What promised to be a "different" kind of war targeting "terrorists" with pinpoint accuracy is turning into a bloody military campaign
By Osama El-Sherif, October 28, 2001
- If the United States is seeking to punish those who were responsible for the 11 September carnage in New York and Washington, then its war in Afghanistan is definitely off the mark.
What promised to be a "different" kind of war targeting terrorists with pinpoint accuracy is turning out to be a crude and bloody military campaign against a poor and backward country with civilians as the primary casualty.
US leaders have robbed their people of the moral high ground by unleashing a ruthless killing machine against the hapless Afghani people.
America's war in Afghanistan is desecrating the memory of those innocent thousands who perished in the World Trade Center tragedy because the war is being waged in their name.
War is ugly because more often than not it destroys the innocent, the young, the vulnerable and the poor. It is only after the fact that people discover the true and long-lasting tragedies of war; millions of displaced people, destruction of infrastructure and means of survival, civil strife and lawlessness, unraveling of social and cultural values and bonds... etc.
As the war against Afghanistan enters its third week international aid organizations are predicting that the combined effects of the bombings and the onset of winter threaten the lives of at least five million Afghanis who will be trapped in their own remote villages in uncompromising conditions.
America keeps telling the people of Afghanistan that it is indeed their friend. It drops food and flyers as well as bombs and missiles. Both are missing their targets. It is now evident that innocent civilians have been bombed and that not all those who need food are receiving it.
From the ground America appears as a potent but evil power to the starving and helpless people of Afghanistan. For that power to be dropping food and bombs it must look even crazy.
So far and after three weeks of unrelenting bombing we know very little about the damage that the "terrorist network" that allegedly masterminded and carried out the 11 September attacks had sustained.
But we know that at least three million Afghanis have been displaced and are now living in refugee camps in Pakistan. We know that another five million are starving and have no access to clean water or medical aid. We know that civilian deaths and injuries as a result of the strikes are in the thousands. Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Herat and other cities and towns in Afghanistan are in ruins facing a slow death. And yet the war is still in its opening chapters.
America wants to topple the rule of the Taliban and of course capture or destroy Osama Bin Laden. Both goals are elusive because both targets remain defiant and will fight until death.
As America and its allies muster a huge flotilla of ships and submarines from which they can launch jets and missiles to strike targets in Afghanistan, the question of what else is there to bomb becomes ironically valid. The absence of legitimate military targets has caused an unusual number of miss hits in such a short time.
Until now the US has successfully bombed hospitals, international aid storage facilities, UN employees working on de-mining the country, housing complexes, an entire village, few mud houses and tents. It has also bombed its own Northern Alliance. We fear that more bombings by mistake incidents are on their way with tragic consequences for innocent civilians.
President Bush has said that America's war is just and that Americans going to war were fighting for a noble cause. But he must be speaking about an entirely different war. What is happening in Afghanistan today puts every American, every nation and every citizen of this world to shame.
Editor's Note: Osama El-Sherif is the Chief Editor of arabia.com
Background horrifying facts:
October 23
VILLAGE BOMBING: At least 52 civilians were reportedly killed in bombing of Chakoor Kariz village, near Kandahar. Arabic TV news station Al Jazeera put the death toll at over 90 as it broadcasted a film of the victims of the attack in hospital in Kandahar.
October 22
HOSPITAL BOMBINGS: The United Nations said a US bomb struck a military hospital in a military compound in Herat, western Afghanistan. The US acknowledged a bomb went astray over the city and may have hit a home. The Taliban said a 100-bed civilian hospital in the city was destroyed by bombing, as well as a clinic.
MOSQUE: The UN reported that US bombs hit a mosque in a camp and a nearby village during attacks on the western Afghan city of Herat.
October 21
REFUGEE CONVOY: At least 20 civilians, including nine children, were killed when a bomb hit the tractor and trailer on which they were fleeing US attacks on the southern town of Tirin Kot, according to survivors of the attack now hospitalized in Pakistan. The Taliban reported two similar incidents near Kandahar and Jalalabad, both on October 17.
KABUL: A stray US bomb landed on the neighborhood of Parod Gajaded in the Khair Khana district of northeastern Kabul, killing 10 people, nine of them from the same extended family, witnesses told an AFP reporter who visited the scene shortly after the bombing.
