[Reader-list] Re: Reader-list digest, Vol 1 #246 - 4 msgs

[m emily cragg]

Outlook Magazine | Oct 29, 2001 ---
[Edited and cleaned-up copy for further distribution. I hope I got all the 
deletions and duplications repaired here. It's worth sending to everyone you 
know who cares about this planet.]

FRONTLINES -- "WAR IS PEACE" by  ARUNDHATI ROY

     As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday, October 7, 2001, the  
US government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror  (the 
new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air  strikes 
against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on  computer-animated images of 
Cruise missiles, stealth bombers,  Tomahawks, 'bunker-busting' missiles and 
Mark 82 high-drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed 
and stopped  clamouring for new video games. The UN, reduced now to an 
ineffective abbreviation, wasn't even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As 
Madeleine Albright once said, "The US  acts multilaterally when it can, and 
unilaterally when it must."
     People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People  get 
killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They first  use flags 
to shrink-wrap peoples' minds and suffocate real thought,
and then as ceremonial shrouds to cloak the mangled corpses of the  willing 
dead.
     The 'evidence' against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in  
the 'Coalition'. After conferring, they announced that it didn't  matter 
whether or not the 'evidence' would stand up in a court of  law. Thus, in an 
instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly  trashed.  Nothing can 
excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is  committed by religious 
fundamentalists, private militia, people's  resistance movements-or  whether 
it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised  government. The 
bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York  and Washington. It is 
yet another act of terror against the people of the world. Each innocent 
person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll 
of civilians who died in New York  and Washington.
     On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now 
hostage to the actions of their own governments. Unknowingly, ordinary 
people in both countries share a common  bond-they have to live with the 
phenomenon of blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is 
dropped on Afghanistan is matched  by a corresponding escalation of mass 
hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts.
      There is no easy way out of the spiralling morass of terror and 
brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race 
to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient 
and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever. 
Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war-these words have taken on new 
meaning. Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach 
their new tasks with a modicum of  honesty and humility. Unfortunately, up 
to now, there has been no  sign of any introspection from the leaders of the 
International  Coalition. Or the Taliban.
     When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, "We're a 
peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also 
holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a 
peaceful people." So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is 
Peace.
      Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush 
said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of 
America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental 
values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects 
evil. We will not tire."
      Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with-and 
bombed-since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); 
Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian 
Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964-73); Vietnam (1961-73); Cambodia 
(1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua 
(1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); 
Yugoslavia (1999).And now Afghanistan. Certainly it does not tire--this, the 
Most Free nation in the world.
     What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of 
speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits, sexual 
preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful 
things. Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and 
subjugate-usually in the service of America's real religion, the 'free 
market'. So when the US government christens a war 'Operation Infinite 
Justice', or 'Operation Enduring Freedom', we in the Third World feel more 
than a tremor of fear.
     Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice 
for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for 
others. The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the 
richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell 
almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of 
weapons of mass destruction-chemical, biological and nuclear. They have 
fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic 
cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, 
armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, 
they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all 
its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league.
      The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin 
and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in 
their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and
handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society 
scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 
years, about $45 billion worth of arms and ammunition was poured into 
Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude 
upon a thoroughly medieval society. Young boys--many of them orphans--who 
grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and 
comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women.
      Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalise 
women; they don't seem to know what else to do with them.
Years of war have stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and 
human compassion. They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down 
around them. Now they've turned their monstrosity on their own people. With 
all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to 
choose between the Taliban and the US government.
     All the beauty of human civilisation-our art, our music, our 
literature-lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is 
as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class 
consumers as there is that they'll all embrace any one particular religion. 
The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it 
is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the 
impulse towards hegemony--every kind of hegemony, economic, military, 
linguistic, religious and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how 
dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a 
government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. 
It's like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from 
breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open. One and a half million Afghan 
people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new 
war. Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded 
into finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were 
returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. 
As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich environment". At a 
press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, was 
asked if America had run out of targets.
     "First we're going to re-hit targets," he said, "and second, we're not 
running out of targets, Afghanistan is..." This was greeted with gales of 
laughter in the Briefing Room. By the third day of the strikes, the US 
defence department boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over 
Afghanistan". (Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, 
of Afghanistan's planes?) On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern 
Alliance-the Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the International 
Coalition's newest friend-is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. 
(For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track record 
is not very different from the Taliban's.
     Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5 per 
cent of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the Coalition's help 
and 'air cover', it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban 
soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the Alliance. So 
the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in 
an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all. Love 
is hate, north is south, peace is war.  But for now, because it's 
inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The visible, 
moderate, "acceptable" leader of the Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, was killed 
in a suicide-bomb attack early in September. The rest of the Northern 
Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists and 
unbending clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some 
of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.
Among the global powers, there is talk of 'putting in a representative 
government'. Or, on the other hand, of 'restoring' the Kingdom to 
Afghanistan's 89-year-old former king, Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in 
Rome since 1973. That's the way the game goes--support Saddam Hussein, then 
'take him out'; finance the mujahideen, then bomb them to smithereens; put 
in Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to 
'put in' a representative government? Can you place an order for 
Democracy-with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)  Reports have begun to 
trickle in about civilian casualties, about
cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which have been 
closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have 
experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food 
convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5 million 
according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during 
the course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before 
winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food.
     As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 
37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to 
drop a total of 5,00,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single 
meal for half-a-million people out of the several million in dire need of 
food. Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous, 
public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse 
than futile. First, because the food will never get to those who really need 
it. More dangerously,
those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. 
A tragic alms race.  Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to 
themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were 
vegetarian, we're told, as per Muslim Dietary Law(!) Each yellow packet, 
decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean 
salad, strawberry jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, 
seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated 
user instructions.
      After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal 
