Читать книгу The Revenge of History - Seumas Milne - Страница 6
ОглавлениеWARS ON TERROR AND TYRANNY (2001–02)
George Bush and Tony Blair launched the ‘War on Terror’ by invading Afghanistan on a wave of liberal-interventionist rhetoric. The casual slaughter of Afghan civilians and restoration of warlord rule exposed the campaign’s brutal reality, fuelling al-Qaida-inspired terror across the world. So did Israel’s US-backed onslaught against the Palestinian intifada in the months that followed. The ease of the Taliban’s overthrow also fed a new Western imperial triumphalism, as Bush and the neoconservatives prepared to settle accounts with Iraq and its ‘axis of evil’. The 9/11 aftermath had been rapidly transformed into a war to enforce US ‘full spectrum dominance’ across the globe.
Bush’s ocean of petrol on the flames
As US and British forces prepare to strike against the humanitarian disaster that is Afghanistan, the problems confronting George Bush’s latter-day crusade against terror are multiplying. The prospect of ‘surgical strikes’ against a disparate and well-hidden force is now increasingly recognised as implausible. Although raids on empty training camps will presumably be staged for CNN, that is unlikely to satisfy domestic demand for revenge. The embarrassing failure to produce convincing evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the difficulties of tracking him down have left the US administration falling back on a more visible enemy, in the form of the Taliban.
That has its own dangers. Overthrowing such a shaky regime, at least in what is left of Afghanistan’s cities, should prove straightforward enough, particularly with the help of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. But the alliance is a ragbag army, based on minority ethnic groups, with its own history of massacres and large-scale human rights abuses when it ruled the country in the early 1990s. A government based on it, the long-discredited king and a few more pliant fragments of the Taliban – the line-up currently being canvassed for a new order in Kabul – would be a pretty grim legacy for such an avowedly high-minded venture. No wonder Bush says he’s ‘not into nation-building’.
Then there is the threat to the survival of the pro-Western military dictatorship and nuclear-armed Taliban-sponsor in Pakistan, now offering logistical backup to the Western war effort. Even more incendiary is the demand for a full-scale assault on Iraq, which has triggered an open split in the Bush administration. War on Saddam would at least provide the US with a target serious enough to appear to match the scale of the slaughter of innocents in New York. But, with no evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks, any such move would rupture its international coalition and destroy any hope of maintaining Arab support.
The fragility of that support was highlighted by the refusal of the Saudi regime, most dependent of all American client states in the region, to allow US forces to use their Saudi bases for operations against Afghanistan, out of fear of a domestic backlash. A taste of the mood in bin Laden’s homeland was given this week by Mai Yamani, anthropologist daughter of the former Saudi oil minister, who was startled to find young people ‘very pleased about Osama because they think he is the only one who stands against the hegemony of the US’.
Failure to read these signs would be the grossest irresponsibility. Those who insist that the attacks in New York and Washington had nothing to do with the US role in the Middle East – but were instead the product of existential angst about Western freedom and identity – not only demonstrate their ignorance of the region. They also weaken the pressure to address the long-standing grievances fuelling this rage: not only Western indulgence of Israeli military occupation, but decades of oil-lubricated support for despots from Iran to Oman, Egypt to Saudi Arabia and routine military interventions to maintain US control. Moral relativism does not lie in acknowledging that link, but in making excuses for this insupportable record.
Few can seriously hope that waging war on Afghanistan or Iraq – or the death of bin Laden, for that matter – will stamp out terrorism any more effectively than the alternative of legal, security and diplomatic action. But an end to the siege of Iraq, the use of Western clout to accelerate the creation of a viable Palestinian state and the withdrawal of US troops from the Arabian peninsula would begin to relieve the political pressure cooker by tackling the most inflammatory sources of tension in the region. Conservative politicians in the US are becoming impatient for the sound of gunfire. The Bush administration has a choice: it can go further in the direction it has begun tentatively to explore while assembling its coalition, for example over the Israel–Palestinian conflict – or it can cave in to the siren voices on its right, and pour an ocean of petrol on the flames.1
(27/9/01)
Lurching towards catastrophe in Afghanistan
There is an eerie familiarity about the scenes being played out every night, as the United States and Britain launch wave after wave of bombing and cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan. The grinning marine on the USS Enterprise, promising ‘to destroy a lot of things over there’; the RAF corporal, showing off his ‘We came, we saw, we kicked ass’ T-shirt; the daily military briefings with their before-and-after images of destruction; the sombre excuses offered for civilian casualties and other forms of ‘collateral damage’; the cheerleaders’ untiring comparison of the enemy with the Nazis and the war’s opponents with appeasers – they almost seem routine.
Perhaps that is scarcely surprising, as we’ve been here before, again and again. This is the fifth time since Tony Blair became prime minister that Britain and the US have taken military action, though not always together, without an explicit United Nations mandate: in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. In four cases, the attacks have consisted overwhelmingly or exclusively of aerial bombardments; in three, the targets have been Muslim states. All have been more or less impoverished and none of those under attack has been able to offer anything but token resistance. In the case of Iraq, major assaults – such as the four-day Desert Fox operation nearly three years ago – have only punctuated what has been a ten-year regime of relentless bombing raids and grinding economic sanctions.
From such a perspective, this conflict did not begin last Sunday or on 11 September, but a decade ago, when the pattern of wars against developing countries under the New World Order was established by the first President Bush in his campaign to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. It was then that US troops were first sent to Saudi Arabia and the devastation of Iraq began – two of the three festering Muslim grievances cited by Osama bin Laden in his broadcast describing the New York and Washington atrocities as America tasting ‘what we have tasted’.
But none of the Anglo-American onslaughts since 1991 can match the cruel absurdity of this week’s bombing of one of the poorest and most ruined countries in the world by the planet’s richest and most powerful state, assisted as ever by its British satrap. For all the earnest assurances about pinpoint targeting, the civilian death toll is already mounting, including the incineration of four employees of the UN’s mine-clearing agency by a cruise missile as they lay sleeping in a Kabul suburb. The almost comical futility of the military overkill was epitomised by General Richard Myers, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, who declared yesterday that ‘we now have air supremacy over Afghanistan’.
But this is also potentially by far the most perilous of all the Western wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The case against the campaign now being waged against Afghanistan – with the explicitly stated prospect that it may be widened in future – does not primarily hinge on its dubious legality, the lack of UN involvement or the absence of reliable evidence of responsibility for the September 11 attacks.