October 18
KABUL: Five members of the same family were killed when six houses were destroyed by US bombs in the Kalae Zaman Khan area of Kabul, witnesses and relatives told AFP at the scene. An eight-year-old girl was killed in the eastern suburb of Macroyan. Other residential areas were struck the same day but casualties could not be confirmed.
October 16
RED CROSS WAREHOUSES: US bombs hit warehouses of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul, destroying supplies and injuring at least one worker. The compound had a large red cross on the roof. After a Red Cross protest, the US admitted dropping a 1,000-pound bomb close to the warehouse, claiming Taliban vehicles were in the area. A World Food Program warehouse in Kabul was also damaged in raids.
October 13
KABUL AIRPORT: A US bomb missed a target at Kabul airport and struck a nearby village, killing at least four people, according to witnesses. The Pentagon confirmed the bomb had gone off course due to a technical error.
October 11
VILLAGE BOMBING: At least 160 people were reported killed in Kadam, a remote mountain village near Jalalabad. AFP saw dozens of collapsed houses, one unexploded bomb and more than 18 fresh graves. But the numbers of dead could not be confirmed.
KABUL: Residents of a village near Kabul airport said a 12-year-old girl died when a bomb landed near her house, causing it to collapse.
October 9
KABUL: The office of a UN-backed de-mining agency in Kabul was bombed, killing four security guards. The US expressed regret following a UN protest (Arabia.com)
COMMENTARY
The New Imperialism
By Pepe Escobar
ISLAMABAD - Joseph Conrad was the first modern writer to fully understand that in extreme situations the distinctions and nuances between civilization and the "heart of darkness" collapse with a bang. Conrad showed how the sublime heights of European civilization could fall into the pit of the most barbarous practices - without any sort of preparation or transition (no wonder that Belgium still has not officially acknowledged the genocide of millions during King Leopold's possession of the Congo).
Now more than ever it is rewarding to re-read Conrad - and as an added bonus to watch Francis Ford Coppola's reading of Conrad in the recently released director's cut of Apocalypse Now. The New Afghan War increasingly runs the risk of being configured as The New Vietnam. Washington has said from the beginning this is not Gulf War II. But now, deeply frustrated because they are unable to break the Taliban - those medieval architects of a pan-Islamic utopia - the Pentagon is contemplating a Desert Storm-style invasion the next Afghan spring. This won't be Gulf War II: this will be Vietnam II.
Most of the Muslim world's uneducated masses suffer from political and social underdevelopment and extremely corrupt elites. Osama bin Laden capitalized on this dysfunction. Osama and the Al-Qaeda, in their warped world-view, would have the Muslim world believe that we are now facing a war between Islam and the West. It may come as a striking revelation that the West also has its hordes of fundamentalists, of the armchair kind - but although they don't resort to jet-turned-to-missile suicide squads, they are just as deadly.
When Samuel Huntington came up with his Clash of Civilizations reductionist classic in 1993, he relied heavily on The Roots of Muslim Rage, a 1990 essay by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Professor Edward Said, a most acute critic of Orientalists, has pointed out that neither Huntington nor Lewis were careful enough to examine the fact that "the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture". This goes way beyond a simplistic clash of cultures. Huntington's clash became a road map for American foreign policy because it is basically an ideology: a very handy ideology to fill the vacuum created by the end of the ideology-heavy Cold War.
We don't even have to invoke Freud and Nietzsche - as Said does - to realize that "there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe". Huntington's clash - although a dangerous warring ideology - must be ridiculed for what it is: mere defensive self-pride. As any urban youth in any world city can attest, the name of the game in the 21st century is interdependence: cultures are not monolithic, they interact in an orgy of cross-fertilization.
Bush the elder was wrong - or his formulation was ahead of his time. Not the Gulf War, but the Afghan War, fought by young Bush, is the preamble to a New World Order. The signs are already in print - and they are all offshoots of Huntington's clash.
