A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil
George Monbiot
Tuesday October 23, 2001
The Guardian
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here," Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the first world war ended, "that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.
The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.
Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.
Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.
As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.
For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul.
Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.
But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.
American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.
If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.
We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the US government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naïve to believe that this is all it is doing.
Insult and injury in Afghanistan
America’s ill-conceived war on terror
By Arundhati Roy
SPECIAL TO MSNBC.COM
NEW DELHI, Oct. 20 — As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Oct. 7, the U.S. 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.
THE UN, REDUCED now to an ineffective acronym, wasn’t even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, “The U.S. acts multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it must.”) The “evidence” against the terrorists was shared among 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.
BLIND PURSUIT
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 recognized 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.
People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed.
Governments molt 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. 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 spiraling 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 Sept. 11th 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 favorite 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.
THEORY AND PRACTICE
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 U.S. 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 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 worshiped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn’t in the same league.
LEGACY OF WAR
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 forties. 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 brutalize women, they don’t seem to know what else to do with them. Years of war has 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.
POUNDED TO DUST
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, U.S. 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, U.S. Defense 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 U.S. Defense 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?)
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 to the hungry. Not both.
A CYNICAL ALMS RACE
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 500,000 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 land mines. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 ever find it in themselves 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 that only the rich are entitled to?
WHERE WILL IT LEAD?
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.
This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage on Sept. 11th 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?
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).
BURGEONING ANGER
Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world.
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.
To a distraught, confused American 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 Civilizations” 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?
(Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. She is the author of “The God of Small Things,” for which she received the Booker Prize, and “The Cost of Living.” Her latest book is “Power Politics,” published by South End Press. Roy lives in New Delhi)
Robert Fisk: As the refugees crowd the borders, we'll be blaming someone else
'It is palpably evident that they are not fleeing the Taliban but our bombs and missiles'
23 October 2001
Mullah Mohammed Omar's 10-year-old son is dead. He was, according to Afghan refugees fleeing Kandahar, taken to one of the city's broken hospitals by his father, the Taliban leader and "Emir of the Faithful", but the boy – apparently travelling in Omar's car when it was attacked by US aircraft – died of his wounds.
No regrets, of course. Back in 1985, when American aircraft bombed Libya, they also destroyed the life of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's six-year-old adopted daughter. No regrets, of course. In 1992, when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made Apache helicopter fired an American-made missile into the car of Said Abbas Moussawi, head of the Hizbollah guerrilla army in Lebanon, the Israeli pilot also killed Moussawi's 10-year-old. No regrets, of course.
Whether these children deserved their deaths, be sure that their fathers – in our eyes – were to blame. Live by the sword, die by the sword – and that goes for the kids too. Back in 1991, The Independent revealed that American Gulf War military targets included "secure" bunkers in which members of Saddam Hussein's family – or the families of his henchmen – were believed to be hiding. That's how the Americans managed to slaughter well over 300 people in an air raid shelter at Amariya in Baghdad. No Saddam kids, just civilians. Too bad. I wonder – now that President George Bush has given permission to the CIA to murder Osama bin Laden – if the same policy applies today?
And so the casualties begin to mount. From Kandahar come ever more frightful stories of civilians buried under ruins, of children torn to pieces by American bombs. The Taliban – and here the Americans must breathe a collective sigh of relief – refuse to allow Western journalists to enter the country to verify these reports. So when a few television crews were able to find 18 fresh graves in the devastated village of Khorum outside Jalalabad just over a week ago, the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could ridicule the deaths as "ridiculous". But not, I suspect, for much longer.
For if each of our wars for infinite justice and eternal freedom have a familiar trade mark – the military claptrap about air superiority, suppression of "command and control centres", radar capabilities – each has an awkward, highly exclusive little twist to it. In 1999, Nato claimed it was waging war to put Kosovo Albanian refugees back in their homes – even though most of the refugees were still in their homes when the war began. Our bombing of Serbia led directly to their dispossession. We bear a heavy burden of responsibility for their suffering – since the Serbs had told us what they would do if Nato opened hostilities – although the ultimate blame for their "ethnic cleansing'' clearly belonged to Slobodan Milosevic.
But Nato's escape clause won't work this time round. For as the Afghan refugees turn up in their thousands at the border, it is palpably evident that they are fleeing not the Taliban but our bombs and missiles. The Taliban is not ethnically cleansing its own Pashtun population. The refugees speak vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fall on their cities. These people are terrified of our "war on terror'', victims as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Centre on 11 September. So where do we stop?
It's an important question because, once the winter storms breeze down the mountain gorges of Afghanistan, a tragedy is likely to commence, one which no spin doctor or propaganda expert will be able to divert. We'll say that the thousands about to die or who are dying of starvation and cold are victims of the Taliban's intransigence or the Taliban's support for "terrorism" or the Taliban's propensity to steal humanitarian supplies.
