Slaughter of the innocent bolsters view that this is war against Islam

Robert Fisk: Slaughter of the innocent bolsters view that this is war against Islam
15 October 2001

In Baghdad we had the bunker where our missile fried more than 300 people to death. In Kosovo we had a refugee column torn to pieces by our bombs. Now in Afghanistan, a village called Karam is our latest massacre.
Of course it's time for that tame old word "regret". We regretted the Baghdad bunker. We were really very sorry for the refugee slaughter in Kosovo. Now we are regretting the bomb that went astray in Kabul on Friday night; the missile that killed the four UN mine clearers last Monday; and whatever hit Karam.
It's always the same story. We start shooting with "smart" weapons after our journalists and generals have told us of their sophistication. Their press conferences produce monochrome snapshots of bloodless airbase runways with little holes sprinkled across the apron. "A successful night," they used to say, after bombing Serbia.
They said that again last week and no one " until of course we splatter civilians " suggests going to war involves killing innocent people. It does. That is why the military invented that repulsive and morally shameful phrase "collateral damage". And they are always ready to smear the reporters on the ground.
At first, Nato claimed its aircraft had not butchered the refugee convoy in April 1999. Once we found the bomb parts, with US markings, they changed their tune.
The new tune went like this: "If we killed the innocent we regret it, but why don't the reporters 'break free' of their Serb minders and see what else is going on in Kosovo?" We might be asked the same again, now we are involved in what, historically, is for us in Britain the Fourth Afghan War. What are we journalists doing giving succour to Mr bin Laden and his thugs?
There is one big difference this time round. In 1991, we had a real Muslim coalition on our side. In 1999, we so bestialised the Serbs that the death of their innocent civilians could be laid at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic, and anyway " in theory at least " we were trying to save the Albanian Muslims.
No doubt some idiot general will tell us this time round that Karam is Mr bin Laden's fault -- idiot, because this is not going to wash with the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who are outraged at our air strikes on Afghanistan.
And here's the rub. In every Middle Eastern country, even tolerant Lebanon, suspicion is growing that this is a war against Islam.
That is why the Arab leaders are mostly silent and why the Saudis don't want to help us. That is why crowds tried yesterday to storm a Pakistani airbase used by the American forces.
It reveals a dislocation of thought among Arabs about the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington, a disturbing disconnection that allows them to condemn the atrocities in America without reference to America's response -- and condemn the response without reflecting on the carnage on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Muslim world now sees innocent Muslims who have died in Western air strikes on Afghanistan. If Karam turns out to be as terrible as the Taliban claims, all of Mr Blair's lectures and denials that this is a religious war will be in vain.
The Prime Minister can now only reflect upon the irony that an obscurantist sect that smashes television sets and hangs videotapes from trees is now using television and videotape for its own propaganda. (The Indpendent)

Tariq Ali: Yes, there is an effective alternative to the bombing of Afghanistan 'A lesson could have been learnt from Israel's patient stalking, capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann'
15 October 2001