An otherwise obscure opinion page editor of the Wall Street Journal is in favor of "colonization of wayward nations", including "the application of a dose of US imperialism". Not beating around the bush either, British historian Paul Johnson has also published in the Journal a piece titled "The Answer to Terrorism? Colonialism". The Financial Times, not to be upstaged by American competition, has carried its own "The Need for a New Imperialism". So what are all these self-important paragons of free speech and exchange of ideas basically saying? They're saying that the future, ladies and gentleman, is the past.
The New Imperialism according to the Financial Times is "defensive" - as defensive as Huntington's clash. It is based on the arbitrarily-defined concept of a "failed state". Afghanistan is given as a prime example. The FT cleverly omits to examine how Afghanistan failed because of relentless Russian and American armed interference since the late 1970s.
In The New Imperialism, the "coercive apparatus" must be provided by the West. To disguise the imperialist thrust, the FT suggests that the United Nations should be in charge of these "temporary protectorates". This is exactly what the US has in mind for Afghanistan. Obviously, nobody is listening to the UN special envoy to Afghanistan, Algerian diplomat Lakdar Brahimi, who said in Islamabad last week that the heavily-publicized utopia of a "broad-based government" cannot be forced down the Afghani people's throats: it will take time, it will have to come from within. Otherwise the end result will be, again, chaos.
Paul Johnson theorizes that the war against terrorism will lead to a new form of colonialism - of the benign or "respectable" kind - by "the great civilized powers". He can only mean America and its blind follower Britain - because the last time we checked France, Germany, Italy, Japan and China, to name but a few, are extremely civilized but not exactly keen on turning back the digital clock of history.
What Johnson really wants is to keep again arbitrarily-defined "terrorist states" under "responsible supervision" - meaning "unavoidable" political interference from the West. He even provides a list of eligible countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Iran and Syria. No coincidence: they are all Islamic. But if Johnson abandoned his leather armchair to do a bit of traveling, he could verify that at least three of these have better fish to fry.
Tony Blair bent over backwards on his recent visit to Damascus to engage Syria: Bashar Assad may not be a paragon of democracy, but he is more interested in education and information technology than bombs. Libya - not South Africa - is the new Eldorado for millions of black western and central Africans: Gaddafi, the Great Survivor, prefers to seduce African youth with economic opportunities rather than with bombs. Iran is torn between hardliners and moderates, but the young generation is fully behind Khatami and his "dialogue of civilizations" - a splendidly articulated cultural platform that strikes a chord all over the developing world.
Billions of people in Southeast Asia, China, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East , Eastern Europe or even Western Europe were not consulted about the designs of the New Imperialism. But it is no coincidence that the New Imperialism is being proposed exactly at this historical juncture. The current Pentagon production on the word's screens has turned out to be essentially a relentless bombing of innocent, starving civilians as punishment for terrorist attacks. It is widely regarded - not only in the Muslim world - as a very expensive and ultimately apalling exercise in futility. Apart from America, public support around the world is vanishing at an alarming rate.
This war was imposed from above on the Afghan population. They were never consulted about its legitimacy. They are not responsible for it. They are helpless victims. A cartoon in the Pakistani press explained the real meaning of "carpet bombing": American bombs fall on an Afghan carpet while a group of unflappable Taliban pose on the side for an Al Jazeera TV crew.
The proponents of New Imperialism conveniently forget to examine how the Taliban got to the ruined top of "failed" Afghanistan in the first place. The Taliban are eminently an Afghan, Pastun and tribal movement. It is easy to forget they are a direct product of the Saudi-American-financed anti-USSR jihad of the '80s. They took power in Kabul in 1996 with the absolute blessing of the US.
Afghanistan was beyond "failed" as a state in 1996. But at the time the Taliban were regarded as a convenient tool for the implementation of another classic American business plan: the construction of oil and gas pipelines from the Central Asian republics through Afghanistan, with Karachi as a major destination. The Taliban would theoretically control the whole country, impose law and order, and guarantee a safe trading environment.
The US had high hopes for the Taliban. They would clear Afghanistan of drugs. They would act against Russian and Iranian economic and geopolitical interests. They would get rid of terrorist training camps. They would pave the way for the return of former king Zahir Shah (no joke: this is what Washington thought way back in 1996). And most of all they would open the gates for the mega-pipelines from Central Asia.
