Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 09:53:07 +0100 (BST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?eldorra=20mitchell?= <manynotone-AT-yahoo.co.in>
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html

Arundhati Roy
Guardian

Saturday September 29, 2001


In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11
suicide attacks on 
the
Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American
newscaster said: "Good 
and
evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did
last Tuesday. 
People
who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they
did so with
contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it
doesn't know, 
because
they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly
identified or even
begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US
government has, in 
a
rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled
together an
"international coalition against terror", mobilised
its army, its air 
force,
its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it
can't very well 
return
without having fought one. If it doesn't find its
enemy, for the sake 
of the
enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture
one. Once war 
begins,
it will develop a momentum, a logic and a
justification of its own, and
we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first
place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the
world's most 
powerful
country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old
instinct to fight a 
new
kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending
itself, America's
streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets
look like obsolete,
lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of
nuclear bombs is no 
longer
worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and
cold anger are 
the
weapons with which the wars of the new century will be
waged. Anger is 
the
lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't
show up in 
baggage
checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said
that it had 
doubts
about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the
same day 
President
George Bush said, "We know exactly who these people
are and which
governments are supporting them." It sounds as though
the president 
knows
something that the FBI and the American public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress,
President Bush called 
the
enemies of America "enemies of freedom". "Americans
are asking, 'Why do 
they
hate us?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our
freedom of religion, 
our
freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble
and disagree with 
each
other." People are being asked to make two leaps of
faith here. First, 
to
assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it
is, even though 
it
has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And
second, to 
assume
that The Enemy's motives are what the US government
says they are, and
there's nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is
vital for the US
government to persuade its public that their
commitment to freedom and
democracy and the American Way of Life is under
attack. In the current
atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy
notion to peddle.
However, if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder
why the symbols 
of
America's economic and military dominance - the World
Trade Centre and 
the
Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks.
Why not the 
Statue of
Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led
to the attacks has 
its
taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in
the US 
government's
record of commitment and support to exactly the
opposite things - to
military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military
dictatorship,
religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside
America)? It must 
be
hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to
look up at the 
world
with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might
appear to them 
to be
indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury.
An absence of
surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes
around eventually 
comes
around. American people ought to know that it is not
them but their
government's policies that are so hated. They can't
possibly doubt that 
they
themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their
writers, their actors,
their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are
universally welcomed. 
All
of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown
by firefighters, 
rescue
workers and ordinary office staff in the days since
the attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and
immensely public. 
It
would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or
modulate its anguish.
However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this
as an opportunity 
to
try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans
use it as an
opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn
and avenge only 
their
own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask
the hard questions 
and
say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad
timing, we will be
disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated
those particular 
hijackers
who flew planes into those particular American
buildings. They were not
glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political
messages; no
organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All
we know is that 
their
belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural
human instinct 
for
survival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almost
as though they 
could
not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything
smaller than 
their
deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world
as we knew it. 
In the
absence of information, politicians, political
commentators and writers
(like myself) will invest the act with their own
politics, with their 
own
interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of
the political 
climate in
which the attacks took place, can only be a good
thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said
must be said 
quickly.
Before America places itself at the helm of the
"international 
coalition
against terror", before it invites (and coerces)
countries to actively
participate in its almost godlike mission - called
Operation Infinite
Justice until it was pointed out that this could be
seen as an insult 
to
Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out
infinite justice, and 
was
renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if
some small
clarifications are made. For example, Infinite
Justice/Enduring Freedom 
for
whom? Is this America's war against terror in America
or against terror 
in
general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the
tragic loss of 
almost
7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet
of office space in
Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the
Pentagon, the loss of 
several
hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some
airline companies 
and
the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more
than that? In 
1996,
Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state,
was asked on 
national
television what she felt about the fact that 500,000
Iraqi children had 
died
as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that
it was "a very 
hard
choice", but that, all things considered, "we think
the price is worth 
it".
Albright never lost her job for saying this. She
continued to travel 
the
world representing the views and aspirations of the US
government. More
pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in
place. Children 
continue
to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction
between civilisation 
and
savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people"
or, if you like, "a
clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The
sophistry and
fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead
Iraqis will it 
take to
make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans
for every dead
American? How many dead women and children for every
dead man? How many 
dead
mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch
mesmerised, 
Operation
Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the
world. A coalition 
of the
world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one
of the poorest, 
most
ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling
Taliban 
government is
sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held
responsible for the 
September
11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly
count as collateral 
value
is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed
orphans.There are
accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when
artificial limbs are
airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.)
Afghanistan's economy 
is in
a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army
is that 
Afghanistan
has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot
on a military map 
- no
big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no
water treatment 
plants.
Farms have been turned into mass graves. The
countryside is littered 
with
land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate.
The American army 
would
first have to clear the mines and build roads in order
to take its 
soldiers
in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens
have fled from 
their
homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and
Afghanistan. The 
UN
estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens
who need 
emergency
aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have
been asked to 
leave -
the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian
disasters of recent 
times
has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of
the new century.
Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to
be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombing
Afghanistan back to 
the
stone age". Someone please break the news that
Afghanistan is already 
there.
And if it's any consolation, America played no small
part in helping it 
on
its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy
about where exactly
Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on
maps of the 
country),
but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the
CIA and 
Pakistan's
ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest
covert operation 
in
the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness
the energy of 
Afghan
resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy
war, an Islamic 
jihad,
which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet
Union against the
communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When
it began, it was 
meant
to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be
much more than 
that.
Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and
recruited almost 
100,000
radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as
soldiers for America's 
proxy
war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware
that their jihad 
was
actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The
irony is that 
America was
equally unaware that it was financing a future war
against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of
relentless conflict, the
Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation
reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to
Chechnya, Kosovo 
and
eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in
money and military
equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and
more money was 
needed.
The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a
"revolutionary tax". 
The
ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across
Afghanistan. Within 
two
years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan
borderland had 
become
the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the
single biggest 
source
of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits,
said to be 
between
$100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training
and arming 
militants.