The most serious objections are, first, that by triggering large-scale refugee movements and interrupting food supplies, the war is turning an existing humanitarian crisis into a disaster, which will cause the deaths of many more than were slaughtered in the World Trade Centre, for no remotely proportional gain. Second, whatever success is achieved in killing or capturing bin Laden and his supporters or forcing the Afghan theocrats from power, there is no reason to believe that that will stamp out anti-Western terrorism, even by the al-Qaida networks, which operate across the world without assistance from their Taliban friends. In other words, it won’t work. Finally, and most dangerously, the entire ‘crusade’ in defence of civilisation, as Bush the younger so sensitively described his campaign, shows every sign of creating a political backlash throughout the Muslim world and spawning even more terrorist attacks, rather than curbing them.
Few of those pressing for the alternative of legal, diplomatic and security action are the pacifists they are caricatured to be. But while bin Laden is fast developing popular cult status across the Middle East, Bush and Blair have turned themselves into recruiting sergeants for al-Qaida and militant Islamism – and increased the likelihood of a cycle of revenge and retaliatory violence. The longer the campaign goes on and the wider it spreads, the greater the risk that many Middle Eastern governments dearest to the West will be consigned to oblivion. If the aim of the war launched last Sunday is to put an end to terrorism, it makes no sense. But if, as some in the US clearly want, this campaign becomes the vehicle for achieving wider US strategic objectives – in Iraq, central Asia or elsewhere – it risks a catastrophe.2
(11/10/01)
Terrorism, tyranny and the right to resist
For a war that, in the words of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, ‘may never end’, the enemy is proving embarrassingly hard to define. Of course, we know all about Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors, and we have become ominously aware of the demands from within the US administration that Iraq be brought into the frame. But this campaign is intended to be something grander still. The bombs and missiles now raining down on Afghanistan have been proclaimed as the curtain-raiser of a war against terror itself, which will not cease until the scourge of political violence is dealt with once and for all. The days of toleration for any form of terrorism from Baghdad to Ballymurphy are, it is said, now over. British ministers may mutter that the war is aimed at al-Qaida and the Taliban alone – but then they are not in charge.
Yet for all the square-jawed resolution on display in Western capitals about the prosecution of this war, there is little agreement even within the heart of the coalition about what terrorism actually means. Both the EU and the UN are struggling to come up with an acceptable definition. The European Commission has produced a formulation so broad it would include anti-globalisation protesters who smash McDonald’s windows; while Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general, warned wearily that reaching a consensus would be well-nigh impossible, since ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. President Bush has pledged that the war will not cease so long as ‘anybody is terrorising established governments’, and Britain’s latest terrorism legislation outlaws support for groups opposing any regime, including an illegal one, with violence.
Pacifists apart, however, virtually everyone across the political spectrum supports terrorism in practice – or, rather, what passes for terrorism under the rubric being promulgated by Western chancelleries. The transformation from terrorist to respected statesman has become a cliché of the international politics of the past fifty years, now being replayed in Northern Ireland. Almost every society, philosophy and religion has recognised the right to take up arms against tyranny or foreign occupation. In ‘History Will Absolve Me’, his 1953 trial speech after the abortive Moncada barracks attack, Fidel Castro reels off a string of thinkers and theologians – from Thomas Aquinas and John Salisbury to John Calvin and Thomas Paine – who defended the right to rebel against despots. In modern times, few would question the heroism or justice of the wartime resistance to the Nazis or of armed rebellions against British or French colonial rule, all damned as terrorists by those they fought.
More recently still, the US government trained and funded the armed contra rebellion against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government – ably assisted by John Negroponte, the current US ambassador to the UN, and in defiance of the international court in the Hague. Along with its faithful British ally, the US also backed the Afghan mojahedin (even before the Soviet intervention), just as it is today funding opposition groups waging bombing campaigns in Iraq. So the Bush administration’s problem with terrorism is evidently not about breaking the state’s monopoly of violence.
The right to resist occupation is in any case recognised under international law and the Geneva convention, which is one reason why the West’s routine denunciations of Palestinian violence ring so utterly hollow. Having failed to dislodge the Israeli occupation after thirty-four years, or implement the UN decision to create a Palestinian state after fifty-four years, there are few reasonable grounds to complain if those living under the occupation fight back. But the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which last week assassinated Israel’s racist tourism minister in response to the Israeli assassination of its leader in August, is officially regarded as a terrorist organisation by the US government, which has now successfully pressured the Palestinian leadership to ban its military wing.
The tendency in recent years, encouraged by the scale of last month’s atrocity in New York, has been to define terrorism increasingly in terms of methods and tactics – particularly the targeting of civilians – rather than the status of those who carry it out. Such an approach has its own difficulties. Liberation movements which most would balk at branding terrorist, including the ANC and the Algerian FLN, attacked civilian targets – as so mesmerisingly portrayed in Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. But more problematic for Western governments is the way such arguments can be turned against them. The concept of modern terrorism derives, after all, from the French revolution, where terror was administered by the state – as it is today by scores of governments around the world.
If paramilitary groups become terrorists because they kill or injure civilians, what of those states which bomb television stations, bridges and power stations, train and arm death squads or authorise assassinations? After days when hundreds of Afghan civilians are reported to have died as a result of Anglo-American bombardment – while hundreds of thousands are fleeing for their lives – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s remark that the aim was to ‘frighten’ the other side couldn’t have more sharply posed the paradox of terror.
In his City of God, Saint Augustine tells a story about an encounter between Alexander the Great (the last ruler successfully to garrison Afghanistan) and a pirate captain he had caught on the high seas. Ordering the pirate to heave to, Alexander demands: ‘How dare you molest the seas as a pirate?’ ‘How dare you molest the whole world?’ retorts the plucky pirate. ‘I have a small boat, so I am called a thief and a pirate. You have a great navy, so you are called an emperor, and can call other men pirates.’ Substitute ‘terrorist’ or ‘rogue state’ for ‘pirate’ and the episode neatly encapsulates the morality of the New World Order.
