File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0111, message 242


Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 13:37:18 +1100
From: saeed urrehman <saeed.urrehman-AT-anu.edu.au>
Subject: the new imperialism


"The New Imperialism"
By Pepe Escobar

http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/18/020200&mode=nocomment&threshold
Monday, November 26, 2001

ISLAMABAD -- Joseph Conrad was the first modern writer to fully understand 
that in extreme situations the distinctions and nuances between 
civilization and the "heart of darkness" collapse with a bang. Conrad 
showed how the sublime heights of European civilization could fall into the 
pit of the most barbarous practices -- without any sort of preparation or 
transition (no wonder that Belgium still has not officially acknowledged 
the genocide of millions during King Leopold's possession of the Congo).

Now more than ever it is rewarding to re-read Conrad - and as an added 
bonus to watch Francis Ford Coppola's reading of Conrad in the recently 
released director's cut of Apocalypse Now. The New Afghan War increasingly 
runs the risk of being configured as The New Vietnam. Washington has said 
from the beginning this is not Gulf War II. But now, deeply frustrated 
because they are unable to break the Taliban -- those medieval architects 
of a pan-Islamic utopia -- the Pentagon is contemplating a Desert 
Storm-style invasion the next Afghan spring. This won't be Gulf War II: 
this will be Vietnam II.


  Most of the Muslim world's uneducated masses suffer from political and 
social underdevelopment and extremely corrupt elites. Osama bin Laden 
capitalized on this dysfunction. Osama and the Al-Qaeda, in their warped 
world-view, would have the Muslim world believe that we are now facing a 
war between Islam and the West. It may come as a striking revelation that 
the West also has its hordes of fundamentalists, of the armchair kind -- 
but although they don't resort to jet-turned-to-missile suicide squads, 
they are just as deadly.
When Samuel Huntington came up with his Clash of Civilizations reductionist 
classic in 1993, he relied heavily on "The Roots of Muslim Rage," a 1990 
essay by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Professor Edward Said, a most acute 
critic of Orientalists, has pointed out that neither Huntington nor Lewis 
were careful enough to examine the fact that "the major contest in most 
modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture". 
This goes way beyond a simplistic clash of cultures. Huntington's clash 
became a road map for American foreign policy because it is basically an 
ideology: a very handy ideology to fill the vacuum created by the end of 
the ideology-heavy Cold War.

We don't even have to invoke Freud and Nietzsche -- as Said does -- to 
realize that "there are closer ties between apparently warring 
civilizations than most of us would like to believe". Huntington's clash -- 
although a dangerous warring ideology -- must be ridiculed for what it is: 
mere defensive self-pride. As any urban youth in any world city can attest, 
the name of the game in the 21st century is interdependence: cultures are 
not monolithic, they interact in an orgy of cross-fertilization.

Bush the elder was wrong -- or his formulation was ahead of his time. Not 
the Gulf War, but the Afghan War, fought by young Bush, is the preamble to 
a New World Order. The signs are already in print -- and they are all 
offshoots of Huntington's clash.

An otherwise obscure opinion page editor of the Wall Street Journal is in 
favor of "colonization of wayward nations", including "the application of a 
dose of US imperialism". Not beating around the bush either, British 
historian Paul Johnson has also published in the Journal a piece titled 
"The Answer to Terrorism? Colonialism". The Financial Times, not to be 
upstaged by American competition, has carried its own "The Need for a New 
Imperialism". So what are all these self-important paragons of free speech 
and exchange of ideas basically saying? They're saying that the future, 
ladies and gentleman, is the past.

The New Imperialism according to the Financial Times is "defensive" -- as 
defensive as Huntington's clash. It is based on the arbitrarily-defined 
concept of a "failed state". Afghanistan is given as a prime example. The 
FT cleverly omits to examine how Afghanistan failed because of relentless 
Russian and American armed interference since the late 1970s.

In The New Imperialism, the "coercive apparatus" must be provided by the 
West. To disguise the imperialist thrust, the FT suggests that the United 
Nations should be in charge of these "temporary protectorates". This is 
exactly what the US has in mind for Afghanistan. Obviously, nobody is 
listening to the UN special envoy to Afghanistan, Algerian diplomat Lakdar 
Brahimi, who said in Islamabad last week that the heavily-publicized utopia 
of a "broad-based government" cannot be forced down the Afghani people's 
throats: it will take time, it will have to come from within. Otherwise the 
end result will be, again, chaos.