I have to admit – having been weaned on Israel's promiscuous use of the word "terror" every time a Palestinian throws a stone at his occupiers – that I find the very word "terrorism" increasingly mendacious as well as racist. Of course – despite the slavish use of the phrase "war on terrorism" on the BBC and CNN – it is nothing of the kind. We are not planning to attack Tamil Tiger suicide bombers or Eta killers or Real IRA murderers or Kurdish KDP guerrillas. Indeed, the US has spent a lot of time supporting terrorists in Latin America – the Contras spring to mind – not to mention the rabble we are now bombing in Afghanistan. This is, as I've said before, a war on America's enemies. Increasingly, as the date of 11 September acquires iconic status, we are retaliating for the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington. But we're not setting up any tribunals to try those responsible.
The figure of 6,000 remains as awesome as it did in the days that followed. But what happens when the deaths for which we are responsible begin to approach the same figure? Refugees have been telling me on the Pakistan border that the death toll from our bombings in Afghanistan is in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds. Once the UN agencies give us details of the starving and the destitute who are dying in their flight from our bombs, it won't take long to reach 6,000. Will that be enough? Will 12,000 dead Afghans appease us, albeit that they have nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden? Or 24,000? If we think we know what our aims are in this fraudulent "war against terror", have we any idea of proportion?
Sure, we'll blame the Taliban for future tragedies. Just as we've been blaming them for drug exports from Afghanistan. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the Taliban-drug linkage. And all we have to do to believe this is to forget the UN Drug Control Programme's announcement last week that opium production in Afghanistan has fallen by 94 per cent, chiefly due to Mullah Omar's prohibition in Taliban-controlled areas. Most of Afghanistan's current opium production comes – you've guessed it – from our friends in the Northern Alliance.
This particular war is, as Mr Bush said, going to be "unlike any other" – but not in quite the way he thinks. It's not going to lead to justice. Or freedom. It's likely to culminate in deaths that will diminish in magnitude even the crime against humanity on 11 September. Do we have any plans for this? Can we turn the falsity of a "war against terror" into a war against famine and starvation and death, even at the cost of postponing our day of reckoning with Osama bin Laden? (The Independent Argument)
Showing the Middle East our true colors
By Michael Kelly
WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP
First published: Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Because this war was forced on us, and because it has brought us death and fear, it is natural to see this moment only in terms of painful burden. It is that, but it is also one of extraordinary opportunity.
The best-case scenario is, in the short term, victory. Short-term victory means the destruction of al-Qaida, the defeat of the Taliban and the establishment of a government in Afghanistan that is not hostile to the U.S. It means accomplishing these goals without creating an environment that leads to ancillary disaster, notably the takeover in Pakistan and or Saudi Arabia by radical anti-American Islamicists.
This is a result that is not guaranteed. The early indications in Afghanistan all augur well. The U.S. campaign, largely waged from the air, appears well on the way to destroying much of the Taliban's military infrastructure. With its command centers, its airplanes, its tanks, forts and artillery wrecked, the Taliban may well fall to the forces of the rebel Northern Alliance. The odds of success here are enhanced by the reports of significant defections from the Taliban ranks.
And, so far, ancillary disaster does not seem to loom. While there have been fairly widespread demonstrations against the United States throughout the Middle East and even into the Far East, there have not been (yet, at least) any signs of popular unrest sufficient to cause the toppling of any regime.
Cassandras see a victory in Afghanistan as a defeat in waiting. Look, they say, at what happened to the Russians when they tried to run that place with a puppet government. But here is exactly where the opportunity for a transformative moment occurs: The United States is not the Soviet Union.
It is not an imperial or colonial power; it has no desire (because its people have no desire) to conquer Afghanistan, to occupy it, to own it by proxy. It simply wants Afghanistan to be run by people who will not use it as a base for terror against the United States. It is perfectly content, after that, to let Afghanistan do with itself what it will -- indeed to help Afghanistan.
The Afghans don't know this, of course, and neither do a lot of other people in the Middle East. The idea of the United States as Europe came to know it -- a great power that was also a good power; a liberator and a protector but not a conqueror or an occupier -- is news still to much of the Eastern world. (For that matter, it is news still to many on the left in the Western world.) Bernard Lewis, the great Islamic scholar and author, argues that, generally speaking, the United States is seen in the Middle East in terms of a continuum that stretches back through several hundred years as just the latest in a series of Western, white, Christian powers (France, Britain, now America) whose interests in the region were materialistic and imperialistic.
In this view, America's interest in the affairs of Arabic and Islamic states is (like the European colonial powers) entirely selfish and corrupt, and the proof of this may be found in America's support for selfish and corrupt regimes, notably Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. America (again, like the Europeans) is chronically duplicitous, always willing to betray trusts and allies as its interests shift. And finally, in this view, America is a paper tiger; technologically superior but at bottom cowardly, and thus in the end susceptible to defeat by a more courageous foe.
Lewis believes that the United States had one great chance to show the Middle East that it was different: the Gulf War. Here, America had an opportunity to rescue a captive people -- not the Kuwaitis but the Iraqis -- from a terrible and much-hated regime. In failing to do this, and in the process shamefully betraying the Kurdish and Shiite Iraqis whom it had encouraged to rebel, the United States confirmed the Middle Eastern long view.
