Afghans The Victims of US Terrorism - We Are All Victims Now

Afghans the victims of US terrorism
(OPINION: The Irish Times)

All the news bulletins and news channels nowadays have "anchormen" or "experts" parading in front of huge maps of Afghanistan, explaining the detail of the military assault on the country.
We are told of the type of bomber used and from what base, the aircraft carriers from where the tomahawk missiles are fired. Sometimes we are told of the "payload delivered".
And not a hint of the devastation these "payloads" deliver to the people of Afghanistan. The awful terror they bring, the devastation, the injury, the slaughter.
We have become morally desensitised to the abominations that are clinically conveyed to us night after night on our television screens.
Nobody at any of the news conferences challenges George Bush or Tony Blair or Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell about the outrages they are perpetrating. We are all part of the consensus that it is OK to bomb a country to a pulp with the vastness of the military might the world has ever known.
Nobody asks Tony Blair about the "human rights of the suffering women of Afghanistan" that he talked about in that speech at the Labour Party conference two weeks ago.
How did the world get to believe that terror and slaughter delivered by a bomb in a car was an atrocity, while much more terror and much more slaughter delivered by airplane or missile is morally OK?
Remember all the talk some years ago about the godfathers of violence who sat in their comfortable, middle-class homes in Dundalk or Buncrana, while their cowardly minions delivered mayhem to the streets of Belfast or Derry or Claudy or Omagh?
What about the godfathers of violence sitting in their stately mansions in the White House or Downing Street or Chequers or Camp David, and their minions dropping far larger bombs from the security of thousands of feet beyond range of retaliation, causing far more mayhem in the homes and streets of Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad?
And all for what?
Is it believable that the attack on America of September 11th could have been planned, directed and co-ordinated from caves in Afghanistan? Or that the organisation that was responsible for that attack originates in Afghanistan? A great deal of the emerging evidence suggests otherwise.
Last Wednesday the New York Times published a lengthy portrait of one of the organisers and perpetrators of the September 11th attack, Mohammed Atta. Atta came from a middle-class family in Cairo, where his father was a lawyer.
He went to Hamburg for several years to get a degree in urban planning and he later worked there. "Officials" were quoted as saying there was "strong evidence" Atta had trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, but we are not told what that evidence is or what it is he could have been trained in that would have had any relevance to what happened on September 11th.
It is clear, however, that his radicalism emerged while he was in Hamburg, where he associated with people from the Turkish, Arab and African communities. He went to Florida in 2000 and trained as an airline pilot.
There is evidence that he received a large sum of money from someone in The United Arab Emirates, who "may" have had an association with Osama bin Laden.
A report in Monday's Los Angeles Times quoted FBI sources as saying there were several people involved in plotting further attacks on the US and they were "at large in the United States and across Europe and the Middle East".
The Los Angeles Times also reported that several people suspected of involvement either in the September 11th attack or in planning further attacks were from Saudi Arabia and were resident either there or in the US.
CBS News on Monday evening quoted Prof Vali Nasr of the University of San Diego as saying the Saudi government had "appeased" Islamic extremists by funding and promoting a radical form of Islam that sees the US as the enemy.
Other reports from the US suggest that the real source of terrorism is Iran, where there are several persons wanted by the US, and, of course, Iraq remains a major suspect as a terrorist sponsor.
So what is the point of the assault on Afghanistan? Yes, Osama bin laden and some of his associates are there, but if the vast bulk of those suspected of terrorism by the US are either in the US itself or in Hamburg or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Iraq, what good will it do if everyone in Afghanistan is obliterated?
How will it reduce the terrorist threat to US if the vast majority of terrorists are in places other than Afghanistan?
If the anthrax attacks are the work of terrorists, does anyone believe that the packages containing it were sent from Afghanistan?
And just one other thing. If the point of the assault on Afghanistan is not to defeat terrorism but get Osama bin Laden and bring him to "justice", why has the latest offer by the Taliban to send him to an agreed third country been dismissed?
What would it matter if he were taken to one of America's allies such as Egypt or even Pakistan or Turkey and "brought to justice" there?
The reality is that Afghanistan is being devastated and hundreds are being slaughtered, on the net issue of bringing bin Laden and his associates to justice in the US rather than to some other third agreed country. That's what the slaughter is about. And that's putting it at its best.