Paul Johnson theorizes that the war against terrorism will lead to a new 
form of colonialism -- of the benign or "respectable" kind -- by "the great 
civilized powers". He can only mean America and its blind follower Britain 
-- because the last time we checked France, Germany, Italy, Japan and 
China, to name but a few, are extremely civilized but not exactly keen on 
turning back the digital clock of history.

What Johnson really wants is to keep again arbitrarily-defined "terrorist 
states" under "responsible supervision" -- meaning "unavoidable" political 
interference from the West. He even provides a list of eligible countries: 
Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Iran and Syria. No coincidence: they are 
all Islamic. But if Johnson abandoned his leather armchair to do a bit of 
traveling, he could verify that at least three of these have better fish to 
fry.

Tony Blair bent over backwards on his recent visit to Damascus to engage 
Syria: Bashar Assad may not be a paragon of democracy, but he is more 
interested in education and information technology than bombs. Libya -- not 
South Africa -- is the new El Dorado for millions of black western and 
central Africans: Gaddafi, the Great Survivor, prefers to seduce African 
youth with economic opportunities rather than with bombs. Iran is torn 
between hardliners and moderates, but the young generation is fully behind 
Khatami and his "dialogue of civilizations" -- a splendidly articulated 
cultural platform that strikes a chord all over the developing world.

Billions of people in Southeast Asia, China, South Asia, Latin America, 
Africa, the Middle East , Eastern Europe or even Western Europe were not 
consulted about the designs of the New Imperialism. But it is no 
coincidence that the New Imperialism is being proposed exactly at this 
historical juncture. The current Pentagon production on the word's screens 
has turned out to be essentially a relentless bombing of innocent, starving 
civilians as punishment for terrorist attacks. It is widely regarded -- not 
only in the Muslim world -- as a very expensive and ultimately apalling 
exercise in futility. Apart from America, public support around the world 
is vanishing at an alarming rate.

This war was imposed from above on the Afghan population. They were never 
consulted about its legitimacy. They are not responsible for it. They are 
helpless victims. A cartoon in the Pakistani press explained the real 
meaning of "carpet bombing": American bombs fall on an Afghan carpet while 
a group of unflappable Taliban pose on the side for an Al Jazeera TV crew.

The proponents of New Imperialism conveniently forget to examine how the 
Taliban got to the ruined top of "failed" Afghanistan in the first place. 
The Taliban are eminently an Afghan, Pastun and tribal movement. It is easy 
to forget they are a direct product of the Saudi-American-financed 
anti-USSR jihad of the '80s. They took power in Kabul in 1996 with the 
absolute blessing of the US.

Afghanistan was beyond "failed" as a state in 1996. But at the time the 
Taliban were regarded as a convenient tool for the implementation of 
another classic American business plan: the construction of oil and gas 
pipelines from the Central Asian republics through Afghanistan, with 
Karachi as a major destination. The Taliban would theoretically control the 
whole country, impose law and order, and guarantee a safe trading environment.

The US had high hopes for the Taliban. They would clear Afghanistan of 
drugs. They would act against Russian and Iranian economic and geopolitical 
interests. They would get rid of terrorist training camps. They would pave 
the way for the return of former king Zahir Shah (no joke: this is what 
Washington thought way back in 1996). And most of all they would open the 
gates for the mega-pipelines from Central Asia.

So the whole thing was a sub-plot of the New Great Oil Rush: how America 
would win against the stiff competition of Russia and Iran. The 
American-Saudi coalition of Unocal and Delta was the main Western player. 
Then came the fall of Kabul -- mostly financed by none other than Osama bin 
Laden himself. Unocal at the time was madly in love with the Taliban: an 
official statement praised the Taliban and the prospect of "immediately" 
doing business with them. In Afghanistan in 1996, as Afghan veterans 
comment in Peshawar, the perception was that the Taliban were supported or 
even financed by Washington.

