The Algebra of Infinite Justice
by Arundhati Roy
In
the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center, an American newscaster said: "Good
and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last
Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they
did so with contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.
Here's
the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, Arundhati
Roybecause they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly
identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US
government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric,
cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilized
its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to
battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it
can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find
its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to
manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic
and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being
fought in the first place.
What we're witnessing here is the
spectacle of the world's most powerful country reaching reflexively,
angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when
it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise
missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As
deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight
in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with
which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock
pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage
checks.
Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said
that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On
the same day President George Bush said, "We know exactly who these
people are and which governments are supporting them." It sounds as
though the president knows something that the FBI and the American
public don't.
In his September 20 address to the US Congress,
President Bush called the enemies of America "enemies of freedom".
"Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' " he said. "They hate our
freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom
to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." People are being
asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy
is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial
evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's
motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing
to support that either.
For strategic, military and economic
reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that
their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life
is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger,
it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's
reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military
dominance - the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - were chosen as
the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be
that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in
American freedom and democracy, but in the US government's record of
commitment and support to exactly the opposite things - to military and
economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious
bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard
for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world
with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them
to be indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence
of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around
eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not
them but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't
possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians,
their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their
cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the
courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary
office staff in the days since the attacks.
America's grief at
what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be
grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However,
it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to
understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an
opportunity to usurp the whole world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only
their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard
questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad
timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.
The
world will probably never know what motivated those particular
hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings.
They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political
messages; no organization has claimed credit for the attacks. All we
know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the
natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered.
It's almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their
rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown
a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information,
politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will
invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations.
This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the
attacks took place, can only be a good thing.
But war is looming
large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America
places itself at the helm of the "international coalition against
terror", before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively
participate in its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite
Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult
to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice,
and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small
clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom
for whom? Is this America's war against terror in America or against
terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic
loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of
office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the
Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the
bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock
Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then
the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she
felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of
US economic sanctions. She replied that it was "a very hard choice",
but that, all things considered, "we think the price is worth it".
Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel
the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government.
More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children
continue to die.
So here we have it. The equivocating
distinction between civilization and savagery, between the "massacre of
innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilizations" and
"collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite
justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better
place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead
women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each
dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerized, Operation Enduring
Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the
world's superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest,
most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban
government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held
responsible for the September 11 attacks.
The only thing in
Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its
citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are
accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are
airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy
is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that
Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a
military map - no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no
water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The
countryside is littered with land mines - 10 million is the most recent
estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and
build roads in order to take its soldiers in.
Fearing an attack
from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and
arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN
estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need
emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been
asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian
disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite
justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're
waiting to be killed.
In America there has been rough talk of
"bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age". Someone please break the
news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation,
America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American
people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we
hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but the US
government and Afghanistan are old friends.
In 1979, after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter
Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the
history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan
resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic
jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union
against the communist regime and eventually destabilize it. When it
began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to
be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded
and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic
countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the
mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on
behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware
that it was financing a future war against itself.)
In 1989,
after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians
withdrew, leaving behind a civilization reduced to rubble.
Civil
war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and
eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military
equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was
needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a
"revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories
across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the
Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of
heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on
American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and
$200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.
In
1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline
fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded
by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political
parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its
first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down
girls' schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced
sharia laws under which women deemed to be "immoral" are stoned to
death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given
the Taliban government's human rights track record, it seems unlikely
that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by
the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.
After
all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia
and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is,
can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will
only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.
The
desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet
communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America.
It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalization, again
dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the
graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for
America.
And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has
suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting
military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking
root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural
market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of
heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before
September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented
camps along the border. Pakistan's economy is crumbling. Sectarian
violence, globalization's structural adjustment programs and drug lords
are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the
terrorist training centers and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth
across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular
appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan
government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has
material and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.
Now
the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it
has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf,
having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something
resembling civil war on his hands.
India, thanks in part to its
geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far
been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been
drawn in, it's more than likely that our democracy, such as it is,
would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the
Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set
up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside
view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable,
that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a
fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to
invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it's staying or
just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through
your windscreen.
Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being
fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up
undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror
across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives
lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in
school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema
hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about
the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague,
anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being
picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being
annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.
The US government,
and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of
war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off
workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public
spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defense industry. To
what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers"
than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to
even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more
violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.
Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise
as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can
pull up stakes and move their "factories" from country to country in
search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.
Terrorism
as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the
first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the
planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they
are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows
and, for heaven's sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US
defense secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America's
new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans
must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider
it a victory.
The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling
card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been
written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it
could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's
old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the
17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982,
the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of
Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West
Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of
all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American
government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And
this is far from being a comprehensive list.
For a country
involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been
extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second
on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbor. The
reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors
to come.
Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't
exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did
invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979
when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the
distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the
course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime
suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up
the charts to being "wanted dead or alive".
From all accounts,
it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand
scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11
attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of
evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.
From
what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions
in which he operates, it's entirely possible that he did not personally
plan and carry out the attacks - that he is the inspirational figure,
"the CEO of the holding company". The Taliban's response to US demands
for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically
reasonable: produce the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President
Bush's response is that the demand is "non-negotiable".
(While
talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side
request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the
chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that
killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence.
It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)
But who is
Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden?
He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark
doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and
civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to
waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear
arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its
chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military
interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its
merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of
poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals
who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the
water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has
been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually
becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been
going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will
greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by
America's drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration
recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)
Now
Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric.
Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God
and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms
of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both
are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely
powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the
utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the
axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an
acceptable alternative to the other.
President Bush's ultimatum
to the people of the world - "If you're not with us, you're against us"
- is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choice that people
want to, need to, or should have to make.
Published on Saturday, September 29, 2001 in the Guardian/UK
- Sep 29 Sat 2001 00:07
The Algebra of Infinite Justice
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