We are all victims now

All this war on terror is doing is spreading terror. No one feels safer than they did before the bombs fell.

Gary Younge
Monday October 15, 2001
The Guardian

So we have come a full and bloody circle. As the American firefighters quench the flames and clear the rubble from the remains of the twin towers in Manhattan, the US military, with British assistance, creates more rubble and starts more fires all over Afghanistan. The FBI has warned of more terror attacks in the next few days. In New York and Florida people live in fear of another anthrax attack. The al-Qaida terrorist network has warned Muslims in Britain and America not to fly. Meanwhile, winter in Afghanistan promises a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. What started at ground zero is ending up as a zero-sum game.
Even by its own standards, Operation Enduring Freedom is proving a disaster. Taking western leaders at their word, its stated aim is to defeat terrorism. A reasonable test of their war aims, therefore, would be to ask whether their actions have made a terrorist attack more or less likely. More plainly speaking: do you feel more secure today than you did last Saturday? Americans don't seem to. Police forces and armies are on the highest state of alert possible. In London on Saturday night, hundreds of people were evacuated from restaurants and pubs after a chemical scare and Canterbury Cathedral was cleared of worshippers yesterday after a man dropped some white powder.
Every plane in the sky, every police siren on the road and every bullet-proofed bobby on a beat make me think it will be our turn next. Such dark thoughts have been circling in the back of my mind since the original attacks just over a month ago; since the bombing started they are now at the forefront. The events of September 11 exposed the vulnerability of the west to an attack carried out by a few determined men. The bombing of Afghanistan merely exacerbated it. Following the atrocities people were only afraid of flying; now they are worried about opening their mail too. The system seems fragile because everyone is tense. Today any unstable individual can knock a few hundred points off the Dow Jones index, win themselves a place on prime-time TV and earn a military assisted, impromptu landing, simply by making a dash for a cockpit.
Meanwhile opposition to the bombings has destabilised a nuclear power, Pakistan, which now wavers between a military dictator and militant mullahs. This precariousness, not to mention the terrorist attacks in Kashmir, is troubling its antagonistic nuclear neighbour, India. And that is before we get to the terrified ex-pats in Saudi, the riots in Indonesia and the uneasy calm in Egypt. With every smart bomb that goes astray and hits a residential areas (how smart can these bombs really be?) we know that more people will take to the streets. We wait for al-Jazeera to broadcast the first picture of a mosque in flames and then watch the sparks fly all the way to Gaza.
True, these are early days. Bush has promised a year more of this if need be. So the short-term panic would, arguably, be worthwhile if one seriously thought that it was a long-term solution to terrorism. But nobody really does. Terrorism is not like foot and mouth which, with enough culling, quarantine and road blocks, you can snuff out. It is, depending on the time, the place and the cause in which it is committed, an expression of either the absence of dialogue, the failure of negotiation or a determination by a few to undermine the popular will - and sometimes a mixture of all three at once. It can, for short periods of time, be contained but it cannot be extinguished. Either way it is its political character that distinguishes it from other acts of social violence.
