HANDS OFF AFGHANISTAN!
In response to the hijack attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre US leaders are demanding decisive action not just against individuals, but countries. The most mentioned target Afghanistan, refuge of Osama bin Laden who is pinpointed as perpetrator.
American grief at the deadly attack is more than understandable, but nothing is gained by visiting that grief on the people of Afghanistan. According to Afghanistan's clerical regime:
'Killing our leaders will not help our people any. There is no factory in Afghanistan that is worth the price of a single missile fired at us. It will simply increase the mistrust between the people in the region and the United States.' (New York Times, 13 September 2001)
Afghanistan's penury is a result of the many years of conflict between East and West played out in its hills. After Soviet troops invaded to shore up their preferred regime in 1980, the West engaged in a long-term programme to destabilise the pro-Soviet regime by backing Islamic militants.
Tom Carew, who fought with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan as a member of the British Special Air Services explained that:
'The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism - car-bombing and so on - so that they could strike at the Russians in the major towns.' He added that 'Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate,' meaning the United States (Observer, 13 August 2000).
Osama bin Laden, the 42 year-old Saudi businessman who joined the American-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan was 'a creation of the CIA and MI6' according to intelligence analyst Stephen Dorril (MI6 Fifty Years of Special Operations, p722).
Michael Moran of MSNBC reported that bin Laden's Maktab al-Khidamar 'was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation'. (24 August, 1998) As late as 1992 bin Laden's fighters were on the same side as the US, fighting with the Bosnian muslims against the Serbs.
In 1998, after the first bin Laden attributed WTC bombing, Senator Orrin Hatch, who endorsed the plan to arm and train mujahideen as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, said 'It was worth it' (Michael Moran MSNBC, 24 August 1998)
The war between the US-backed mujahideen and the Soviets was a disaster for Afghanistan, and the country has been engulfed in the conflict between the different Islamic factions ever since the Soviets pulled out. Life expectancy there is just over forty, there is no need to reduce it further.
For the United States the policy of promoting Islamic fundamentalists to fight the left created not just Hamas in Israel, but Osama bin Laden's Al Quaida group. Military solutions have failed the American people. The current attempt to stand tall by bombing Afghanistan is a sign of weakness, not strength.
AMERICA: AT WAR WITH ITSELF
Targetting Afghanistan was a panic response to a policy declared by the President that the hijackings were an 'act of war'. Bullish though the statement sounds, the obvious question is 'with whom'. Wars are ordinarily fought with other nations, but virtually every nation in the world - including Afghanistan - has condemned the bombing.
Given the ferocity of the attack on the symbols of US world dominance, the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, and given the appalling list of civilian casualties, it is no surprise that American leaders are perplexed and even at a loss.
Despite the announcements that things will never be the same again, America's emerging response only consolidates the morbid trends already at work in that society. More than a few commentators have noted that American culture has been exploring the fantasy of a violent destruction of New York and Washington in Film and popular music, from Independence Day, through Godzilla to the eerily prescient Washington/Willis film, the Siege. Behind these cultural investigations of imminent catastrophe lie the elite's presentiment of the of its own system.
Most of these fantasies drew upon documentary imagery of the US bombardment of Baghdad and Belgrade, but putting Americans in the role of the victim, rather than the perpetrator. After the freak hijack attack, Americans no longer have to imagine themselves as victims. By the magical transformation that victimhood gives, the headquarters of US militarism at the Pentagon, and of the bond traders and merchant bankers at the World Trade Center, becomes the living embodiment of freedom and family values.
Seen in historical perspective, the proposition that America is the victim in global conflict makes little sense. In fact the US Armed Forces have been active in countries in every continent of the globe since 1945, from Palestine to Korea, Egypt to the Congo, Cuba to Panama, and from Macedonia to Iran. Popular national movements in particular have been the target of US militarism. Furthermore the overwhelming dominance of the US economy not only guarantees the highest standard of living in the world, but also frustrates development in many of the world's poorest places, so that economic development only ever takes place on terms already dictated by the US and its Western allies.
America's pre-eminence though has come with a price. Guilty Americans hear with despair that they consume a quarter of the world's energy. Not just the so-called Vietnam syndrome continues to dog the elite, now it must cope with a psychosomatic 'Gulf War syndrome', too. America's leaders shouted down the demand for reparations for slavery, though the whole of American culture is shot-through with a guilty preoccupation with its past crimes against Afro-Americans. American guilt is the perennial accompaniment of American success.
The fantastic inversion of America from victimiser to victim silences the problem of American guilt. Already the environmentalist lobby the Sierra Club has withdrawn its campaign against President Bush's energy policy; anti-capitalist protesters who barracked the G8 summits in financial centres around the world have been strangely silent about the demolition of the World Trade Center. Already sponsors are withdrawing from the planned anti-globalization protest in Washington on 30 September.
Throughout its era of global pre-eminence the US has masked its domination behind an ideological struggle against an external foe. Until it collapsed in 1989, the Eastern bloc played the role of bogeyman, who's image could scare everyone into line. Since then US policy makers and militarists have worked hard to stage-manage a similarly unifying struggle for the 'free world'. The pursuit of pitiful and toothless enemies, from General Noriega, through Saddam Hussein, Muammar Ghadaffi and Slobodan Milosevic has lent a limited sense of mission to America.
The declared war against 'international terrorism' tellingly contains all the same elements as all those previous struggles, right back to the Cold War. It demands cooperation from allies internationally, patriotic obedience from Americans, a projection of hatred towards enemies, and towards internal critics. The fluke element of the current campaign is that the first enemy to strike a decisive blow against America itself numbers less than a hundred people.
But that matters little. America's real war is not with an external enemy, but with itself. The campaign is not to defeat a foreign force, but to silence the nation's own self-doubt about its standing in the world.
SUICIDE HIJACKINGS: A WEAPON OF DESPAIR
The individual audacity of the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks disguises the despair that drove them. Though the hijackers almost certainly intended to appeal to an anti-Western sentiment, it failed to materialise. Even the footage of a handful of Palestinians celebrating ran against the grain of the Palestinian leadership's insistence upon sympathy with the US. The gradual slaughter of Palestinians over the last five months has cost more than 500 lives, but barely provoked any wider response. The adoption of their cause by a loose grouping of Arabs, mostly from Gulf States who had made their homes in North America indicates the isolation of these activists from any social base. In the 1970s a wave of hijackings took succour from a popular opposition to US policy in the Middle East. By contrast the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks - like the previous WTC bombing - arise out of the collapse of the anti-imperialist movement. Frustrated at their own failure to organise resistance, these militants took a shortcut that by-passed the masses. Tragically, suicide is fast becoming a key component of left strategies. Kurdish militants have developed the tactics of hunger- strikes and even self-immolation. It is a measure of the left's isolation that it dwells on fantasies of apocalyptic destruction, rather than the more patient work of contructing an opposition.
IN PERSPECTIVE
Fatalities
September 2001 World Trade Centre/Pentagon 5500
In early 1991 180 000 Iraqis were killed in the initial air bombardment of the country. In the subsequent years half a million have died because of sanctions. Continuing raids killed 200 in 1999.
British Labour leader Neil Kinnock said 'to be blunt, the best time to kick someone is when they are down' (John Major: the autobiography, p256)
In 1993 4000 Somalis were killed by US airborne battalions, as part of 'operation hope'.
President Clinton: 'When people kill us they should be killed in greater numbers' (G Stephanopolous All too Human, p214)
July 1999 Yugoslavia 2000 civilians and 600 military. Forty four per cent of the country's industry was also destroyed.
Tony Blair said 'Good has triumphed over evil'.
-- James Heartfield