Unocal was actively negotiating with the Taliban the construction of 
pipelines from Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea, via Afghanistan and 
Pakistan. Unocal officials were extensively briefed by CIA agents. The 
positioning of Unocal in relation to Pakistani sources was equivalent to 
the positioning of the CIA during the jihad in the '80s. Unocal's main 
source of information was the disinformation-infested US Embassy in Islamabad.

Apart from all the by-products of their demented version of Islam, the 
Taliban in the end dealt a major blow to Washington. They did not control 
all of Afghanistan as expected. They did not bring peace: on the contrary, 
they installed a police state and engaged in ethnic cleansing (against the 
Hazaras). Average Afghans stress that the Taliban version of "peace" soon 
degenerated into an internal jihad against the civilian population.

They did not end poppy cultivation: on the contrary, they made a lot of 
money out of it. They treated women in the most repulsive way. And -- the 
ultimate reason for their current predicament -- they extended a precious 
red Afghan carpet to Osama bin Laden and his Arab-Afghans.

 From courting this irascible lover, America is now bombing it to oblivion. 
But as millions in the Muslim world keeps on repeating, not a single piece 
of evidence has been produced in public to suggest that the Taliban are 
totally, partially, or even marginally responsible for September 11. Not a 
single piece of a so-called unimpeachable evidence was "independently 
verified" -- as BBC and CNN are so fond of saying (even when they are 
verifying something during a Taliban-sponsored tour of Kandahar).

Any talk of a future broad-based Afghan government is a smoke screen. As 
far as American interests are concerned, it has to be a government that no 
matter what facilitates the American perspective of the Last Great Oil 
Rush. If push comes to shove, America may even contemplate an occupation of 
Afghanistan, more or less disguised via the UN. Before that happens, policy 
makers had better listen to Afghan professor Jamalluddin Naqvi, who says, 
"History is witness to the fact that Afghanistan is a human and territorial 
Bermuda Triangle from where no one ever comes out -- at any rate in one 
piece."

Henry Kissinger would grumble that this is just realpolitik. It would 
certainly be an instance of the New Imperialism in action. The 
international community should thank the Wall Street Journal and the 
Financial Times for informing us all in advance.

Another imperialist with impeccable credentials, globalization's puppy dog 
Thomas Friedman, wrote in the New York Times that "the hidden fist that 
keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is 
called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps". Globalization does 
not work without the New Imperialism. But another reading of history is 
always possible. In their seminal book Empire, Tony Negri and Michael Hardt 
argue that the process of globalization has generated a universal and 
oppressive New Imperialism -- but stress that a real humanist alternative 
to imperialism and war is more than possible.

Ibn Khaldun, a Muslim historian of the 14th century, would agree. He was 
not deterministic like Huntington, Fukuyuma and assorted cohorts. He said 
that civilizations follow a process -- they go through different stages. 
Centuries before Adam Smith, Ibn Khaldun came up with an extremely 
sophisticated analysis of free trade, the role of the market, and the rule 
of law. The Muqaddimah -- the introduction to his immense Universal 
History, is a prodigy of humanism: nothing remotely similar to the 
intolerant Islam of the Taliban or the confrontational Islam of Al-Qaeda.

If Ibn Khaldun were alive today, he would tell us that American 
civilization -- like the Caliphates, or the Umayyad dynasty of his time -- 
has expanded to almost limitless power. And when you reach Absolute Power, 
the only way is down. Not only the eminent Muslim reached this conclusion, 
but also Western icons like Gibbon -- talking about the Decline and Fall of 
the Roman Empire -- and more recently Professor Paul Kennedy, who excelled 
in his examination of the concept of overextension of great powers.

In a fruitful "dialogue among civilizations" -- an Iranian idea -- Ibn 
Khaldun and Professor Kennedy would probably agree that America is now 
overextended. And they would certainly agree that civilizations do decline. 
America still is by all means a civilization of boundless, fascinating 
energy and dynamism. But it must beware of hubris -- the essential element 
in Greek tragedy, the cultural foundation of Western civilization. 
Unfortunately, some dreamers of New Imperialism and assorted Pentagon 
generals have never heard of Sophocles. They'd better get their act 
together before they plunge America into another heart of darkness."







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