14 November 2001
So, victory at last to the US and Britain in their putative "war on terrorism". The Taliban have been well and truly routed, with areas formerly under their corrupt control now having fallen to the West's friends, the equally corrupt Northern Alliance.
With victory now in the bag, omnipotent America can finally look forward to a return to life as normal after successfully dispensing its brand of instant justice. The ugly enemy of terrorism has been vanquished and a giant blow has been struck for international freedom. All that now remains is for that terrorism mastermind, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership to be captured "dead or alive" and put on display, first in Kabul and then in Washington DC.
Well, before self-praise and gloating get completely out of hand, it is necessary to inject a bit of reality into the debate. I would hate to be a killjoy, but even with bin Laden and Mullah Omar captured/assassinated, the West's victory might still prove to be pyrrhic.
From the very beginning of "Operation Enduring Freedom" it was always a cinch that an Allied victory was assured. After all, the Taliban's aged military equipment with the scarce resources of one of the world's poorest countries was never going to be a match for the fearsome might of the world's only remaining superpower and its wealthy allies, with their sophisticated cluster bombs. So one-sided was this war that it was very much like an elephant stamping on an ant.
Far from ending terrorism, "Operation Enduring Freedom" might well spawn more terrorism against the US. By launching a military campaign against Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, instead of taking the judicial route, the US and Britain may well have created more dangerous enemies. The campaign of the past few weeks, which saw hi-tech American bombs falling on people's homes, schools, hospitals and even a Red Cross facility, have gone a long way to further hardening attitudes to the US.
Of course, the terrorist acts of 11 September in New York and Washington were unspeakably barbaric and shamed us all because they showed the depths to which human beings are capable of sinking. They are still so hauntingly vivid in our minds that we did not need to be reminded of them by Tony Blair in his efforts to justify the West's own terrorism.
However, truly civilised people do not respond to barbarity with barbarity of their own. Instead, they reveal, by their choice of action, that they are better human beings and that they will not allow their enemies to push them to stoop to such depraved levels.
Those responsible for the cowardly 11 September attacks should have been systematically tracked down and prosecuted, preferably in a neutral country, however long that would have taken. If the US and Britain had conclusive evidence of bin Laden's guilt or culpability, they should have made that evidence available to the Taliban and the United Nations, and insisted on his extradition. That way punitive action would have been very clearly targeted, instead of the generalised, instant punishment meted out in Afghanistan.
Instead of acting like cowboys, the US and its allies would have shown themselves to be believers in true justice, and therefore better than the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
Now America will never again know the kind of safety to which it was accustomed. Through its actions in the past five weeks it has created even more Muslim enemies for itself, some of whom might feel strongly enough to want to try something foolish. The situation is not helped by the continuing US partisanship in the Middle East conflict, with President George Bush's refusal to meet Yasser Arafat in New York at the weekend again indicating his failure to fully appreciate the cause of some of the hatred felt for America. (The Guardian)
Mary Dejevsky: Don't be fooled: Mr Bush is not changing course after this war
'None of this means Bush will abandon his isolationist tendencies in the wake of 11 September'
16 November 2001
Anyone who has watched the procession of foreign visitors shaking hands with President Bush in recent weeks might be forgiven for believing that the US administration was about to rejoin the world. After eight months of turning its back on almost every aspect of international engagement -- from arms control and environment agreements to Middle East peace -- the US suddenly repaid its debt to the United Nations and Mr Bush turned the White House into the diplomatic equivalent of Grand Central Station. Aha, we Europeans sighed knowingly, America's new sense of vulnerability is fast teaching it what we learned long ago: that no country, not even the world's superpower, can act as though the rest of the world was not there.
Unfortunately, this may not be the most prescient reading of what is happening. The cataclysm of 11 September has indeed forced changes in the Bush administration's priorities. On coming to office, Mr Bush set about reordering foreign policy, starting in his own back yard with Mexico. But, instead of forging closer hemispheric relations, he has found himself dispatching his country's élite troops to Afghanistan.
With a background in business and a Harvard MBA, he ran for the presidency as a competent leader and economic manager. In office, he has presided over a deepening recession and taken the role of commander in chief. Having campaigned on a platform of military modernisation, he has found himself dependent on the forces and structures he inherited. Rising to the top of his domestic agenda was a bold plan to allow more immigrants, especially Mexicans, to work legally in the United States. The ease with which a majority of the 15 aspiring hijackers were able to enter the US legally and wreak their deadly havoc has made any relaxation of immigration restrictions a political non-starter.