That does not make it better or worse but different and as unlikely a candidate for eradication as other political evils such as racism or corruption. That does not mean that we shouldn't try. It does mean you have to be clear in your objectives, realistic in your expectations and subtle in your means. The bombing of Afghanistan cannot lay claim to any of those attributes. If they kill Osama bin Laden they will create a martyr; if they capture him America will find itself on trial; if he remains on the loose they will have failed.
This is not just a question of the west losing the propaganda war. The problem is not with the marketing, but the product. In order to take out the al-Qaida network and get Bin Laden, America needs the full support of the Arab world. The backing has only been lukewarm, because of America's appalling record in the Middle East. Three weeks ago it was considered a mixture of heresy, naivety and plain bad taste to raise the issue of American foreign policy; now it is widely accepted that without a just settlement in the Middle East, networks like al-Qaida will always be able to prey on disaffection in the Arab world.
But the damage has, literally, largely been done. Those here who wilfully confuse anti-war with anti-American, context with cause and explanation with justification in order to polarise debate and deride dissent, now have their wish. Those who did not back the bombing, they say, are appeasers or apologists for the Taliban. They laid out a choice between backing western imperialism on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other. A growing number in the Muslim world look at the record of both in their area and are opting for the latter. It is thoroughly depressing that they believe that those are the only two options available.
None the less they have been pretty much the only two presented. From the outset Bush has been putting the world "on notice" and warning: "You're either with us or you're against us." Both he, and Blair, act as though there are only two possible responses to the terrorist attacks. Either you bomb one of the poorest, most famine-stricken countries in the world to smithereens, or you do nothing. There are few who believe that those responsible for the attacks should go unpunished. But mention the United Nations or an international court of human rights and their eyeballs start rolling. They want something done "now". They talk as though "now" is its own point in time - not connected to other atrocities America committed years ago or the consequences that will endure ahead. The South Africans waited years for their truth and reconciliation committee; a million Rwandans died in the 1994 genocide yet it was a full year before the trials of the suspects began. America holds fire for 26 days before lashing out at Afghanistan and is praised for its patience. If this is restraint, define rash; if this is justice, then define revenge.
In the meantime every bomb they drop turns what was an unpopular, dangerous outsider into a hero among a significant and growing minority of the Muslim world. With the west's help Bin Laden has managed to present himself as the largest immovable object against American cultural, political and economic hegemony. This is disastrous for all of us. Not only are Bush and Blair not defeating terrorism, they are creating a generation of terrorists for the future. With enemies like these, Bin Laden does not need friends.