So the whole thing was a sub-plot of the New Great Oil Rush: how America would win against the stiff competition of Russia and Iran. The American-Saudi coalition of Unocal and Delta was the main Western player. Then came the fall of Kabul - mostly financed by none other than Osama bin Laden himself. Unocal at the time was madly in love with the Taliban: an official statement praised the Taliban and the prospect of "immediately" doing business with them. In Afghanistan in 1996, as Afghan veterans comment in Peshawar, the perception was that the Taliban were supported or even financed by Washington.
Unocal was actively negotiating with the Taliban the construction of pipelines from Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea, via Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unocal officials were extensively briefed by CIA agents. The positioning of Unocal in relation to Pakistani sources was equivalent to the positioning of the CIA during the jihad in the '80s. Unocal's main source of information was the disinformation-infested US Embassy in Islamabad.
Apart from all the by-products of their demented version of Islam, the Taliban in the end dealt a major blow to Washington. They did not control all of Afghanistan as expected. They did not bring peace: on the contrary, they installed a police state and engaged in ethnic cleansing (against the Hazaras). Average Afghans stress that the Taliban version of "peace" soon degenerated into an internal jihad against the civilian population.
They did not end poppy cultivation: on the contrary, they made a lot of money out of it. They treated women in the most repulsive way. And - the ultimate reason for their current predicament - they extended a precious red Afghan carpet to Osama bin Laden and his Arab-Afghans.
From courting this irascible lover, America is now bombing it to oblivion. But as millions in the Muslim world keeps on repeating, not a single piece of evidence has been produced in public to suggest that the Taliban are totally, partially, or even marginally responsible for September 11. Not a single piece of a so-called unimpeachable evidence was "independently verified" - as BBC and CNN are so fond of saying (even when they are verifying something during a Taliban-sponsored tour of Kandahar).
Any talk of a future broad-based Afghan government is a smoke screen. As far as American interests are concerned, it has to be a government that no matter what facilitates the American perspective of the Last Great Oil Rush. If push comes to shove, America may even contemplate an occupation of Afghanistan, more or less disguised via the UN. Before that happens, policy makers had better listen to Afghan professor Jamalluddin Naqvi, who says, "History is witness to the fact that Afghanistan is a human and territorial Bermuda Triangle from where no one ever comes out - at any rate in one piece."
Henry Kissinger would grumble that this is just realpolitik. It would certainly be an instance of the New Imperialism in action. The international community should thank the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times for informing us all in advance.
Another imperialist with impeccable credentials, globalization's puppy dog Thomas Friedman, wrote in the New York Times that "the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps". Globalization does not work without the New Imperialism. But another reading of history is always possible. In their seminal book Empire, Tony Negri and Michael Hardt argue that the process of globalization has generated a universal and oppressive New Imperialism - but stress that a real humanist alternative to imperialism and war is more than possible.
Ibn Khaldun, a Muslim historian of the 14th century, would agree. He was not deterministic like Huntington, Fukuyuma and assorted cohorts. He said that civilizations follow a process - they go through different stages. Centuries before Adam Smith, Ibn Khaldun came up with an extremely sophisticated analysis of free trade, the role of the market, and the rule of law. The Muqaddimah - the introduction to his immense Universal History, is a prodigy of humanism: nothing remotely similar to the intolerant Islam of the Taliban or the confrontational Islam of Al-Qaeda.
If Ibn Khaldun were alive today, he would tell us that American civilization - like the Caliphates, or the Umayyad dynasty of his time - has expanded to almost limitless power. And when you reach Absolute Power, the only way is down. Not only the eminent Muslim reached this conclusion, but also Western icons like Gibbon - talking about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - and more recently Professor Paul Kennedy, who excelled in his examination of the concept of overextension of great powers.