Political violence emerges when other avenues are closed. Where people suffer oppression, are denied a peaceful route to justice and social change and have exhausted all other tactics – the point the ANC reached in the early 1960s – they are surely entitled to use force. That does not apply to adventurist and socially disconnected groups like Baader Meinhof or the Red Brigades, nor does it deal with the question of whether such force is advisable or likely to be counterproductive. ‘Jihadist’ groups, especially networks like al-Qaida with a ‘global reach’ and a religious ideology impervious to accommodation, are considered by many to be beyond any normal calculus of repression and resistance.
The September 11 atrocity was certainly an unprecedented act of non-state terror. But such groups are also unquestionably the product of conditions in the Arab and Muslim world for which both Britain and the US bear a heavy responsibility, through their unswerving support of despotic regimes for over half a century. It was precisely that blockage of democratic development that led to the failure of secular politics, which in turn paved the way for the growth of Islamist radicalism. Groups like al-Qaida offer no future to the Muslim world, but bin Laden and his supporters have their boots sunk deep in a swamp of grievance. As the assault on Afghanistan continues, no one should delude themselves that cutting off al-Qaida’s head or destroying its Afghan lair will put an end to this eruption.
(25/10/01)
The imperial revival: A recipe for conflict without end
Britain has yet to come to terms with its imperial record. A fog of cultural amnesia about the the country’s recent colonial past pervades the debate about its role in the world today. The twentieth century, it was often said in the run-up to the millennium, had been a century of bloodshed and tyranny, with the Nazi genocide and Stalinist terror regularly paired as the emblematic twin horrors of the era. The modern school history curriculum reflects a similar perspective. But when it comes to the role of colonialism and its aftermath, British reactions are usually cloaked in embarrassment or retrospective pride about a legacy of railways and ‘good governance’.
There is precious little acknowledgement of the relentless and bloody repression that maintained a quarter of the world’s population under British rule until barely half a century ago. Nor is there much awareness of the hundreds of thousands who died in continual rebellions across five continents, or from forced labour and torture, let alone the ubiquitous racist segregation or deliberate destruction of economic prosperity in places like Bengal. It is less than fifty years since the inmates of British colonial detention camps in Kenya were routinely raped and had their testicles ripped off, while British soldiers massacred civilians at Batang Kali in Malaya with impunity. But – as with other former colonial powers, such as France and Belgium – there has been no public settling of accounts; no pressure for colonial reparations, or for old men to be tried for atrocities carried out under the union flag.
One consequence of this national failure to face up to the reality of Britain’s impact on the world has been a casual enthusiasm for a latter-day revival of the imperial project. What began as an almost playful attempt at historical revisionism by right-wing pundits on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1990s has, since September 11, flowered into a chorus of full-throated calls for the US and its allies to move from the informal imperial arrangements of the postwar era to the imposition of direct ‘international colonial’ rule on rogue states. The argument has been most forcefully advanced by the Oxford history professor Niall Ferguson, currently filming a television series on the history of the British empire. But his passion for a new imperium – restrained only by a fear that the Americans may not have the appetite for the task in hand – is far from unique. Among others pressing for a modern imperial renaissance are the novelist and critic Philip Hensher, who suggested a viceroy be appointed to run Afghanistan, while the polemicist Mark Steyn insisted that compared with the current system of relying on corrupt and dictatorial regimes like Saudi Arabia to protect big-power interests, ‘colonialism is progressive and enlightened’.
Such voices could be more easily dismissed as nostalgic mavericks were it not for the fact that they reflect a far broader emerging consensus in favour of intervention against recalcitrant governments, UN protectorates and the imposition of Western norms through legal and economic restraints on national sovereignty. This is the ‘doctrine of international community’, first championed by Tony Blair during the Kosovo war, with its echoes of the liberal imperialism of the 1890s, but expressed in a language of ‘partnerships’ and ‘values’ to appease the sensitivities of the age. Underpinned by that postmodern conceit of ‘humanitarian war’, it reached its emotional apogee in the vision of a reordered world he held out to Labour’s Brighton conference last month. And so long as it is dressed up in a suitably multilateral form, the new liberal imperialists are just as happy with international colonial rule as their blunter right-wing counterparts.
A UN trusteeship or other multinational occupation arrangement is of course exactly what is being prepared for the benighted people of Afghanistan, as and when US ‘daisy cutters’ and Northern Alliance warlords finally displace the Taliban from the rubble of Kabul and Kandahar. We know roughly what such a setup will be like, because UN protectorates – effectively administered by Nato and its friends – are already functioning in Kosovo, Bosnia and East Timor (in Sierra Leone, Britain preferred to act unilaterally). In every case, the results have been dismal – most notably in Kosovo, where the occupation forces have failed to prevent large-scale reverse ethnic cleansing. We have in any case been here before. In the aftermath of the first world war, the League of Nations handed out mandates to Britain and France to prepare countries such as Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon for eventual self-government. On the eighty-fourth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – in which Britain promised to establish a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people without prejudicing the rights of the Arab inhabitants – it hardly needs spelling out that the long-term fallout was calamitous.
The roots of the global crisis which erupted on September 11 lie in precisely these colonial experiences and the informal quasi-imperial system that succeeded them. By carving up the Middle East to protect oil interests – as Britain did when it created Kuwait – and supporting a string of unrepresentative client states across the region, the Western powers fostered first the nationalist and then the Islamist backlash which now threatens them. The claim of the American political class that the US was attacked because it stands for freedom and democracy is more or less the opposite of the truth. In reality, the rage driving anti-Western terror is fuelled by the fact that the West continues to deny the peoples of the area the freedom to determine their own affairs – and has repeatedly intervened militarily across the region to enforce its interests since the end of formal colonial rule.
There is simply no reason to believe that what did not work and was rejected during the colonial era will be accepted if it is dressed up in the language of human rights, markets and the rule of law. The nineteenth-century imperialists did not, after all, sell themselves as exploiters and butchers, but as a force for progress and civilisation, bringing education, trade and religion to all – they even claimed to be defending women’s rights. The anti-colonial storm that swept away Western direct rule in the twentieth century cannot be reversed. If the US and Britain are set on a continuing course of armed intervention, punitive sanctions and multinational colonies, that is a recipe for indefinite war.