Over the past decade or so, every war fought by the West (in the Gulf, the Balkans and now South Asia) has been accompanied by a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign. Politics is conducted and presented in the style of intelligence agencies: disinformation, exaggeration of enemy strength and capability, explanation of a television image with a brazen lie and censorship. The aim is to delude and disarm the citizenry. Everything is either over-simplified or reduced to a wearisome incomprehensibility. The message is simple. There is no alternative.
As the bombing of Afghanistan continues for the second week, the Pentagon has admitted that some bombs went astray. Two hundred Afghan civilians have been killed so far and more will die if the bombs continue to fall. During the lull before the war, the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, mused in public as to whether Afghanistan had any "assets worth bombing". He knew the answer. The fact is that the Anglo-American bombing campaign is in clear breach of Articles 48 and 51 of the Geneva Convention as well as the Nuremberg Charter. Article 48 insists that: "In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives."
Article 51 is equally clear in prohibiting indiscriminate attacks and specifies these as attacks "which may be expected to cause incidental loss of a civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated".
Was there ever an alternative to the bombing? If the real intention was not a crude war of revenge, but to seriously weaken and eliminate terrorism and bring to trial those who ordered the crimes committed on 11 September, then the answer is yes. The disproportionality of what is taking place speaks for itself. If the US judiciary was convinced by the evidence of Mr bin Laden's guilt then a warrant should have been issued for his extradition and a plan prepared to bring him to trial.
A lesson could have been learnt from Israel's patient stalking, capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann who was accused of a far more serious crime. In going to war, Bush and Blair resorted to a mixture of cowboy discourse and Old Testament imagery to pre-empt any judicial inquiry or action. The model so far has been that of the old lynch-mob, egged on by a populace fed on a regular diet of scare stories. Anthrax today and, no doubt, nuclear briefcases tomorrow.
If the real aim is simply an old-fashioned imperialist one, i.e. to topple the Taliban regime and replace it with a protectorate considered closer to "Western values" (as the Taliban once was), then and only then does the bombing make sense as the Northern Alliance, waiting to commence the battle for Kabul, realise full well. Its leaders boast they can do it alone, but US marines and British commandos are standing by to help them just in case the Taliban defeat them as they did once before.
Meanwhile, there is no news of the pretext for this war. Where is Osama bin Laden? Is his capture part two of this operation? And if he is caught will he be killed or brought to trial? And, if so, will this entire exercise have helped to diminish the attraction for, let alone help to defeat terrorism? I think the result will be the exact opposite and especially in the Arab and Muslim world.
Neither George Bush nor Tony Blair appear to appreciate that, like it or not, Mr bin Laden has become a hero in many parts of the Third World. Young, middle-class graduates in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Maghreb will make sure that his martyrdom will not be in vain. Only last week, President Bush told journalists: "How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I'll tell you how I respond. I'm amazed. I just can't believe it because I know how good we are."
Mr Blair, his military confederate, had another solution: "One thing becoming increasingly clear to me is the need to upgrade our media and public opinion operations in the Arab and Muslim world." The simplicity on display is frightening. Surely the mandarins in the State Department and Foreign Office are aware of the realities. They must know that the medium-term solution is political and economic, not military.
Unless the Palestinians are guaranteed a viable, sovereign state, there will be no peace. Mr Arafat may be content with the shrivelled little Bantustans at Israeli pleasure, but the Palestinian population is not. The latest intifada is also a revolt against the Oslo Accords and the corruption of the Palestinian leadership.
Then there is Iraq. Not a single one of the standard arguments for the continuing bombardment and blockade of Iraq stands up. The notion that Saddam's cruelties are unique is an abject fiction. The Turkish Generals, valued members of Nato, have killed 30,000 Kurds over the past decade and denied them the use of their own language. Responsible modernity? Saddam never attempted a cultural annihilation of this order. The Saudi Kingdom makes not even a pretence of human rights, its treatment of women would not pass muster in medieval Russia. As for nuclear weapons, the hawkish Unscom inspector, Scott Ritter, insists they cannot be countenanced. Israel, however, possesses nuclear weapons without any sanctions whatsoever.
Double standards of this sort and on this scale drive young people to despair. Here is an immediate solution. The lifting of sanctions and a permanent halt to the bombing of Iraq would have a positive impact throughout the world of Islam, reducing the number of young men prepared to sacrifice their own lives for what they regard as a holy cause. It would be a small step forward if, as US and British jets are dispatched for yet another bombing raid on a the shattered and famished remnant of Afghanistan, a few of our political leaders spoke up in the name of reason.
The writer's novel, 'The Stone Woman', is published in paperback by Verso this month

Robert Fisk: 'Will a few holes in the runway of Kandahar airport make a difference?'
14 October 2001

