The Algebra of Infinite Justice
by Arundhati Roy
In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide
attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, an American
newscaster said: "Good and Evil rarely manifest themselves
as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know,
massacred people who we
do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Then he
broke down and wept. Here's the rub: America is at war against
people it doesn't know (because they don't appear much on
TV). Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend
the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush
of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an
"International Coalition Against Terror", mobilised
its army, its airforce, its navy and its media, and committed
them to battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't
very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't
find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home,
it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will
develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own,
and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first
place.
What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's
most powerful country, reaching reflexively, angrily, for
an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when
it comes to defending
itself, America's streamlined warships, its Cruise missiles
and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence,
its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight
in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons
with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger
is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't
show up in baggage checks.
Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that
it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers.
On the same day, President George W. Bush said: "We know
exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting
them." It sounds as though the President knows something
that the FBI and the American public don't. In his September
20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies
of America "Enemies of Freedom"
"Americans are asking why do they hate us?" he
said. "They hate our freedoms -our freedom of religion,
our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and
disagree with each other." People are being asked to
make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy
is who the US government says it is, even though it has no
substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to
assume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government
says they are,
and there's nothing to support that either.
For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital
for the US government to persuade the American public that
America's commitment to freedom and democracy and the American
Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of
grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However,
if that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the symbols
of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, were chosen as
the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty?
Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks
has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but
in the US government's record of commitment and support to
exactly the opposite things- to military and economic terrorism,
insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable
genocide (outside America)?
It must be hard for ordinary Americans so recently bereaved
to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and
encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It
isn't indifference. It's
just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing
that what goes around, eventually comes around. American people
ought to know that it is not them, but their government's
policies that are so hated. They can't possibly doubt that
they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers,
their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema,
are universally welcomed.
All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown
by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office-goers
in the days and weeks that followed the attacks. America's
grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public.
It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate
its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using
this as an opportunity to try and
understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as
an opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn
and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest
of us to ask the
hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains,
for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps
eventually silenced.
The world will probably never know what motivated those particular
hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings.
They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political
messages, no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks.
All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped
the natural human instinct for survival or any desire to be
remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down
the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their
deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as
we know it. In the absence of information, politicians, political
commentators, writers (like myself) will invest the act with
their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation,
this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks
took place, can only be a good thing.
But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said, must
be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm
of the "international coalition against terror",
before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate
in its almost godlike mission -Operation Infinite Justice
- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For
example, Infinite Justice for whom? Is this America's War
against Terror in America or against Terror in general? What
exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost
7,000 lives, the gutting of 5 million square feet of office
space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon,
the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy
of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock
Exchange? Or is it more than that?
In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US Secretary of State,
was asked on national television what she felt about the fact
that 5,00,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic
sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice",
but that all things considered, "we think the price is
worth it." Madeleine Albright never lost her job for
saying this. She continued to travel the world representing
the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently,
the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue
to die.
So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between
civilisation and savagery, between the 'massacre of innocent
people' or, if you like, 'a clash of civilisations' and 'collateral
damage'. The
sophistry and fastidious algebra of Infinite Justice. How
many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place?
How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead
women and children for every dead man? How many dead mujahideen
for each dead investment
banker?
As we watch mesmerised, Operation Infinite Justice unfolds
on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world's
superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest,
most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling
Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man
being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.
The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as
collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million
maimed orphans. There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that
occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible
villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact,
the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no
conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military
map, no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes,
no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass
graves. The countryside is littered with landmines -10 million
is the most recent estimate. The American army would
first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to
take its soldiers in.
Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have
fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan
and Afghanistan. As supplies run out, food and aid agencies
have been
asked to leave, the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian
disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the
Infinite Justice of the new century. Civilians starving to
death, while
they're waiting to be killed.
By contributing to the killing of Afghan civilians, the US
government will only end up helping the Taliban cause. In
America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan
back to the stone age". Someone please break the news
that Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation,
America played no small part in helping it on its way. The
American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly
Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there's a run on maps
of Afghanistan), but the US government and Afghanistan are
old friends. In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) launched
the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their
purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to
the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jehad,
which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union
against the Communist regime and eventually destabilise it.
When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam.
It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, the
CIA funded and recruited almost 1,00,000 radical mujahideen
from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy
war. The rank and file of the mujahideen were unaware that
their jehad was actually
being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam.(The irony is that America
was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against
itself). By 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless
conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation
reduced to rubble. Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The
jehad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir.
The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment,
but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed.
The mujahideen ordered farmers to plant opium as 'revolutionary
tax'. The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across
Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan
borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the
world, and the single biggest source on American streets.
The annual profits, said to be between 100 and 200
billion dollars, were ploughed back into training and arming
militants.