Blair has led Britain into four wars in four years – against Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leonean rebels and Afghanistan. So far, British and US casualties have been negligible. But the likely costs are now rising. When British troops slaughtered the followers of the Mahdi in Sudan or the Muslims of northern Nigeria a century ago, the fighting was far from home and the colonial forces had overwhelming technological superiority. ‘Whatever happens,’ wrote Hilaire Belloc, ‘we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.’ Retaliations for colonial atrocities in the metropolitan heartland – such as the attempted assassination in London of General Dyer, the man who ordered the 1919 Amritsar massacre – were rare. Now all that has changed. Since September 11, we have discovered that the empire can strike back.3
(8/11/01)
A hollow victory and the war of the flea
Ten days after victory was declared in the Afghan war, real life continues to make a mockery of such triumphalism in the cruellest way. As American B-52 bombers pound Taliban diehards around Kandahar and Kunduz, tens of thousands of refugees are streaming towards the Pakistani border and chaotic insecurity across the country is hampering attempts to tackle a fast-deteriorating humanitarian crisis.
Aid agencies confirm that six weeks of US bombing – which even the British government concedes has killed hundreds of civilians – has sharply exacerbated what was already a dire situation. Oxfam warned yesterday they were ‘operating on a precipice’. More than 100,000 people are now living in tents in the Kandahar area alone, and the charity has been asked by Pakistan to gear up camps across the border to receive similar numbers in the next few days. After an aid convoy was hijacked by local warlords on the Kabul–Bamiyan road on Tuesday, Oxfam and and other agencies argue that only a UN protection force can now prevent starvation outside the main towns and distribution centres.
But of course the return of lawlessness and competing warlords was an inevitable and foreseen consequence of Anglo-American support for the long-discredited Northern Alliance, just as the humanitarian disaster has been the widely predicted outcome of the attack on Afghanistan. It was reportedly British advice that led to the decision to rely on the heroin-financed gangsters of the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban out of Kabul and the north. If so, it will be a struggle even for Tony Blair to chalk it up as another feather in the cap of his doctrine of international community.
The effect of US and British intervention in Afghanistan has been to breathe new life into the embers of a twenty-year-old civil war and hand the country back to the same bandits who left 50,000 dead in Kabul when they last lorded it over the capital. What has been hailed in the West as a liberation for women from the Taliban’s grotesque oppression is being treated very differently by Afghan women’s organisations. The widely praised Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, for example, described the return of the alliance as ‘dreadful and shocking’, and said many refugees leaving Afghanistan have been even more terrified of their ‘raping and looting’ than of US bombing.
British and American politicians have gone out of their way to commend the restraint of their new friends, now absurdly renamed the United Front, even when its soldiers have been filmed maiming and executing prisoners. But then by supporting the alliance so decisively, they are indirectly complicit in what are unquestionably war crimes. That complicity moved a stage further on Monday, when US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he was determined to prevent thousands of Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters in Kunduz from escaping as part of any surrender agreement. He hoped, he said, they would be ‘killed or taken prisoner’, but added that US forces were ‘not in a position’ to take prisoners. Since Northern Alliance commanders have repeatedly made clear that they will not take foreign volunteers prisoner – and are reported already to have killed hundreds they have captured – the implication of Rumsfeld’s remarks was pretty unmistakable.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. The US government appears to be increasingly impatient with any kind of restraint on its use of naked force. In the past week or so, it has repeatedly bombed areas known to be free of Taliban or al-Qaida forces – such as the town of Gardez, where at least seven civilians were killed in one raid; rocketed the offices of Al Jazeera, the freest television station in the Middle East; threatened to sink any ship in the Arabian sea that resists being boarded; and ordered the setting up of domestic military tribunals, with powers to try secretly and execute suspected foreign terrorists.
Nor does it now seem to have much time for Tony Blair’s plans for troop deployments, peacekeeping and nation building in poverty-stricken central Asia. But then nobody now in power in Afghanistan – whether the factions of the Northern Alliance, the southern Pashtun warlords or the remnants of the Taliban theocrats – wants foreign troops in their country, as the marines at Bagram air base have discovered.
Only Afghans can create a viable political future for themselves; foreign interference has been at the heart of Afghanistan’s twenty-year disintegration. Perhaps the warlords will come to an accommodation and the talks due to be held in Bonn on Monday will start to cobble together some semblance of a broad-based government to rebuild the cluster-bomb-blasted wreckage of their society. But for the US, this is a second-order issue. It now smells the blood of its quarry, the man held responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. If bin Laden is captured and killed in the next few days, as the US and British military seem increasingly confident will happen, the Afghan campaign will be celebrated as a decisive breakthrough in the war against terror – and the US will move on, turning its attention to Iraq and elsewhere, after mopping up a few foreign jihad enthusiasts.4
But in reality it is likely to be nothing of the sort. The war against the Taliban has so dominated the global response to the atrocities of September 11, it is hard to remember that the Kandahar clerics probably had nothing directly to do with them. Western governments exaggerate the importance of state sponsorship to terror campaigns. The case against the Afghan war was primarily that it would lead to large-scale civilian casualties, fail to stamp out anti-Western terrorism, create a political backlash throughout the Muslim world and actually increase the likelihood of further attacks. In the absence of any serious effort to address the grievances underlying anti-US hatred, that argument has been strengthened. It was clear long ago, certainly since the demise of the Soviet Union, that no state could defeat the US in a conventional military confrontation and that only the war of the flea – guerrilla warfare or terrorism – could be effective. The Afghan debacle has hammered that lesson home.5
(22/11/01)
Can the US be defeated?
Those who have argued that America’s war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45 billion increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had ‘better get their house in order’ or face what he called the ‘justice of this nation’, it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all.
Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the ‘full spectrum dominance’ the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for ten, twenty-three and fifty-two years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients.
With his declaration of war against this absurdly named ‘axis of evil’, Bush has abandoned whatever remaining moral high ground the US held onto in the wake of September 11. He has dispensed with the united front against terror, which had just about survived the onslaught on Afghanistan. And he has made fools of those, particularly in Europe, who had convinced themselves that America’s need for international support would coax the US Republican right out of its unilateralist laager. Nothing of the kind has happened. When the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer plaintively insists that ‘alliance partners are not satellites’, and the EU’s international affairs commissioner Chris Patten fulminates against Bush’s ‘absolutist and simplistic’ stance, they are swatted away. Even Jack Straw, foreign minister of a government that prides itself on its clout in Washington, was slapped down for his hopeful suggestion that talk of an axis of evil was strictly for domestic consumption. Allied governments who question US policy towards Iraq, Israel or national missile defence are increasingly treated as the ‘vassal states’ the French president Jacques Chirac has said they risk becoming. Now Colin Powell, regarded as the last voice of reason in the White House, has warned Europeans to respect the ‘principled leadership’ of the US even if they disagree with it.