How kind of the Americans to suspend bombing on Fridays. Will it, I wonder, be halted on all Muslim sabbaths? For the festival that marks the ascent of the Prophet Mohamed to Heaven? For Ramadan?
Do not think these comments cynical. I just began to wonder -- once General Richard Myers obliged the Muslims of Afghanistan by suspending war on Fridays -- whether this war was serious or not. What did we think we were doing by emphasising our affection for Islam in the middle of bombing Afghanistan?
This is not the only way we are fooling ourselves. When we opened our air bombardment of Afghanistan, we went straight into Kosovo mode. We were, so we were told, going to attack ground to air defences, command and control centres and achieve total "air superiority''. Forget the fact that the Taliban have already taken Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages, that scarcely any of their 20 clapped-out Mig-21s can fly, that they probably wouldn't know the difference between a command and control centre and a dustbin. In just a few short hours last week, we turned the Taliban into the Serbs.
True, we bombed Osama bin Laden's camps. I bet we did. There would have been no difficulty in spotting their location because, of course, most of them were built by the CIA when Mr bin Laden and his men were the good guys -- although this salient fact oddly eluded the generals when they came to tell us what they had bombed.
But do we really believe that punching holes into the runway of Kandahar airport is going to have any military effect on men who smash televisions and hang videotapes from trees? Do we think that blowing up fuel dumps is going to stop bearded men from shooting at us in the mountains? If the equally bloody men of the Northern Alliance are to be our foot soldiers, do we intend -- once they reach the ruins of Kabul -- to allow them to return to their good old days of rape and looting? Or are we going to send in the Americans and the British to capture the cities -- which is exactly what the Russians did in 1980 -- and leave the mountains to the bad guys?
We've been making much of the Mountain Division recently, supposedly poised in Uzbekistan. But poised to do what? The only conceivable military tactic that might work for us " that is, if we still remember we're after Mr bin Laden, not the destruction of the ruins of Afghanistan " would be to slice off bits of the country, one at a time, for search missions. But anyone who has visited Afghanistan knows how awesome that task would be. A journey down the Kabul Gorge with its towering, sheer peaks and freezing rivers, suggests that the Mountain Division would have to spend years picking its way through the rocks.
And all the while, a humanitarian catastrophe is growing closer. Can our soldiers fight their way across a country teeming with starving, emaciated people, distributing ration packs along with cheerful requests for information on the whereabouts of Mr bin Laden. How are we to concentrate on retribution for 11 September when armies of Afghan civilians are appealing for us to save their lives?
Even if we find Mr bin Laden and his men, are we then just going to allow Afghanistan to rot back into the muck, its people dying of hunger and landmines? It's only a matter of time before the clerks of Pakistan accuse the West of responsibility for the humanitarian tragedy about to occur – and the worst thing is that they may be partly right.
I'm struck by what President Bush said last week; that this could last weeks, months, even a decade. I wonder how many Afghans will be left alive in 10 years' time to appreciate the respect we showed them by not bombing on Fridays.

COMMENTARY
Bin Laden Types Soften With Legitimacy

By MICHAEL HECHTER, Michael Hechter, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington, is author of "Containing Nationalism" (Oxford University Press, 2000)

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans were shocked to learn how deeply our government is hated in some parts of the world. Most also fear the type of Islamic state--based on the puritanical and strict strain of Islam known as Wahhabism--that many in the Middle East apparently dream of creating.

But suppose revolutionaries succeeded in establishing a fundamentalist regime in one or more Middle Eastern states, as almost happened in Algeria. Would this be a disaster for the U.S.?

Not necessarily. To understand why, we must also understand why so many Muslims find this dream attractive. Look closely at Osama bin Laden's image, and you see no cleric, no mullah. The camouflage fatigues and automatic rifle at hand recall no one more than Che Guevara.

Bin Laden wants to be the Guevara of the Islamic world.

As all revolutionaries do, he speaks about injustice and oppression. Many Middle Eastern countries have not fared well in the capitalist world system. Their economies are feeble, their political regimes undemocratic, their leaders contemptuous of the wishes and desires of the masses.

In the absence of any realistic alternatives, it is not so difficult to convince these masses that an Islamic regime might better serve their interests.

Iran is the closest example of such a regime. There, a fundamentalist-led revolution unseated the U.S.-backed shah. As a result, the U.S. lost political influence and markets for our goods, especially armaments.

What would be the likely implications of a Wahhabi regime in the Middle East for our two greatest current concerns: international terrorism and oil?

Consider international terrorism. Would such a regime expose us to an increased risk of terrorism? In fact, there is good reason to expect that the terrorist threat would be decreased.

Bin Laden is particularly dangerous because he is a roving bandit. His whereabouts are mysterious and subject to change. Give someone like him a government, and two things would happen. His regime would be forced to become at least somewhat accountable to his supporters. He would have to deliver the goods, or an opposition would brew against him. He also would become stationary. That means we would know how to get to him.

What about the implications for oil, the geopolitical issue that has always loomed largest in the Middle East?

Here, too, the easy answer may be wrong.

Since the supply of oil is essential to the world economy, we fear that a fundamentalist regime (say, in Saudi Arabia) might cut off that supply, thus crippling the global economy. But to what end? All governments are revenue mongers, and the revenue from oil exports are as green as tax receipts and far easier to extract. Iran happens to be a member in good standing of OPEC.

In short, economic realities are just as likely to dictate oil policy in a fundamentalist regime as it would in a secular Islamic one.