In a fruitful "dialogue among civilizations" - an Iranian idea - Ibn Khaldun and Professor Kennedy would probably agree that America is now overextended. And they would certainly agree that civilizations do decline. America still is by all means a civilization of boundless, fascinating energy and dynamism. But it must beware of hubris - the essential element in Greek tragedy, the cultural foundation of Western civilization. Unfortunately, some dreamers of New Imperialism and assorted Pentagon generals have never heard of Sophocles. They'd better get their act together before they plunge America into another heart of darkness. (Asia Times Online)
Bombing with blindfolds on
By James Carroll, 11/6/2001
WHEN I FIRST LAID eyes on a B-52 bomber in the mid-'50s, I was struck by the motto of the Strategic Air Command emblazoned on the fuselage: ''Peace is our profession.'' Such words on a fearsome warplane were a consolation, and I wanted to believe them. Even as a boy, though, I was instinctively attuned to the moral complexity of bombing, and I wasn't that surprised when, during Vietnam, that motto was revealed to be a big lie. The profession of those planes was to wreck havoc, period.
Last week, B-52s were sent into action over Afghanistan, a first exercise in ''carpet bombing.'' The unleashing of this crude ghost plane, which drops imprecise ordnance from 40,000 feet, is a chilling harbinger. Whatever the broad justifications of the US-led war against terrorism, the way in which that war centers on an increasingly brutal bombing campaign cries out to be reconsidered.
What are the purposes and effects of bombing? That straightforward question has hardly ever been answered truthfully by our government. The air war in Afghanistan is being conducted behind a veil of secrecy - but a veil of secrecy shielding Americans, not the Afghans on whom the bombs explode. Our government insists that civilians are not being targeted and that Taliban claims of large numbers of civilian casualties are propaganda.
But however much we long to be consoled by a distinction between military and civilian targets (''carpet bombing'' notwithstanding), the history of bombing suggests that that distinction itself is a lie. ''A History of Bombing'' is the title of a book by the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, and his findings are instructive.
One of the first countries to be bombed from the air, ironically, was Afghanistan during Britain's imperial adventurism in 1919. After World War I, the British air staff declared that it would impose civilian-protecting limits on bombing, but an internal memo defined that declaration as having been made ''to preserve appearances'' because ''the truth [is] that air warfare has made such restriction obsolete and impossible.''
Thus the dilemma presented itself at the very onset of the age of bombing. In 1940, the British definition of a ''military target'' was extended to include industrial centers and the homes of industrial workers - which meant city centers could be hit. American strategists resisted such blatant targeting of civilians for a time, but by the end of World War II, the United States blithely engaged in mass fire-bombing of entire Japanese cities, especially Tokyo.
Even then, lip service was paid to the consoling distinction between military and civilian, as if still being observed. It is stunning to recall, with Lindqvist, that when Harry Truman announced to the world that America had used the atomic bomb, he defined its target as having been ''an important Japanese army base.''
The atomic bomb was dropped on the ''base,'' he said, because ''we wished in the first attack to avoid as much as possible the killing of civilians.'' At least 95 percent of the 100,000 killed immediately at that ''base,'' also known as Hiroshima, were civilians, as Truman surely knew. But he also knew the importance of ''preserving appearances.''
The US lies about bombing in Vietnam, where dead civilians were routinely added to the military body count, are well known. After the revelations of the immorality of that war, Americans had a right to assume that ''carpet bombing'' by B-52s was a thing of the past. During the Gulf War, with the advent of ''smart'' bombs and laser-guided missiles, ''ethical'' bombing that spared civilians seemed to have arrived, but those claims, too, turned out to be false. And the B-52 operated there as well.
The NATO air war against Serbia in 1999, despite great claims for its ''humanitarian'' purpose, was distinguished by strategy that kept bombers flying high enough to protect pilots but too high to protect civilians on the ground. History suggests that war managers have never told the truth about the real purposes and effects of their bombing campaigns.
And now? Last week the moral bankruptcy of bombing was on display when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to rule out American use of nuclear weapons in this war. We should be clear what this means: The United States is prepared, under some circumstance, to cross the nuclear threshold into the realm of massive civilian death - what, to protect civilian life?
How does the motto ''Peace is our profession'' translate into Arabic? These contradictions suggest that a kind of moral blindness has accompanied the phenomenon of bombing from the start. Indeed, moral blindness is necessary for it, blocking our view, for example, of the way US bombing, at very least, is creating conditions of humanitarian catastrophe this winter.
I believe that bin Laden is counting on such blindness and that with our bombing, we have not disappointed him.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.