By openly arrogating to itself the prerogative of such leadership – and dispensing with any restraint on its actions through the United Nations or other multilateral bodies – the US is effectively challenging what has until now passed for at least formal equality between nations. But it is only reflecting reality. The extent of America’s power is unprecedented in human history. The latest increases will take its military spending to 40 per cent of the worldwide total, larger than the arms budgets of the next nineteen states put together. No previous military empire, from the Roman to the British, boasted anything like this preponderance, let alone America’s global reach. US officials are generally a good deal more frank about the situation than their supporters abroad. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon described US strategy as ‘benevolent domination’ (though it may be doubted whether those who have recently been on the receiving end of US military power, from the Middle East to Latin America, would see it that way). A report for the US Space Command last year, overseen by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, rhapsodised about the ‘synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority’ that would come with missile defence and other projects to militarise space. This would ‘protect US interests and investment’ in an era when globalisation was likely to produce a further ‘widening between haves and have-nots’. It would give the US an ‘extraordinary military advantage’.
In fact, it would only increase further what became an overwhelming military advantage a decade ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the experience of Bush’s war on Afghanistan has driven home the lessons for the rest of the world. The first is that such a gigantic disproportion of international power is a threat to the principles of self-determination the US claims to stand for on a global scale. A state with less than one twentieth of the earth’s population is able to dictate to the other 95 per cent and order their affairs in its own interests, both through military and economic pressure. The issue is not one of ‘anti-Americanism’ or wounded national pride (curiously, those politicians around the world who prattle most about patriotism are also usually the most slavish towards US power), but of democracy. This is an international order which, as the September 11 attacks demonstrated, will not be tolerated and will generate conflict.
Many doubt that such conflict can amount to anything more than fleabites on an elephant which has demonstrated its ability to crush any serious challenger, and have come to believe US global domination is here for good. That ignores the political and economic dimensions (including in the US itself), as well as the problems of fighting asymmetric wars on many fronts. In economic terms, the US has actually been in decline relative to the rest of the world since it accounted for half the world’s output after the second world war. In the past few years its share has bounced back to nearly 30 per cent on some measures, partly because of the Soviet implosion and Japanese stagnation, and partly because of America’s own long boom. But in the medium term, the strain of military overstretch is likely to make itself felt. More immediately, the US could face regional challenges, perhaps from China or Russia, which it would surely balk at pushing to military conflict. Then there is the likelihood of social eruptions in client states like Saudi Arabia which no amount of military technology will be able to see off. America’s greatest defeat was, it should not be forgotten, inflicted by a peasant army in Vietnam. US room for manoeuvre may well prove more limited than might appear.6
When it comes to some of America’s richer and more powerful allies, the opposite is often the case: they can go their own way and get away with it. The Foreign Office minister Peter Hain argued at the weekend that being a steadfast ally of the US didn’t mean being a patsy, pointing to the fact that Britain was able to maintain diplomatic relations with two out of three of President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ states.
The test of his claim will come when the US government turns its rhetoric into action and demands British support for a full-scale assault on Iraq (as yesterday’s Washington drumbeat suggests could be only months away), or the use of the Fylingdales base in Yorkshire for its missile defence plans. Tony Blair has demonstrated none of the limited independence shown by earlier Labour prime ministers, such as Harold Wilson, and all the signs are that he will once again agree to whatever he is asked to do on Britain’s behalf. If he is going to stand up to the global behemoth, he will need some serious encouragement – both inside and outside parliament.
(14/2/02)
Terror in Jenin, signed off in Washington
The stories of brutality, death and destruction filtering out of the Jenin refugee camp have become increasingly ominous. While independent observers have been kept out – along with ambulances and UN blood supplies – the Israeli army has rampaged its way through the hillside shanty town, overwhelming desperate Palestinian resistance. As in other West Bank towns and camps, reports of beatings and executions of prisoners abound, and Israel appears to be preparing the ground for evidence of atrocities. Meanwhile, across the Arab world – where TV footage of Ariel Sharon’s state terror has been a good deal more graphic than what we have seen on our own screens – millions have demonstrated their fury at what is taking place, while their Western-backed rulers have turned their guns on the streets, killing and injuring protesters from Bahrain to Alexandria.
This is where wars against terror end, with screaming children forced to drink sewage and piles of corpses being cleared by bulldozers. Yesterday’s horrific suicide bomb attack on a bus in Haifa (from where many of the Jenin refugees fled or were expelled in 1948) has cruelly demonstrated the futility of the strategy pursued by Sharon and his government of national unity. The largest-scale Israeli offensive for two decades was supposed to root out the very terror networks that struck with deadly force yesterday. But such acts of desolate revenge are born of half a century of dispossession and powerlessness, and a civilian death count far higher than Israel has endured over the past eighteen months. What alternative does the government have to defend its citizens in these circumstances, Israeli politicians demand? The answer is painfully obvious: withdraw from the territories it has lorded over since 1967, and redress the ethnic cleansing which underpinned the foundation of the state nineteen years earlier.
Sharon has no intention of doing any such thing. Instead, he has plunged into a latter-day version of France’s war against the FLN insurrection in Algeria in the 1950s. Like Sharon’s Israel, France unleashed its full might against bombers and gunmen, killing, torturing and imprisoning many thousands, crushing resistance in the casbahs with terror. Yet after a lull, the rebellion reignited even more powerfully than before, and the French were forced to quit. Israelis usually have far fewer illusions about what is going on in their country than their Western supporters. Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general in the mid-1990s, recently described the Palestinian intifada as a ‘war of national liberation’, adding: ‘We enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities . . . we established an apartheid regime’.