U.S. foreign policy has long been inconsistent, especially in the Middle East. Apart from its steadfast support of Israel, our government also extends its embrace to "friendly" Islamic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf, among others.

Although our leaders continually proclaim that dedication to democracy and self-determination is the linchpin of our national interest, Israel is the only country in the region that meets these criteria.

We should not let our antipathy to Islamic fundamentalism trump our commitment to self-determination. To defeat the Bin Ladens of the world, we should pay greater heed to our own rhetoric.

First shots in the propaganda war

by:Carolyn Lochhead

FORGET THE CAVES of Afghanistan. The two biggest fronts in this war are right here, within our own politically correct souls and our own precious health-conscious bodies.
At baby showers in Georgetown, conversation among the educated elite turns to gas masks and anthrax vaccines and openly contemplates such horrors as a move to Bethesda, until it is agreed that Bethesda might not be spared from a nuclear hit on downtown Washington.
Forget secondhand smoke. Anti-oxidants don't work too well against chemical weapons. Osama bin Laden knows how to scare us.
Then, there's that propaganda thing he does, which was supposed to be the stuff that comes out of the Bush White House. Propaganda sounds so archaic, like some kind of weird throwback to Norman Rockwell, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. We wince at those quaint value judgments and are loath to get near them again.
But now Osama calls us infidels. And says President Bush is the leader of the infidels. We didn't even know he was our leader until all this happened. And how can anyone who listens to NPR on a regular basis be an infidel?
Osama gets his tape replayed more often than a Gary Condit news-break on MSNBC. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice suggests that repeated airing of propaganda may not count as news either. Did Joseph Goebbels mainline the U.S. media with his calls to exterminate the Jews? Would he have won more converts if he had? How about a Larry King exclusive with one-eyed Taliban chief Mohammed Omar?
Osama is one sharp guy. He looks and talks like a prophet, and millions of the poor and ignorant think he is one. He's turned the opiate of the masses into crack cocaine.
For us, though, that kind of thing was supposed to have ended sometime around the Middle Ages. Religion is not something a secular society, especially a decadent one, deals with very well. It seems just a little bit gauche to call Osama a terrorist. That would imply a value judgment.
Yet propaganda may prove pivotal in a war that pits a fanatical perversion of Islam against Western civilization.
Can Western civilization defend itself? We don't even like to talk about such a thing anymore, much less defend it. Moral relativism is our religion, cynicism our gospel, guilt our communion.
Notice how clever Osama was to bring up the fact that we nuked Japan. The Americans "came out to fight Islam in the name of fighting terrorism," Osama said. "People at the end of the world, in Japan, hundreds of thousands of people got killed. This is not our crime."
Even the generals admit that Osama is winning the propaganda war.
"It's correct that in the opening phases of the first battle of the first war of the 21st century, we're losing," said General Ron Fogelman, former Air Force chief of staff. "We see this murderer with a pretaped sequence of releases who seizes the initiative."
It was no accident that Bush asked American children each to donate $1 to an Afghan children's fund. The administration hopes to counter our bad image by summoning and displaying the best of our values.
But that assumes we can stifle our own snickering.
"The children in Afghanistan have been suffering for over 20 years," said Barbara Lubin, director of the Middle East Children's Alliance. "It is cynical for President Bush to ask American school children to each send $1 to the White House to help them while our government is bombing their country day and night."