A shameful silence as the bombs drop

Public figures should speak out against these indefensible raids

Jonathan Steele
Wednesday October 17, 2001
The Guardian

Mary Robinson's call for a pause in the bombing of Afghanistan, backed by her authority as the UN human rights commissioner, needs to be heeded - even if she half-retracted it later. The original explanation for the American and British air strikes was that the Taliban's air defences had to be eliminated so that special forces could fly in by helicopter to capture Osama bin Laden without risk. Three days after the strikes began, the US defence secretary announced the US had air supremacy over Afghanistan. What then justifies going on with the bombing of cities?
Does the US want to overthrow the Taliban regime by force? Even that no longer seems valid. Washington has accepted that a quick capture of Kabul by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance could lead to revenge killings on a massive scale. The Pentagon is not bombing Taliban troops to the north of Kabul, so if the front lines are spared, there is no justification for hitting targets close to innocent civilians. Deaths must already be well into triple figures, and even if the toll is not yet massive, the bombs have caused an exodus of traumatised people. Some young men are escaping Taliban press gangs, but the vast bulk of the refugees are fleeing American and British air-borne slaughter. Thousands left in anticipation of the attacks. Others ran when the first bombs fell.
Apart from the horror of these relentless air strikes, the month since September 11 has produced three depressing features. One is the "empathy deficit" it has revealed in our supposedly sophisticated society. Almost everyone who has sat in a plane since that horrendous day must have wondered whether they might be travelling in a bomb. Anyone who lives or works in a tall building will have dwelt on the nightmare possibility that an aircraft could suddenly come through the wall. Few seem able to put themselves in the place of the people of Kabul and Kandahar, hearing the hellish thunder and feeling the earthquake-like vibration of missiles and bombs exploding around them. They are offered "enduring freedom", but are only enduring terror.
The second sad aspect is the unwillingness of so many in the pro-war camp to engage in argument. I have been amazed by critics who know I supported military action in Kosovo but call my opposition to the Afghan war "pacifist". Some opponents of this war are genuine pacifists, and I respect their position. Others are fiercely "anti-American" in that they rarely approve of US policy (though they make a distinction between America's vibrant civil society and the actions of its government). The war lobby prefers these opponents since they can be dismissed as "absolutist".
Those who oppose the bombing out of pragmatism are more threatening. Our arguments have to be evaded in other ways. In these columns some writers have accused the war's critics of flailing around with no alternative policies. They are attacked by Tony Blair in caricature fashion - "after September 11 the idea that we're going to sit back and do nothing is absurd". In fact, they offered numerous options. These were all the things the prime minister later did, except for military action: improved security measures, more intensive intelligence-gathering, and political pressure on states which harbour terrorists or support Bin Laden, in particular Pakistan. But rather than revenge and force, we advocated patience, cool thinking, and international police work.
The worst aspect of the post-September 11 world is the self-censorship of so many people who hold positions of greater or lesser power. The international "coalition against terrorism" is destroying people's ability to think and speak. Mary Robinson's backtracking on her call for a bombing pause is one case. What of the others in government, parliament, the United Nations High Commissionfor Refugees, or at UN headquarters in New York who know the bombing is wrong but dare not say so openly? Some fear that opposing military strikes will be interpreted as condoning the atrocities of that dark day in America. Others worry their "credibility" may be undermined.
Except for Christian Aid and Muslim Aid, which have come out against the bombing, many aid agencies, particularly those which get grants from the British government, have kept quiet for fear of a cut in their funds. Others look at polls which seem to show strong support for bombing. Shame on them for not taking the lead and trying to change the public's view. Every aid agency in Afghanistan knows military action is causing needless death, increases the number of refugees and exacerbates the task of delivering food and medicine. In the name of the people they claim to want to help, they should break their silence now.