But despite President Bush’s much-vaunted public appeals to Sharon to begin a military pullback from the main Palestinian towns, the US – the one power in the world with the leverage over Israel to make it withdraw for good – shows no sign whatever of seriously reining in its long-term client state. On the contrary, the US administration, with the British government in ever-loyal echo, repeatedly expressed its ‘understanding’ of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian territory in the first phase of this invasion. Sharon’s determination to destroy not just ‘terror networks’ and the military infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority, but its civilian infrastructure as well – including educational and health institutions – has effectively had the green light from the US government. Both Sharon and Bush want to see the removal of the elected Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, even though his stature throughout the Arab world has grown dramatically as Israel has sought to humiliate him. Both appear to want the wider problem taken out of Palestinian hands and dealt with at a regional level. Nothing could have made the real US attitude clearer than Secretary of State Colin Powell’s leisurely peregrinations across North Africa while Israeli forces have wreaked devastation in Jenin, Nablus and Bethlehem. To all intents and purposes, the destruction of the Palestinian Authority has been a policy signed off in Washington.
It can hardly be a surprise. US military and economic support for Israel – worth $70 billion since 1979 – has been the linchpin of its imperial power in the Middle East since at least the 1960s. There is a widespread mythology (which at one end of the spectrum shades off into anti-Semitic fantasies about global Jewish conspiracies) that US backing for Israel is largely the result of the effectiveness of political lobbying in Washington. In reality, it has been primarily driven by strategic interests in the world’s most important oil region. Unlike the autocratic Arab potentates the US and other Western states lean on to keep the oil flowing and their populations in check, Israel is an utterly reliable ally with a proven military record against Arab armies. It was Israeli military prowess which broke the dangerous spell of Nasserism when it defeated the Arabs in the six-day war. As a settler state in a hostile region, with a developed Western political and economic system and dependent on US military and financial support, any Israeli move against US interests in the region is unthinkable. But while it is impossible to imagine Israelis electing an anti-Western government, it would be a one-way bet in many Arab countries if their people were actually given a choice.
The pattern for the relationship was set by Britain as the dominant imperial power in the region in the early part of the last century. Sir Ronald Storrs, the first governor of Jerusalem under British rule in the 1920s, explained it as ‘forming for England a “little loyal Jewish Ulster” in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’. A lifetime later, that is essentially the role played by Israel for the US and wider Western interests today. It also helps explain the licence given to the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state to violate UN security council resolutions at will, and why even the EU is unlikely to agree to the economic or military sanctions demanded yesterday by the European parliament. The closeness of the alliance does not, however, mean the US will not bring its client to heel if necessary. When US administrations have felt that Israeli behaviour was encroaching on vital US interests – as in 1956, when Israel seized the Suez canal in collusion with Britain and France, for example, or in the 1980s, when it tried to prevent the sale of Awacs surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia – they have been prepared to slap their ally down, regardless of its friends on Capitol Hill.
The paradox of Middle East peacemaking has long been that while the US is an open partisan of one side in the conflict, it is only through US intervention that a viable long-term settlement can be achieved. Bush’s half-hearted attempt to strike a more even-handed public note over Sharon’s onslaught in the West Bank this week is transparently the product of fears of growing unrest in the region, – and the problems it is creating for American plans to settle accounts with Iraq. But the US will only move decisively if it feels its own interests are under threat.7
(11/4/02)
The battle for History: Stalin, Hitler and colonial crimes
It would be easy to dismiss the controversy over the latest Martin Amis offering as little more than a salon tiff among self-referential literati. His book, Koba the Dread, follows a well-trodden political path. An excoriation of Lenin, Stalin and communism in general (interlaced with long-simmering spats with his once communist father Kingsley and radical friend Christopher Hitchens), it is intended as a savage indictment of the left for its supposed inability to acknowledge the crimes committed in its name. Strong on phrasemaking, the book is painfully short on sources or social and historical context. The temptation might be to see it as simply a sign that the one-time enfant terrible of the London literary scene is reliving his father’s descent into middle-aged blimpishness.
That would be a mistake. Amis’s book is in reality only the latest contribution to the rewriting of history that began in the dying days of the Soviet Union and has intensified since its collapse. It has become almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin with Hitler as twin monsters of the past century – Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an afterthought – and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier wickedness. The impact of this cold-war victors’ version of the past has been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure.
This profoundly ideological account has long since turned into a sort of gruesome numbers game. The bizarre distortions it produces were on show last week during a television interview with Amis, when the BBC presenter Gavin Esler remarked in passing that Stalin was ‘responsible for at least three times as many deaths’ as Hitler – a truly breathtaking throwaway line. Esler was presumably comparing Amis’s own figure of 20 million Stalin victims (borrowed from the cold-war historian Robert Conquest) with the 6 million Jews murdered by Hitler in the Holocaust. But of course Hitler took a great many more lives than 6 million: over 11 million are estimated to have died in the Nazi camps alone and he might reasonably be held responsible for the vast majority of the 50 million killed in the second world war, including more than 20 million Soviet dead.
But in the distorted prism of the new history, they are somehow lost from the equation. At the same time, the number of victims of Stalin’s terror has been progressively inflated over recent years to the point where, in the wildest guesstimates, a third of the entire Soviet population is assumed to have been killed in the years leading up to the country’s victory over Nazi Germany. The numbers remain a focus of huge academic controversy, partly because most are famine deaths which can only be extrapolated from unreliable demographic data. But the fact is that the opening of formerly secret Soviet archives has led many historians – such as the Americans J. Arch Getty and Robert Thurston – to sharply scale down earlier cold-war estimates of executions and gulag populations under Stalin. The figures are still horrific. For example, 799,455 people were recorded as having been executed between 1921 and 1953, and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million (most convicted for non-political offences) at its peak after the war. But these are a very long way from the kind of numbers relied on by Amis and his mentors.8
For all their insistence on moral equivalence, Amis and even Conquest say they nevertheless ‘feel’ the Holocaust was worse than Soviet repression. But the differences aren’t just a matter of feelings. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka, no extermination camps built to murder people in their millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most bloody and destructive war in human history – in fact, it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine (something that eluded its tsarist predecessors). Part of the Soviet tragedy was that that victory was probably only possible because the country had undergone a forced industrial revolution in little more than a decade, in the very process of which the greatest crimes were committed. The achievements and failures of Soviet history cannot in any case be reduced to the Stalin period, any more than the role of communists – from the anti-fascist resistance to the campaigns for colonial freedom – can be defined simply by their relationship to the USSR.
Perhaps most grotesque in this postmodern calculus of political repression is the moral blindness displayed towards the record of colonialism. For most of the last century, vast swathes of the planet remained under direct imperial European rule, enforced with the most brutal violence by states that liked to see themselves as democracies. But somehow that is not included as the third leg of twentieth-century tyranny, along with Nazism and communism. There is a much-lauded Black Book of Communism, but no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record.