U.S. Sent Guns to bin Laden in 1980s

By D. IAN HOPPER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - More than a decade ago, the U.S. government sent 25 high-powered sniper rifles to a group of Muslim fighters in Afghanistan that included Osama bin Laden, according to court testimony and the guns' maker.
The rifles, made by Barrett Firearms Manufacturing Inc. of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and paid for by the government, were shipped during the collaboration between the United States and Muslims then fighting to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
Experts doubt the weapons could still be used, but the transaction further accentuates how Americans are fighting an enemy that U.S. officials once supported and liberally armed.
In a trial early this year of suspects in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, Essam Al-Ridi, identified as a former pilot for bin Laden, said he shipped the weapons in 1989 to Sheik Abdallah Azzam, bin Laden's ideological mentor. The weapons had range-finding equipment and night-vision scopes.
During the late 1980s, the United States supplied arms worth $500 million a year to anti-Soviet fighters including Afghanistan's current Taliban rulers, bin Laden and others. The supplies included a range of weapons from small arms to shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
Al-Ridi, an American citizen born in Egypt, testified that Azzam liked the rifles because they could be ``carried by individuals so it's made in such a way where you could have a heavy cannon but mobile by an individual.''
While in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Al-Ridi said he saw bin Laden several times with Azzam.
Ronnie Barrett, president of Barrett Firearms, likened sale of the .50-caliber armor-piercing rifles to the supply of the Stinger surface-to-air missiles given to anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan.
``Barrett rifles were picked up by U.S. government trucks, shipped to U.S. government bases and shipped to those Afghan freedom fighters,'' Barrett said.
The sale was publicized by the Violence Policy Center, gun-control advocates who want for more restrictions on the sale of high-powered weapons such as the specialized Barrett exports.
``These .50-caliber sniper rifles are ideal tools for terror and assassination,'' VPC analyst Tom Diaz said.
Firearms expert Charles Cutshaw of Jane's Information Group said he was more worried about the Stingers than long-range sniper rifles.
``It seems to me that there are easier ways for a terrorist to get at a high-value target than this,'' Cutshaw said. ``If they wanted to bring down an aircraft, the best way would be to bring it down with a Stinger.'' Guerrillas using Stingers were credited with shooting down more than 270 Soviet aircraft.
Cutshaw said the sniper rifles are ``sort of overkill'' for shooting people; more appropriate targets would be vehicles or fuel tanks. But the Irish Republican Army used the weapon to kill 10 British soldiers and policemen patrolling the Northern Ireland border in the 1990s.
The rifles could be used only with U.S.-made ammunition, but such ammunition can be obtained in neighboring Pakistan, Cutshaw said.
The Barrett rifles sold for $5,000 to $6,000 each, and both Barrett and Cutshaw had doubts they would still work due to dust and a lack of spare parts.
But the rifles could be functional if they have been kept in storage since the purchase, Barrett said. The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan months after the rifles were sold.
``If it's not used, it could work,'' Barrett said. ``Age will not bother the gun, just usage.''

US accused of bombing Red Cross warehouse

Taliban claim civilian toll has reached 300

Luke Harding in Islamabad
Wednesday October 17, 2001
The Guardian

The United States appeared to have committed another blunder in its military campaign against Afghanistan last night after two missiles landed on a warehouse in Kabul run by the the Red Cross.
Furious workers for the aid group in Pakistan said that the building had a red cross painted on its roof and was clearly a civilian facility. Rescue workers and Afghan employees tackled the blaze with fire extinguishers but said at least 35% of the food in the warehouse and other equipment had been destroyed.

"It is definitely a civilian target. In addition to that, it is a clearly marked ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] warehouse," said Robert Moni, the head of the ICRC delegation in Kabul, which has evacuated to Pakistan. "It is marked on the top with a red cross. People should take all necessary measures to avoid such things."

Last week an American missile hit a UN building belonging to a de-mining agency, killing four Afghan security guards. It had apparently been destined for a short-wave radio tower nearby.

At the weekend Pentagon officials admitted that a 2,000lb bomb had "inadvertently" ploughed into a hamlet two miles south of Kabul airport after defence personnel confused longitude and latitude and entered the wrong satellite coordinates. Four people died and eight were injured. The Taliban have claimed that at least 300 civilians have been killed in American and British strikes over the past nine days. The US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has dismissed the Taliban figures as "ridiculous". He said damage caused to the village of Karam in eastern Afghanistan - in which the Taliban say hundreds of villagers died - was caused after a missile struck a Taliban ammunition dump.

An Afghan Red Cross worker was slightly wounded by flying glass in yesterday's attack, witnesses said.

The Red Cross has already complained to the US embassy in Islamabad and its Geneva headquarters has complained formally to the UN mission there.

"We have to evaluate the damage and how it will affect our work," said Macarena Aguilar, a Red Cross spokeswoman in Geneva. "Of course we regret what has happened."

Two bombs landed on the warehouse compound, which is made up of five buildings. "One building was hit by two bombs," said Pascal Duport, the deputy head of Red Cross mission in Kabul. "A fire started and apparently the fire brigade got control of the fire."

He added: "Another building was touched by the fire but it was saved. It [the building hit] contained humanitarian assistance - wheat, oil, blankets and so on. We think it is only partially affected."

Earlier, al-Jazeera television claimed that a hospital in Afghanistan had been hit and up to five people had been killed, but there was no independent verification of this claim.