A shabby excuse for democracy

Alternatives to bombing were absent from the Commons debate

Paul Foot
Tuesday October 16, 2001
The Guardian

There is not a shred of a case for the military action in Afghanistan, yet in the "debate" in the House of Commons on October 8 not a single voice was raised against it. There was no motion and no vote. And although a few MPs are against the war, the only sign of dissidence last Monday was an isolated question from Alan Simpson (Nottingham North) warning that "bombing will produce more terrorists than it kills".
Clare Short, international development secretary (how far she has come from her humanitarian welfare work in Birmingham, where she started!) congratulated the on a "high quality debate" whose main feature was "a deep consensus". It didn't seem to occur to her or anyone else that deep consensus is the curse of high quality debate, or that a single evening's discussion, full of gushing praise for Blair and Bush, cut short so that MPs, in the middle of the crisis, could slink off to continue their grossly extended holidays, was a pathetic apology for parliamentary democracy. Jenny Tonge (Richmond Park), who only a few days previously had drawn applause from delegates at the Liberal Democrat party conference for her advice to the government to bomb Afghanistan with bread not bombs, enthusiastically supported the bombs option. "The die has been cast," she said, drawing deeply on the well-worn Liberal thesaurus of cliches. "The decision has been taken, I am sure, with far better intelligence than I have. Therefore, I support that decision and that action."
No doubt the superior intelligence that convinced her was every bit as accurate as the intelligence that foresaw the New York atrocity and guarded against it. Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) said he believed in the "now widespread acceptance of the inevitable military action". Perhaps he should read his own journal, the New Statesman, which sets out clearly and almost unanimously the case against the inevitability of military action.
Opponents of the bombing were challenged to provide alternatives. David Winnick (Walsall North) said "the question for colleagues who oppose military action is simple. What alternative do they propose? The murderous network that we face can, like fascism, be appeased or fought. It is as simple as that." Stephen Pound (Ealing North) asked "if not this action, what action should be taken?"
There are plenty of answers to these questions, but very few got a decent airing in the debate. I cite a few:
Stop subsidising the government of Israel. Stop appeasing the war criminal Sharon. The continuous breaches by Israel of United Nations resolutions, the constant seizure of other peoples' territory, the apparently everlasting persecution of the Palestinian people have been sustained by more economic and military aid from the US and Britain than has been bestowed on any other country on earth. Appeasement of Israel has been the lynchpin of US and British policy in the Middle East, and is obviously connected, at whatever distance, to the terrorist attacks on September 11. Yet the crucial importance of Palestine to the issue was emphasised by only one MP in the debate - John Austin (Erith and Thamesmead)
Stop appeasing the Russian government over its murder and torture of the people of Chechnya. This subject got an honourable mention from Ian Taylor (Esher and Walton), who rejoiced that "not least because of the events in Chechnya, Moscow is very much on side in attempting to find a solution to what has been going on in Afghanistan".
Stop bombing Iraq - hardly mentioned in the debate.
Stop cuddling up to feudal and sexist dictatorships such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia which are every bit as foul as the Taliban. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) said: "One thinks with admiration of the bravery of General Musharraf of Pakistan." No one seemed to disagree, or even protest that the brave general came to power in a military coup against an elected government.
Above all, stop siding with the rich of the world against the poor. From the Tory front bench Bernard Jenkin (North Essex) complained that the events of September 11 "shattered the illusion of a safe and comfortable world". That world, including even North Essex, was neither safe nor comfortable. Its distinguishing characteristic was the vast wealth of the irresponsible and greedy few and the indescribable poverty, hunger and thirst of the many. That doesn't excuse the fanatical and suicidal terrorism of September 11. But it helps to explain it. And if the gap between rich and poor is allowed to grow, terrorism will grow too.
These alternatives do not require dropping a single bomb or killing a single innocent person. Every one of them would do more to combat terrorism than all the cruise missiles dropped on Kabul and Kandahar. Yet it was the bombing, not the alternatives to bombing, which last week secured the unanimous acclaim of the mother of parliaments.