Most pertinently, Mr Bush was persuaded -- perhaps against his first instincts -- that if he was to mount successful punitive action against the terrorists, he needed the diplomatic cover of international support, as well as foreign logistical help. Hence the overtures to the United Nations, the carousel of cabinet visits to Russia and Asia and his own shift towards the acceptance of Palestinian statehood.
But none of this means that the Bush administration will abandon its isolationist tendencies in the wake of 11 September. Before that infamous day, Mr Bush came across as an unconvincing President, presiding over a divided Congress and a divided country. He had carelessly let Republican control of the Senate slip from his grasp and was still disowned as a legitimate president by many Democratic voters. He and his advisers were debating what compromises they could tolerate on their favoured domestic issues and which might be postponed or abandoned.
Now Mr Bush's position is infinitely stronger. Congress has set aside most party politics in the national interest. The wave of red, white and blue patriotism that swept the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks shows no sign of subsiding, and, so long as it lasts, it boosts the occupant of the Oval Office. Despite a wobble at the height of the anthrax scare, Mr Bush's popularity ratings have been as high as those of his father during the Gulf War.
The success -- so far -- of the military campaign in Afghanistan stands to strengthen Mr Bush further and so widen his room for manoeuvre. But any hope that he might use his new authority either to shift the fundamentals of his domestic agenda or to intensify US engagement with the rest of the world looks vain. His hawkish defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, looks cock-a-hoop these days, scarcely able to contain his satisfaction. In contrast, his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, seems to have lost some of the energy and drive that he so visibly possessed when he led the diplomatic dance before the bombing began. Mr Bush, for his part, has raised no expectations whatsoever that the US will take the lead in peacekeeping, aid-delivery or what he and his Cabinet call, with more than a hint of scorn, "nation-building".
So long as the Taliban make no comeback (and this looks increasingly unlikely), Mr Bush can probably rest on the laurels of war. Once the US declares its military campaign over, anything that then goes awry can be blamed on the inadequacy of the post-conflict settlement or the Afghans. It will not necessarily sour what Mr Bush will claim to be his, and the "coalition's", victory.
Mr Bush granted a glimpse of how little he intended to be diverted from his original priorities almost immediately after 11 September. Asked whether the suicide hijackings of four US domestic flights did not argue conclusively against spending so much money on his pet missile-defence system, Mr Bush said that, on the contrary, it proved how very necessary such a system was. While the logic of his answer was open to question -- how (and why) would a missile-defence system have spotted and deflected or destroyed a commercial aircraft on a domestic flight? -- the strength of his conviction was not.
Mr Bush has since insisted that he stands by his view that tax cuts will help fend off economic distress and he will propose more if the economy continues to slide. He is also sticking to his view that the role of government should be curbed. He lobbied personally against a Bill that would have made airport security staff federal employees (and so a charge on the public purse as beneficiaries of federal wages, medical insurance and pensions). Proponents of the Bill hoped that federal conditions would raise standards and so make it more difficult for terrorists to board US planes.
Not one of these policies, however, enjoys great support outside the ranks of Congressional Republicans. Americans may be united in patriotic fervour, but they also harbour grave misgivings about the wisdom of spending huge amounts on missile defence, when the home front has proved so vulnerable. They fret about more tax cuts, which will go into already well-lined pockets, and -- with reason -- about skimping on airport security.
If a longer-term effect of the terrorist attacks of 11 September is, as it increasingly seems, to persuade Americans that public spending has its uses, Mr Bush may find the political capital he has earnt from his "war" seeping away long before the next election in 2004.
Blasting our way to peace
Justice has been redefined as success in a war that is sounding a retreat from civilisation
George Monbiot
Thursday November 15, 2001
The Guardian
The armchair warriors have proved no more merciful in victory than the Northern Alliance. Yesterday's Sun gave two pages to an editorial entitled "Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong ... the fools who said Allies faced disaster". Christopher Hitchens raised the moral and intellectual tone of the debate in the Guardian yesterday with this lofty sentiment: "Well, ha ha ha and yah, boo - It was ... obvious that defeat was impossible". Such magnanimity suggests that it is not Afghanistan which we have bombed into the stone age, but ourselves.
But almost everyone now agrees that this is the end of history, all over again. The sceptics have been routed as swiftly as the Taliban. George Bush and Tony Blair, with the help of their daisy cutters and cluster bombs, have ushered in a new, new world order, the long awaited golden age of democracy. But have the warriors of the west, both actual and virtual, really won? And if so, what precisely is the prize?
There's no question that the rapid advance of the Northern Alliance took hawks as well as doves by surprise. All of us, warriors and sceptics, overestimated the difficulties of capturing Kabul. But the Telegraph's repetition of Mrs Thatcher's injunction - "just rejoice, rejoice" - may prove to be a little premature.