In 1995, the Talibanthen a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline
fundamentalistsfought its way to power in Afghanistan. It
was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported
by many
political parties in akistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime
of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly
women. It closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from
government jobs,
enforced Sharia laws in which women deemed to be 'immoral'
are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous
are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human rights
track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be
intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of
war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.
After all that has happened, can there be anything more
ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy
Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction?
Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble,
scramble some old graves
and disturb the dead. The desolate landscape of Afghanistan
was the burial ground of Soviet Communism and the springboard
of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space
for neo-capitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated
by America. And now
Afghanistan is poised to be the graveyard for the unlikely
soldiers who fought and won this war for America.
And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered
enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting
military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy
from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there
was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979
and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one
and a half million. There are three million Afghan refugees
living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy
is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation's Structural
Adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country
to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training
centres and madrassas, sown like dragon's teeth across the
country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular
appeal within Pakistan itself. The aliban, who the Pakistan
government has
supported, funded and propped up for years, has material and
strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.
Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garrot
the pet it has
hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf,
having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has
something resembling civil war on his hands.
India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the
vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough
to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's
more than likely that
our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today,
as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously
gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India
rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's
sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable that India
should want to do this. Any Third World country with a fragile
economy and a complex social base should know by now that
to invite a superpower like America in (whether it says it's
staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a
brick to drop through your windscreen.
In the media blitz that followed the September 11 events,
no mainstream TV station thought it fit to tell the story
of America's involvement with Afghanistan. So, to those unfamiliar
with the story,
the coverage of the attacks could have been moving, disturbing
and perhaps to cynics, self-indulgent. However, to those of
us who are familiar with Afghanistan's recent history, American
television coverage and the rhetoric of the "International
Coalition Against Terror" is just plain insulting. America's
'free press' like its 'free market' has a lot to account for.
Operation Infinite Justice
is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life.
It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn
more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary
people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of
sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will
there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall?
Will my love come home tonight? Already CNN is warning people
against the possibility of biological warfaresmall pox, bubonic
plague, anthraxbeing waged by innocuous crop duster aircraft.
Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than
being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.
The US government, and no doubt governments all over the
world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail
civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass
ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending
and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry.
To what purpose? President George Bush can no more "rid
the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints.
It's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion
that it can
stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism
is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country.
It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi
or Nike. At
the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and
move their 'factories' from country to country in search of
a better deal. Just like the multinationals.
Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is
to be contained, the first step is for America to at least
acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations,
with other human beings, who, even if they are not on TV,
have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and,
for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld,
the US Defence Secretary, was asked what he would call a victory
in America's New War, he said that if he could convince the
world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their
way of life, he would consider it a victory. The September
11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone
horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Osama
bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but
it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims
of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam
and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel, backed by the
US, invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 2,00,000 Iraqis killed in
Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who
have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And
the millions who died in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican republic, Panama, at
the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists
who the American government supported, trained, bankrolled
and supplied with arms.
And this is far from being a comprehensive list. For a country
involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people
have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11
were only the second on American soil in over a century. The
first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long
route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the
world waits with bated breath
for the horrors to come.
Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist,
America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America
did invent him. He was among the jehadis who moved to Afghanistan
in 1979 when the CIA commenced operations. Osama bin Laden
has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted
by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight, he has been promoted
from Suspect, to Prime Suspect, and then, despite the lack
of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted
dead or alive". From all accounts, it will be impossible
to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny
in a court of law) to link Osama bin Laden to the September
11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating
piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not
condemned them. From what is known about the location and
the living conditions from
which Osama bin Laden operates, it's entirely possible that
he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks, that
he is the inspirational figure, 'the CEO of the Holding Company'.
The Taliban's response to US demands for the extradition
of Osama bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable:
Produce the evidence, we'll hand him over. President Bush's
response is that the demand is "non-negotiable".
(While talks are on for the extradition of CEO, can
India put in a side-request for the extradition of Warren
Anderson of the USA? He was Chairman of Union Carbide, responsible
for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984.
We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in he files.
Could we have him, please?)
But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that.
What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He
is the American President's dark doppelganger. The savage
twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He
has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste
by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear
arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full spectrum
dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives,
its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic
and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that
has munched through the economies of poor countries like a
cloud of locusts. Its
marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe,
the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we
think.
Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are
blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.
Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around
in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet
US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by
America's drug-addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration
recently gave Afghanistan a $43 million subsidy for a "war
on drugs"...) Now they've even begun to borrow each other's
rhetoric. Each refers to the other as 'the head of the snake'.
Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of
Good and Evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged
in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed,
one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the
other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly
hopeless. The
fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important
thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative
to the other.
President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world"If
you're not with us, you're against us" is a piece of
presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people want
to, need to, or should have to
make.
|