Gagging the sceptics

The US, founded to protect basic freedoms, is now insisting that its critics are its enemies

George Monbiot
Tuesday October 16, 2001
The Guardian

If satire died on the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, then last week its corpse was exhumed for a kicking. As head of the United Nations peacekeeping department, Kofi Annan failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica. Now, as secretary general, he appears to have interpreted the UN charter as generously as possible to allow the attack on Afghanistan to go ahead.
Article 51 permits states to defend themselves against attack. It says nothing about subsequent retaliation. It offers no licence to attack people who might be harbouring a nation's enemies. The bombing of Afghanistan, which began before the UN security council gave its approval, is legally contentious. Yet the man and the organisation who overlooked this obstacle to facilitate war are honoured for their contribution to peace.
Endowments like the Nobel Peace Prize are surely designed to reward self-sacrifice. Nelson Mandela gave up his liberty, FW de Klerk gave up his power, and both were worthy recipients of the prize. But Kofi Annan, the career bureaucrat, has given up nothing. He has been rewarded for doing as he is told, while nobly submitting to a gigantic salary and bottomless expense account.
Among the other nominees for the prize was a group whose qualifications were rather more robust. Members of Women in Black have routinely risked their lives in the hope of preventing war. They have stayed in the homes of Palestinians being shelled by Israeli tanks and have confronted war criminals in the Balkans. They have stood silently while being abused and spat at during vigils all over the world. But now, in this looking-glass world in which war is peace and peace is war, instead of winning the peace prize the Women in Black have been labelled potential terrorists by the FBI and threatened with a grand jury investigation.
They are in good company. Earlier this year the director of the FBI named the chaotic but harmless organisations Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against Capitalism in the statement on terrorism he presented to the Senate. Now, partly as a result of his representations, the Senate's new terrorism bill, like Britain's Terrorism Act 2000, redefines the crime so broadly that members of Greenpeace are in danger of being treated like members of al-Qaida. The Bush doctrine - if you're not with us, you're against us - is already being applied.
This government by syllogism makes no sense at all. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida have challenged the US government; ergo anyone who challenges the government is a potential terrorist. That Bin Laden is, according to US officials, a "fascist", while the other groups are progressives is irrelevant: every public hand raised in objection will from now on be treated as a public hand raised in attack. Given that Bin Laden is not a progressive but is a millionaire, it would surely make more sense to round up and interrogate all millionaires.
Lumping Women in Black together with al-Qaida requires just a minor addition to the vocabulary: they have been jointly classified as "anti-American". This term, as used by everyone from the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Daily Mail to Tony Blair and several writers on these pages, applies not only to those who hate Americans, but also to those who have challenged US foreign and defence objectives. Implicit in this denunciation is a demand for uncritical support, for a love of government more consonant with the codes of tsarist Russia than with the ideals upon which the United States was founded.
The charge of "anti-Americanism" is itself profoundly anti-American. If the US does not stand for freedom of thought and speech, for diversity and dissent, then we have been deceived as to the nature of the national project. Were the founding fathers to congregate today to discuss the principles enshrined in their declaration of independence, they would be denounced as "anti-American" and investigated as potential terrorists. Anti-American means today precisely what un-American meant in the 1950s. It is an instrument of dismissal, a means of excluding your critics from rational discourse.
Under the new McCarthyism, this dismissal extends to anyone who seeks to promulgate a version of events other than that sanctioned by the US government. On September 20, President Bush told us that "this is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom". Two weeks later, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, met the Emir of Qatar to request that progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom be suppressed. Al-Jazeera is one of the few independent television stations in the Middle East, whose popularity is the result of its uncommon regard for freedom of speech. It is also the only station permitted to operate freely in Kabul. Powell's request that it be squashed was a pre-emptive strike against freedom, which, he hoped, would prevent the world from seeing what was really happening once the bombing began.
Since then, both George Bush and Tony Blair have sought to prevent al-Jazeera from airing video statements by Bin Laden, on the grounds of the preposterous schoolboy intrigue that they "might contain coded messages". Over the weekend the government sought to persuade British broadcasters to restrict their coverage of the war. Blair's spin doctors warned: "You can't trust them [the Taliban] in any way, shape, or form." While true, this applies with equal force to the techniques employed by Downing Street. When Alastair Campbell starts briefing journalists about "Spin Laden", it's a case of the tarantula spinning against the money spider.
If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must question everything we see and hear. Though we know that governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem to believe that this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current one. Many of those who now accept that babies were not thrown out of incubators in Kuwait, and that the Belgrano was fleeing when it was hit, are also prepared to believe everything we are being told about Afghanistan and terrorism in the US.
There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. The magical appearance of the terrorists' luggage, passports and flight manual looks rather too good to be true. The dossier of "evidence" purporting to establish Bin Laden's guilt consists largely of supposition and conjecture. The ration packs being dropped on Afghanistan have no conceivable purpose other than to create the false impression that starving people are being fed. Even the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been labelled "a gift from Iraq". This could indeed be the work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would benefit from a shift in public opinion.
Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system for which our governments are supposed to be fighting. The true defenders of America are those who are now being told that they are anti-American.

Robert Fisk: Promises, promises
Colin Powell tells Pakistan's General Musharraf that he will help solve the problem of Kashmir. Tony Blair offers Yasser Arafat the vision of a Palestinian state. But should we take them at their word? History shows that assurances made in wartime aren't always everything they seem