Consider a few examples. Up to 10 million Congolese are estimated to have died as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the early 1900s. Up to a million Algerians are estimated to have died in the war for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout the twentieth-century British empire, the authorities gassed, bombed and massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, Sierra Leone to Palestine, India to Malaya. And while Martin Amis worries that few remember the names of Soviet labour camps, who now commemorates the name of the Andaman islands penal colony, where 80,000 Indian political prisoners were routinely tortured and experimented on by British army doctors, or the huge Hola internment camp in Kenya where prisoners were beaten to death in the 1950s?
If Lenin and Stalin are regarded as having killed those who died of hunger in the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, then Churchill is certainly responsible for the 4 million deaths in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943 – and earlier British governments are even more guilty of the still larger famines in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, which claimed as many as 30 million victims under a punitive free-market regime. And of course, in the post-colonial era, millions have been killed by US and other Western forces or their surrogates in wars, interventions and coups from Vietnam to Central America, Indonesia to southern Africa.
There is no major twentieth-century political tradition without blood on its hands. But the battle over history is never really about the past – it’s about the future. When Amis accuses the Bolsheviks of waging ‘war against human nature’, he is making the classic conservative objection to radical social change. Those who write colonial barbarity out of twentieth-century history want to legitimise the new liberal imperialism, just as those who demonise past attempts to build an alternative to capitalist society are determined to prove that there is none. The problem for the left now is not so much that it has failed to face up to its own history, but that it has become paralysed by the burden of it.9
(12/9/02)
We are sleepwalking into a reckless war of aggression
The world is now undergoing a crash course of political education in the new realities of global power. In case anyone was still in any doubt about what they might mean, the Bush doctrine (set out last Friday in the US National Security Strategy) laid bare the ground rules of the new imperium. The US will in future brook no rival in power or military prowess, will spread still further its network of garrison bases in every continent, and will use its armed might to promote a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ (its own), through unilateral pre-emptive attacks if necessary.
In the following week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the German chancellor of ‘poisoning’ relations by daring to win an election with a declaration of foreign policy independence. Even the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy felt moved to accuse the US of ‘imperialism’. But it was Al Gore, winner of the largest number of votes in the last US presidential election, who blurted out the unvarnished truth: that the overweening recklessness of the US government has fostered fear across the world, not at what ‘terrorists are going to do, but at what we are going to do’.
Some, however, are having trouble keeping up. In parliament, many MPs seem determined to sleepwalk into a war of aggression, hiding behind the fiction that all will be resolved if United Nations weapons inspectors are allowed to go in and finish the disarmament of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Tony Blair was at pains to soothe their anxieties on Tuesday, as he will be next week at the Labour conference in Blackpool. The aim, he assured them, was simply to get rid of weapons of mass destruction under the auspices of the UN. If the regime changed as a by-product, so much the better. But yes, Saddam Hussein could save himself by compliance.
It’s only necessary to listen briefly to the chorus of administration voices in Washington insisting on the exact opposite, however, to realise this is a fraud – and that Blair knows it. From the president downwards, they have made utterly clear that regime change remains their policy, and force their favoured method – with or without a UN resolution and whether or not Saddam complies with inspections. And they are the ones making the decisions.
What is actually happening is that Blair, as Bush’s senior international salesman, is providing political cover for a policy which is opposed throughout the world, using the time-honoured New Labour methods of spin and ‘sequencing’: drawing his government and MPs into a succession of positions intended to lock them into acceptance of the final outcome. So while Rumsfeld – the man who as President Reagan’s envoy came to Baghdad in March 1984 to offer US support to Saddam, on the same day Iraq launched a chemical weapons attack on Iranian troops – rages on about a ‘decapitation strategy’ for his former allies, Blair has been busy promoting Britain’s dossier of assertion, conjecture and intelligence speculation to soften up public opinion for war.
There is nothing whatever in the dossier, as the former Tory foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said this week, to suggest that Iraq is any more of a threat than it was in the days when the US and Britain were arming it – in fact the opposite, as would be expected after twelve years of sanctions and seven years’ weapons inspections.
But more importantly, the Iraqi government’s announcement that it intends to allow UN inspectors free and unfettered access has already stolen the dossier’s rather modest thunder. After all, it should soon be possible to put its claims seriously to the test. That is presumably why Bush immediately threatened to veto the inspectors’ return without a new, more aggressive UN resolution and why Condoleezza Rice has been trying to revive discredited claims of links between Iraq and al-Qaida.
In spite of Russia’s insistence yesterday that inspectors can go back without a new UN resolution, Blair at least is convinced that support can be won for a more hawkish form of words. Given the threats and bribes that are routinely used to corral crucial votes – and the carve-up of Iraq’s oil that the US has been dangling in front of Russia and France – that seems possible.
What is highly unlikely, though, is that any resolution will be passed explicitly authorising invasion, regime change and occupation – in violation of the UN charter – which is what is actually intended. Expect, instead, some implied threat of force, which could then be used to create provocations, trigger an attack and be claimed as UN-authorised. But it would be nothing of the sort. Nor would it reflect the genuine will of the international community, but only further serve to discredit the UN as a cipher for American power, to be used or discarded as and when convenient.
That process was accelerated this week when the only Middle Eastern state with an advanced programme of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear-armed Israel – refused to comply with a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate end to its destruction of Palestinian compounds in Ramallah because it said it was ‘one-sided’. No action is expected. But then Israel is a serial flouter of UN Security Council resolutions – and some resolutions are treated more seriously than others.
The planned US invasion of Iraq will increase the threat of war throughout the world. By legitimising pre-emptive attacks, it will lower the threshold for the use of force and make aggression by powerful states more likely. It will encourage nuclear proliferation, as states rush to get hold of some protective deterrent. It will damage the fabric of international law and multilateral treaties. It will encourage terrorism by pouring oil on the flames of anti-Western rage.
It also risks creating a humanitarian disaster in Iraq – on top of the terrible human toll exacted by sanctions. Nor is it easy to believe that a US-orchestrated regime change in Iraq will deliver a genuine democracy, or that the US would be likely to accept the kind of government free elections might produce. The last time Britain and the US called the shots in Baghdad, in 1958, there were 10,000 political prisoners, parties were banned, the press was censored and torture was commonplace.