In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of
dangerous, hardline
fundamentalists - fought its way to power in
Afghanistan. It was funded 
by
the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by
many political 
parties
in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror.
Its first 
victims
were its own people, particularly women. It closed
down girls' schools,
dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced
sharia laws under 
which
women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to death, and
widows guilty of 
being
adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban
government's human 
rights
track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any
way be intimidated 
or
swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or
the threat to the 
lives
of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything
more ironic than 
Russia
and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan?
The question is, 
can
you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on
Afghanistan will only
shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and
disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial
ground of Soviet
communism and the springboard of a unipolar world
dominated by America. 
It
made the space for neocapitalism and corporate
globalisation, again
dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to
become the 
graveyard
for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war
for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has
suffered 
enormously.
The US government has not been shy of supporting
military dictators who 
have
blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the
country. Before 
the
CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium
in Pakistan. 
Between
1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from
zero to 
one-and-a-half
million. Even before September 11, there were three
million Afghan 
refugees
living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's
economy is 
crumbling.
Sectarian violence, globalisation's structural
adjustment programmes 
and
drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up
to fight the 
Soviets,
the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown
like dragon's teeth
across the country, produced fundamentalists with
tremendous popular 
appeal
within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the
Pakistan government has 
sup
ported, funded and propped up for years, has material
and strategic
alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to
garotte the pet 
it has
hand-reared in its backyard for so many years.
President Musharraf, 
having
pledged his support to the US, could well find he has
something 
resembling
civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to
the vision of 
its
former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be
left out of this
Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's more than
likely that our 
democracy,
such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some
of us watch in
horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating
its hips, begging 
the US
to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan.
Having had this 
ringside
view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd,
it's unthinkable, 
that
India should want to do this. Any third world country
with a fragile 
economy
and a complex social base should know by now that to
invite a 
superpower
such as America in (whether it says it's staying or
just passing 
through)
would be like inviting a brick to drop through your
windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought
to uphold the 
American
Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it
completely. It will 
spawn
more anger and more terror across the world. For
ordinary people in 
America,
it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening
uncertainty: will my
child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in
the subway? A bomb 
in
the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There
have been 
warnings
about the possibility of biological warfare -
smallpox, bubonic plague,
anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster
aircraft. Being 
picked
off a few at a time may end up being worse than being
annihilated all 
at
once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over
the world, will 
use the
climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil
liberties, deny free 
speech,
lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious
minorities, cut back on 
public
spending and divert huge amounts of money to the
defence industry. To 
what
purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of
evil-doers" than 
he
can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US
government to even toy 
with
the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more
violence and
oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.
Terrorism has no
country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise
as Coke or Pepsi 
or
Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can
pull up stakes and 
move
their "factories" from country to country in search of
a better deal. 
Just
like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it
is to be 
contained,
the first step is for America to at least acknowledge
that it shares 
the
planet with other nations, with other human beings
who, even if they 
are not
on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and
sorrows and, for
heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld,
the US defence
secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in
America's new war, 
he
said that if he could convince the world that
Americans must be allowed 
to
continue with their way of life, he would consider it
a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card
from a world 
gone
horribly wrong. The message may have been written by
Bin Laden (who 
knows?)
and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have
been signed by 
the
ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The
millions killed in 
Korea,
Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel -
backed by the US 
-
invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in
Operation Desert
Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died
fighting Israel's
occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who
died, in Yugoslavia,
Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the
Dominican Republic,
Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators
and genocidists 
whom
the American government supported, trained, bankrolled
and supplied 
with
arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and
conflict, the American 
people
have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on
September 11 were only 
the
second on American soil in over a century. The first
was Pearl Harbour. 
The
reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with
Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki.
This time the world waits with bated breath for the
horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't
exist, America 
would
have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did
invent him. He was 
among
the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the
CIA commenced its
operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of
being created by the 
CIA
and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he
has been 
promoted
from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the
lack of any real
evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead
or alive".