17 October 2001

Tea on the lawn. Perhaps only in the old British Empire do they make black tea and milk in the same scalding pot, poured with lashings of sugar into fragile cups. The bougainvillea blasted crimson and purple down the brick wall beside me while big, aggressive black birds pursued each other over the cut grass of my tiny Peshawar hotel. At the end of my little road lies the tiny British cemetery wherein gravestones mark the assassination of the 19th century Raj's good men from Surrey and Yorkshire, murdered by what were called ghazis, the Afghan fundamentalists of their age who were often accompanied into battle -- and I quote Captain Mannering of the Second Afghan war -- "by religious men called talibs".
In those days, we made promises. We promised Afghan governments our support if they kept out the Russians. We promised our Indian Empire wealth, communications and education in return for its loyalty. Little has changed. Yesterday -- all day long into the sweaty evening -- fighter-bombers pulsed through the yellow sky above my little lawn, grey supersonic streaks that rose like hawks from Peshawar's mighty runway and headed west towards the mountains of Afghanistan. Their jet engines must have vibrated among the English bones in the cemetery at the end of the road, as Hardy's Channel firing once disturbed Parson Thirdly's last mortal remains. And, on the great black television in my bedroom, the broken, veined screen proved that Imperial history does indeed repeat itself.
General Colin Powell stood on the right hand of General Pervez Musharraf after promising a serious look at the problems of Kashmir and Pashtu representation in a future Afghan government. The US Secretary of State and the general whom we must now call the President of Pakistan spent much of their time chatting above the overnight artillery bombardment by that other old Empire relic, the Indian army. General Musharraf wanted a "short" campaign against Afghanistan, General Powell a promise of continued Pakistani support in the US's "war against terror". Musharraf wanted a solution to the problem of Kashmir. Powell, promising that the United States was now a close friend of Pakistan, headed off to India to oblige.
Vain promises have ever been a part of our conflict. In the 1914-18 war -- another struggle against "evil", we should remember -- it was the British who made the promises. To the Jews of the world, especially to Russian Jews, we promised our support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. To the Arabs, Lawrence of Arabia promised independence. There's a wonderful moment in the film of the same name when Peter O'Toole, clad in an Arab gown and looking not unlike Osama bin Laden, asks General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) if he can promise Sherif Husseyn independence in return for Arab support in destroying the Turkish army. For just a brief, devastating moment, Hawkins hesitates; then his face becomes all smiling benevolence: "Of course!" he says. Did I not see that very same smile on Tony Blair's face as he clutched Arafat's hand in both of his before leading him through the door of 10 Downing Street this week?
In the end, we imposed an Anglo-French military occupation on the Arabs who had helped us and, three decades later gave the Jews only half of Palestine. "Promises", as the Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi once pointed out, "are meant to be kept." But not the kind you make in wartime.
By the Second World War, we were promising the Lebanese independence from the French if they turned against their Vichy masters. Then the French broke their promise and tried to stay on until driven out in ignominy in 1946. Two years earlier, President Roosevelt -- anxious to secure Saudi oil rights from the British as the war came to an end -- promised the Saudi monarchy that he would not allow the Palestinians to be dispossessed.
By 1990, after the invasion of Kuwait, we wanted the Arab and Muslim world on our side against Iraq. President Bush Senior promised a "New World Order" in which a nuclear-free -- indeed arms-free -- Middle East would live in an oasis of peace. Once the Iraqis were driven out, however, we called a short-lived "Middle-East" summit in Madrid and then sold more missiles, tanks and jet fighters to the Arabs and Israelis than in the preceding 30 years. Israel's nuclear power was never mentioned.
And here we go again. Scarcely three days before Mr Powell acquired his sudden interest in the problems of Kashmir, Yasser Arafat, the discredited old man of Gaza -- "our bin Laden", as ex-General Ariel Sharon indecently called him -- was invited to Downing Street where Tony Blair, hitherto a cautious supporter of Palestinian independence, declared the need for a "viable Palestinian state", including Jerusalem – "viable" being a gloss for a less chopped-up version of the Bantustan originally proposed for Mr Arafat. Mr Blair, of course, had no need to fear American wrath since President Bush Jnr had already discovered that even before 11 September – or so he told us – he had a "vision" of a Palestinian state that accepted the existence of Israel. Mr Arafat – speaking English at length for the first time in years – instantly supported the air bombardment of Afghanistan. Poor old Afghans. They were not on hand to remind the world that the same Mr Arafat had once enthusiastically supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Why do we always play politics on the hoof, making quick-fix promises to vulnerable allies of convenience after years of accepting, even creating, the injustices of the Middle East and South-west Asia? How soon before we decide – and not before time – to lift sanctions against Iraq, and allow tens of thousands of Iraqi children to live instead of die? Or promise (in return for the overthrow of Sadam) to withdraw our forces from the Arabian peninsula? After all – say this not too loudly – if we promised and fulfilled all that, every one of Osama bin Laden's demands will have been met.