It would be rather easier to measure the success of the west's war aims if those aims had not shifted with every presidential announcement. But a few key questions may help us to determine how much the B-52s have achieved. The first and most obvious is: will the advance of the Northern Alliance lead to the overthrow of the barbarous Taliban? The answer is, almost certainly, yes - although they may persist as a guerrilla force. The question this then raises is, will it improve the lives of the Afghan people? Almost everyone appears to believe that it will. But we would be foolish to forget that just five years ago both Afghans and western diplomats welcomed the Taliban's capture of Kabul, as it relieved the inhabitants of the murderous dominion of the men who now run the Northern Alliance. Yesterday the Telegraph claimed that the Northern Alliance's "fearful violence" towards Arab and Pakistani soldiers "is a shocking reminder of the fact that Bin Laden's zealots have been a hated army of occupation". Well, perhaps. But it is also a shocking reminder of the fact that the Northern Alliance can be just as brutal as the hated regime it has displaced. To the claim Polly Toynbee made on these pages yesterday that "nothing could be worse" than the Taliban, one can only respond: don't tempt fate.
The Northern Alliance's willingness to cooperate with western plans for Afghanistan is also questionable. Four days ago, we were told that its soldiers had been persuaded not to advance on Kabul, and this was judged a victory for the west. Now they have taken Kabul, and this too is hailed as a victory for the west. That the military action has not gone according to plan, in other words, is presented as a vindication of the plan.
Given that the Northern Alliance has so far shown little interest in doing as the west requests, why should we assume that it would be prepared to abandon its military gains for a "broad-based" political settlement? Countless comparisons to the outcome in Serbia have been made, as if this somehow offers proof that armed intervention leads inexorably to democracy. But Serbia, unlike Afghanistan, already possessed a mature democracy movement. Where is the Afghan equivalent? Where are the moderate leaders with whom the west wants to replace the Taliban? Who among all the named credible candidates does not have blood on his hands? And will the fiercely independent Afghans accept the writ of the UN? Or, given that both Russia and the west have strategic and energy interests in central Asia, will it come to be seen in the same light as the Soviet occupation?
Will the advance of the Northern Alliance save people who are at risk of famine in Afghanistan? It will almost certainly save some of them. Much more aid is now entering the areas which have come under Northern Alliance control, though, like the retreating Taliban, the Alliance fighters have been looting supplies and commandeering UN vehicles. But for thousands the help is likely to have arrived too late. The interruption of supplies during the eight weeks in which they should have been stockpiled for the winter means that many of those living in the valleys made inaccessible by snow will die before they can be reached.
Will it lead to the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden? Possibly. Will it free the world from terrorism? No. Will it deliver regional or global security? Probably not. The Northern Alliance's gains represented a bounty for Russia and a blow for Pakistan, whose government is now facing a far graver test in victory than it would have faced in defeat. Even in Britain, a new poll by the Today programme shows 80% of Muslims opposed to the west's war.
But, as well as asking what this war has done to Asia, we must also ask what it has done to us. And here, it seems to me, the bugles sounding victory for civilised values are also sounding a retreat.
The first and most obvious loss is our repudiation of the very basis of civilisation: human rights. The new terrorism bills in America and Britain have required the suspension of both the US constitution and the UK's human rights act - it seems that in trying to shut the terrorists out, we have merely imprisoned ourselves.
One of the last smart bombs deployed in Kabul destroyed the offices of al-Jazeera, the only truly independent major television station in the Arab world. Al-Jazeera has consistently provided a voice for Muslims opposed to US military intervention in Afghanistan, as well as airing Bin Laden's inflammatory videos. A few weeks ago Colin Powell sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to close it down, without success. Its destruction suggests that free speech and dissent have now joined terrorism as the business of "evil-doers".
The second loss to the west is the triumph of war-war over jaw-jaw. The partial victory in Afghanistan appears to have convinced both governments and commentators that we can blast our way to world peace. No serious attempt was made, before the bombing began, to differentiate between just and unjust war. Justice in war, as almost every philosopher since Thomas Aquinas onwards agrees, requires that the peaceful alternatives should first have been exhausted. There is plenty to suggest that the initial aim - to capture Bin Laden - could have been achieved without recourse to arms. The Taliban twice offered to hand him over on receipt of evidence pointing to his guilt: a much lower barrier to extradition than western governments would have raised. We appear to have made no attempt to discover whether or not they could have been taken at their word. Now justice appears to have been redefined as success, and war as the only route to peace.
This new triumphalism is sliding effortlessly into a new imperialism. It conflates armed and ethical success, munitions and morality. If this is a victory for civilisation, I would hate to see what defeat looks like.