For the US, this war is not mainly about Iraq at all, but about the implementation of its new doctrine and the reconstruction of the entire region. For Tony Blair, it is about his ‘article of faith’ in the centrality of the American relationship and the need to pay a ‘blood price’ to maintain it. For the British people, across the political spectrum, it should highlight the moral and democratic necessity of starting to loosen what has become a profoundly dangerous alliance.
(27/9/02)
Not fighting terror, but fuelling it
This time last year, supporters of George Bush’s war on terror were in euphoric mood. As one Taliban stronghold after another fell to the US-backed Northern Alliance, they hailed the advance as a decisive blow to the authors of the September 11 atrocities. The critics and doom-mongers had been confounded, cheerleaders crowed. Kites were flying again, music was playing and women were throwing off their burkas with joyful abandon.
As the US president demanded Osama bin Laden ‘dead or alive’, government officials on both sides of the Atlantic whispered that they were less than forty-eight hours from laying hands on the al-Qaida leader. By destroying the terrorist network’s Afghan bases and its Taliban sponsors, supporters of the war argued, the Americans and their friends had ripped the heart out of the beast. Washington would now begin to address Muslim and Arab grievances by fast-tracking the establishment of a Palestinian state. Downing Street even published a roll-call of shame of journalists they claimed had been proved wrong by a hundred days of triumph. And in parliament, Jack Straw ridiculed Labour MPs for suggesting that the US and Britain might still be fighting in Afghanistan twelve months down the line.
One year on, the crowing has long since faded away; reality has sunk in. After six months of multiplying jihadist attacks on US, Australian and European targets, civilian and military – in Tunisia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Russia, Jordan, Yemen, the US and Indonesia – Western politicians are having to face the fact that they are losing their war on terror. In Britain, the prime minister has taken to warning of the ‘painful price’ that the country will have to pay to defeat those who are ‘inimical to all we stand for’, while leaks about the risk of chemical or biological attacks have become ever more lurid. After a year of US military operations in Afghanistan and around the world, the CIA director George Tenet had to concede that the threat from al-Qaida and associated jihadist groups was as serious as before September 11. ‘They’ve reconstituted. They are coming after us,’ he said.
In other words, the global US onslaught had been a complete failure – at least as far as dealing with non-state terrorism was concerned. Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, was even more brutal. Summing up a litany of unmet objectives in the US confrontation with militant Islamism, he asked: ‘By what measure can we say this has been successful?’ But most galling of all has been the authentication of the latest taped message from bin Laden himself, promising bloody revenge for the deaths of the innocent in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the man whose capture or killing was, after all, the first objective of Bush’s war. And yet, along with the Taliban leader and one-eyed motorbiker Mullah Omar, the mastermind of America’s humiliation remains free.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan itself, the record is just as dismal. By using the Northern Alliance opium mafia to overthrow the Taliban regime and pursue al-Qaida remnants ever since, the US has handed over most of the country to the same war criminals who devastated Afghanistan in the early 1990s. In Kabul, the US puppet president Hamid Karzai can rely on foreign troops to prop up his fragile authority. There, and in a few other urban centres, some girls’ schools have re-opened and the most extreme manifestations of the Taliban’s oppression of women have gone.
But in much of what is once again the opium capital of the world, the return of the warlords has meant harsh political repression, lawlessness, mass rape and widespread torture, and the bombing or closure of schools, as well as Taliban-style policing of women’s dress and behaviour. The systematic use by Ismail Khan, who runs much of western Afghanistan with US support, of electric shock torture, arbitrary arrests and whippings to crush dissent is set out in a new Human Rights Watch report. Khan was nevertheless described by Donald Rumsfeld recently as a ‘thoughtful’ and ‘appealing’ person. His counterpart in the north, General Dostum, has in turn just been accused by the UN of torturing witnesses to his troops’ murder of thousands of Taliban prisoners late last year, when he was working closely with US special forces.
The death toll exacted by this ‘liberation’ can only be estimated. But a consensus is growing that around 3,500 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing (which included the large-scale use of depleted uranium weapons), with up to 10,000 combatants killed and many more deaths from cold and hunger as a result of the military action. Now, long after the war was supposed to be over, the US 82nd Airborne Division is reported to be alienating the population in the south and east with relentless but largely fruitless raids and detentions, while mortar and rocket attacks on US bases are now taking place at least three times a week. As General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, puts it, the US military campaign in Afghanistan has ‘lost momentum’.
All this has been the inevitable product of the central choice made last autumn, which was to opt for a mainly military solution to the challenge of Islamist terrorism. That was a recipe for failure. By their nature, terrorist or guerrilla campaigns which have deep social roots and draw on a widespread sense of injustice – as militant jihadist groups do, regardless of the obscurantism of their ideology – cannot be defeated militarily. And as the war on terror has increasingly become a war to enforce US global power, it has only intensified the appeal of ‘asymmetric warfare’ to the powerless.
The grievances al-Qaida is able to feed on throughout the Muslim world were once again spelled out in bin Laden’s latest edict. But there is little sign of any weakening of the wilful Western refusal to address seriously the causes of jihadist campaigns. Thus, during the past year, the US has armed and bolstered Pakistan and the central Asian dictatorships, supported Putin’s ongoing devastation of Chechnya, continued to bomb and blockade Iraq at huge human cost, established new US bases across the Muslim world and, most recklessly of all, provided every necessary cover for Ariel Sharon’s bloody rampages through the occupied Palestinian territories. In most of this, despite Tony Blair’s muted appeals for a new Middle East peace conference, Britain has played the role of faithful lieutenant.
Now, even as ‘phase one’ of its war on terror has been seen to have failed, the US shows every sign of preparing to launch phase two: its long-planned invasion and occupation of Iraq. Perhaps some of the intensity of the current warnings about terrorist threats is intended to help soften up public opinion for an unpopular war. But what is certain about such an act of aggression is that it will fuel terrorism throughout the world and make attacks on those countries which support it much more likely. If such outrages take place in Britain, there can no longer be any surprise or mystery about why we have been attacked, no point in asking why they hate us. Of course, it wouldn’t be the innocents who were killed or injured who would be to blame. But by throwing Britain’s weight behind a flagrantly unjust war, our political leaders would certainly be held responsible for endangering their own people.10
(21/11/02)
