The
algebra of infinite justice
As
the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy challenges the
instinct for vengance
Arundhati Roy
Guardian:
Saturday September 29, 2001
©
Arundhati Roy 2001. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
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 America 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 doppelgänger.
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
Guardian
Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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