in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand 
what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty
really mean, the US government's attempt to use even this abject misery to 
boost its self-image, beggars description. Reverse the scenario for a 
moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying 
all the while that its real target was the US government and its policies. 
And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few 
thousand packets containing nan and kababs impaled on an Afghan flag.Would 
the good people of New York be able to forgive the Afghan government? Even 
if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it, how 
would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudy Giuliani, Mayor 
of New York City,  returned a gift of $10 million from a Saudi prince 
because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in 
the Middle East. Is pride a luxury only the rich are entitled to? Far from 
stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what creates terrorism. Hate 
and retribution don't go back into the box once you've let them out. For 
every 'terrorist' or his 'supporter' that is killed, hundreds of innocent 
people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent people killed, 
there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created. Where 
will it all lead?
      Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the 
world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what 'terrorism'  is. 
One country's terrorist is too often another's freedom fighter. At the heart 
of the matter lies the world's deep-seated ambivalence towards violence. 
Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the 
morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom 
fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain.
      The US government itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty of 
rebels and insurgents around the world. The CIA and Pakistan's ISI trained 
and armed the mujahideen who, in the '80s, were seen as terrorists by the 
government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. While President Reagan posed with 
them for a group portrait and called them the moral equivalents of America's 
founding fathers. Today, Pakistan--America's ally in this new war--sponsors 
insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them 
as 'freedom fighters', India calls them 'terrorists'. India, for its part, 
denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, 
in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri 
Lanka-the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism. (Just as 
the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India 
abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was 
an enraged LTTE suicide-bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister 
Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.)
       People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry 
know that every religious text-from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita-can be 
mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide 
to corporate globalisation.  It is important for governments and politicians 
to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their 
own narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and 
inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting  
religious sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most 
dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any 
people-including their own. People who live in societies ravaged by 
religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text-from the Bible 
to the Bhagwad Gita-can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, 
from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation.
     This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage 
on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be. 
But is war the best way to track them down? Will
burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and 
make the world a living hell for all of us?  At the end of the day, how many 
people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many 
conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many e-mails can you intercept, how 
many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before 
September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly 
possible to process.(Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder 
intelligence--small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the 
preparation that preceded India's nuclear tests in 1998.)
      The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical 
and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And 
freedom-that precious, precious thing-will be the first casualty. It's 
already hurt and haemorrhaging dangerously. Governments across the world are 
cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All 
kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for 
instance, members of the All India People's Resistance Forum, who were 
distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even 
the printer of the leaflets was arrested. The right-wing government (while 
it shelters Hindu extremists groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the 
Bajrang Dal) has banned the Students' Islamic Movement of India and is 
trying to revive an anti-terrorist act which had been withdrawn after the 
Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. 
Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating 
them?
      Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose 
into the world. The international press has little or no independent access 
to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, has 
more or less rolled over, allowing itself to be tickled on the stomach with 
press hand-outs from militarymen and government officials. Afghan radio 
stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been 
deeply suspicious of the Press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate 
estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has 
taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumours spread. 
Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the 
thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger.
      Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart 
missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole warehouses of 
suppressed fury.
      President George Bush recently boasted: "When I take action, I'm not 
going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in 
the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush should
know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles 
their money's worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should 
develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and
cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may  not 
make good business sense to the Coalition's weapons manufacturers. It 
wouldn't make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group-described 
by the Industry Standard as 'the world's largest private equity firm', with 
$12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defence sector and 
makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending. Carlyle is run 
by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defence secretary Frank 
Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college 
roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US 
secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush 
Sr's campaign manager). An American paper-the Baltimore Chronicle and 
Sentinel-says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking 
investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid 
not inconsiderable sums of money to make 'presentations' to potential 
government-clients.
      Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to 
do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its 
strategic interest in oil. Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the 
family. Then there's that other branch of traditional family business-oil. 
Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both 
made their fortunes working in the US oil industry. Turkmenistan, which 
borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas 
reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, 
experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a 
developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America 
has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any 
means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the 
Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely 
to do with its strategic interest in oil.
      Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to 
European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major 
impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney-then
CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry-said: "I can't think 
of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as 
strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the
opportunities have arisen overnight." True enough. For some years now, an 
American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for 
permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and 
out to the Arabian Sea.
      From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative 'emerging markets' in 
South and Southeast Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs 
travelled to America and even met US State Department officials and Unocal 
executives in Houston.At that time the Taliban's taste for public executions 
and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against 
humanity. Over the last six months of the Clinton Administration, pressure 
from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on 
the deal. Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the 
US oil industry's big chance.
      In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media 
networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same 
business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of 
guns and oil and defence deals to get any real play in the media. In any 
case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, 
whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and 
sharp, the inanities about the 'Clash of Civilisations' and the 'Good vs 
Evil' discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by 
government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti-depressants. 
Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the 
enigma it has always been--a curiously insular people, administered by a 
pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.
      And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of 
what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies 
and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped 
into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and 
eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre 
unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, 
that we have had enough?
      As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one 
wonders-have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to 
re-imagine beauty? Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow,
amazed blink of a new-born gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot 
who has just whispered in your ear-without thinking of the World Trade 
Center and Afghanistan?





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