It's intriguing to read the full text of what bin Laden demanded in his post-World Trade Centre attack video tape. He said in Arabic, in a section largely excised in English translations, that "our [Muslim] nation has undergone more than 80 years of this humiliation..." and referred to "when the sword reached America after 80 years". Bin Laden may be cruel, wicked, ruthless or evil personified, but he is very intelligent. I think he was referring specifically to the 1920 Treaty of S�vres, written by the victorious allied powers, which broke the Ottoman Empire and did away – after 600 years of sultanates and caliphates – with the last dream of Arab unity. As the American Professor James Robbins has shrewdly spotted, bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman Zawahri – shouting into the video recorder from his Afghan cave 11 days ago – stated that the al-Quaida movement "will not tolerate a recurrence of the Andalusia tragedy in Palestine". Andalusia? Yes, the debacle of Andalusia marked the end of Muslim rule in Spain in 1492.
We may sprinkle quick-fix promises around. The people of the Middle East have longer memories. Back in the mid-1990s, I used to visit the bookshops of Algiers. Out in the triangle of death around Bentalha, hundreds of innocents were having their throats slit by an Islamist group – possibly also by government forces – many of whose members had fought in Afghanistan against the Russians. In the shops I would look for books on Islam. Muslim culture, Islamic history, Koranic thought. They were all there. And on the very next shelves – the same applied, I found, in Cairo bookshops – would invariably be text books on nuclear science, chemical engineering, aeronautics and biological research.
The aeronautical texts have, of course, a fearful new resonance today. So have the books on biological research. But the reason for their concurrence, I suspected, lay in the history of Arab humiliation. The Arabs were among the first scientists at the start of the second millennium, while the Crusaders -- another of bin Laden's fixations -- were riding in technological ignorance into the Muslim world. So while in the past few decades, our popular conception of the Arabs vaguely embraced an oil-rich, venal and largely backward people, awaiting our annual handouts and their virgins in heaven, many of them were asking pertinent questions about their past and future, about religion and science, about -- so I suspect -- how God and technology might be part of the same universe.
No such long-term thought or historical questions for us. We just went on supporting our Muslim dictators around the world -- especially in the Middle East -- in return for their friendship and our vain promises to rectify historical injustice.
We allowed our dictators to snuff out their socialist and communist parties; we left their population little place to exercise their political opposition except through religion. We went in for bestialisation – Messrs Khomeini, Abu Nidal, Gaddafi, Arafat, Saddam and bin Laden – rather than historical questioning. And we made more promises. Presidents Carter and Reagan, I recall, made promises to the Afghan mujahedin. Fight the Russians and we will help you. There would then be assistance in Afghanistan's economic recovery. A re-building of the country, even (this from the innocent Mr Carter) "democracy" – not a concept to be sure that we would now be promising to the Pakistanis, Palestinians, Uzbeks or Saudis. Of course, once the Russians were gone in 1989, there was no economic assistance. But last year, there was President Clinton, loud once more in America's promises of economic help for Pakistan, asking for a rejection of bin Laden; yet his only sense of perspective was to tell the Pakistani people that their history was -- wait for it -- "as long as the river Indus".
The problem, I fear, is that without any sense of history, we do not understand injustice. We only compound that injustice, after years of indolence, when we want to bribe our would-be allies with promises of immense historical importance – a resolution to Palestine, Kashmir, an arms-free Middle East, Arab independence, an economic Nirvana -- because we are at war -- tell them what they want to hear, promise them what they want -- anything, so long as we can get our armadas into the air in our latest "war against evil".
So there was General Powell yesterday promising to deal with Kashmir while General Musharraf pleaded for a short war and while the jets went sweeping off towards Afghanistan from the Peshawar airbase. (The Independent)