The Guardian (London), September 29, 2001
"The algebra of infinite justice", by Arundhati Roy
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 nacional
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 Afganist
án 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. Sibilinas
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 Afgani
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 supported, 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 doppelganger. 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.
By Arundhati Roy
The Guardian (London)
September 29, 2001
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