>From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce
evidence (of the 
sort
that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link
Bin Laden to the
September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most
incriminating 
piece
of evidence against him is the fact that he has not
condemned them.

>From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and
the living 
conditions
in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he
did not personally 
plan
and carry out the attacks - that he is the
inspirational figure, "the 
CEO of
the holding company". The Taliban's response to US
demands for the
extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically
reasonable: 
produce
the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President
Bush's response is 
that
the demand is "non-negotiable".

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can
India put in a 
side
request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the
US? He was the
chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal
gas leak that 
killed
16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary
evidence. It's 
all in
the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase
that. What is Osama 
bin
Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the
American president's 
dark
doppelgnger. The savage twin of all that purports to
be beautiful and
civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of
a world laid to 
waste
by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy,
its nuclear 
arsenal, its
vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance",
its chilling 
disregard
for non-American lives, its barbarous military
interventions, its 
support
for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless
economic agenda 
that has
munched through the economies of poor countries like a
cloud of 
locusts. Its
marauding multinationals who are taking over the air
we breathe, the 
ground
we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we
think. Now that the 
family
secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into
one another and
gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs,
money and drugs 
have
been going around in the loop for a while. (The
Stinger missiles that 
will
greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The
heroin used by 
America's
drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush
administration recently 
gave
Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each
other's rhetoric. 
Each
refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both
invoke God and use 
the
loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their
terms of 
reference.
Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both
are dangerously
armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely
powerful, the 
other
with the incandescent, destructive power of the
utterly hopeless. The
fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe.
The important 
thing to
keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable
alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world
- "If you're not 
with
us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous
arrogance. It's not 
a
choice that people want to, need to, or should have to
make.

 Arundhati Roy 2001






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