The battle of Afghanistan gives America a rare second chance. Start with the radical assumption that Afghans do not like starving in poverty under the rule of psychopaths. What would happen if the United States made it possible for them to live, not under American rule, but under a sane self-rule, with material assistance from this nation? What would happen, in short, if the United States rescued the Afghans?
What could happen is the beginning of changing short-term victory to long-term victory. Long-term victory for the United States lies in convincing the people of the Middle East of the great and simple truth: America is not the Britain of old; it is not the France of old; it is different. We have a shot at that here.
Faith and science seek higher ground
Scientists with an appreciation of the spiritual issue
a call for faith and science to join forces for peace
By Philip Clayton
SPECIAL TO MSNBC.COM
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 24 — On Sept. 11, the world witnessed acts of high-tech terrorism in which religion and science met in a marriage of death and destruction. Taking a lesson from those horrific events, scholars from around the world concluded a meeting at Harvard University this week with a call for a new alliance between science and the spiritual in the interest of peace.
THE VERY IDEA of attending an international conference on science and religion — at Harvard, of all places — struck me at first as an ill-fitting notion. These days, I barely have time to think of anything more significant than grading my students’ papers or finding a parking spot in Boston. When there is a bit of energy to raise my eyes up from the sidewalk, I find myself picturing jet airliners crashing through the windows of the Prudential Tower as it sparkles in the sun across the Charles River.
RELIGION AND HATRED
I know academics are supposed to think about The Big Questions. And like just about everyone else, I am exhausted enough reading the morning paper, preoccupied with thinking about tens of thousands of U.S. troops waiting to be airdropped into Afghanistan. It just isn’t a good time for cosmic questions.
But I was wrong. The Harvard conference hit right where many of our Sept. 11 questions reside: It’s that spot just above the lower rib that has ached with a constant dull pain since we gasped “Oh, my God” and watched the first World Trade Center tower collapse upon itself. Actually, “Oh, my God” already expressed the question, though we didn’t realize it at that time: How could God allow so much death, so much suffering? And what are we now to say about belief in God — and religion in general — when it becomes the motivation behind such great acts of hatred?
This was the first scholarly gathering on science and religion since the bombings. It was part of an ongoing project called “Science and the Spiritual Quest,” which brings together leading scientists from all over the world. Each speaker represented one of the world’s religious traditions. And each was trying to understand both how their religion impacts their science, and how their science might have a positive effect on their religious belief.
It’s a good question. A lot of us want to know whether science and religion can share a bedroom in domestic tranquility, or whether they’ll keep throwing pots and pans at each other until one of them has to move out into the cold. But is this question relevant today? The history of our century was remade only 43 days ago and, like most Americans, I watched the chilling event. Live. If the “Science and the Spiritual Quest” summit meeting couldn’t speak to what we’re seeing on TV, the speakers weren’t going to get my attention.
HURT OR HEAL?
They did. First, they stated our New Big Question right at the outset. Is religion intrinsically a force for hatred, intolerance, warfare? Or do the world’s religions also have the potential to heal, to smooth breaks between nations, to contribute to world peace?
Harvard conferences aren’t famous for being simple. But here, in plain text, is the almost unanimous answer that leading religious scientists from around the world gave to those two baffling questions. I paraphrase:
To be honest, the ambiguities lie not only in religion, but also in science. We scientists have developed the weapons for terrorism and war. So we must ask: Is science intrinsically a force for war? Or can something in the mindset of science also move humans beyond sectarian violence? Can science help us to be a less warlike species?
We believe that a new partnership between science and religion is necessary after Sept. 11. We believe that scientific training and religious conviction represent positive forces in the human species, and that they can augment each other as forces for peace. The world’s religious traditions at their core (but not in their perversions) can bring to science a higher calling, a sensitivity to the needs of humans and other living things. Science can bring a spirit of open inquiry — the willingness to change even cherished opinions in the search for truth — that will help counter religious dogmatism and fundamentalism. We agree that Sept. 11 represented an evil alliance of lethal technology and religious fanaticism. But we, the scientists at the SSQ summit meeting, commit ourselves to using our religious faith and our scientific mindset as tools for peace.
UNITY AND TRUTH
Interestingly, it was a Muslim scientist who said it most powerfully. Bruno Guiderdoni, director of the Islamic Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris, is both a leading astrophysicist and an expert on the great tradition of Islamic philosophy. As the sun set over Harvard Yard, and the brightly lit steeple of Memorial Church shone above the university, he concluded the televised portion of the conference with the words, “Scientists can help us to see the unity that underlies all Truth. By their very nature, both science and belief in God must be forces for wholeness and not for fragmentation.”
It’s a powerful message — one that needs to be trumpeted from the rooftops. Tell it to your kids, tell your friends, and tell every political leader you know. Something far more important is afoot in science and religion than feuding about evolution and creation.
It’s the most powerful message I’ve heard yet in response to Sept. 11.
(Philip Clayton is visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School and author of “God and Contemporary Science.” Further information on “Science and the Spiritual Quest” is available at www.ssq.net.)