----- Original Message -----
Subject: more awkward questions
> Comment
>
> Collateral repair
>
> A massive aid programme for Afghanistan will help bring down the Taliban
>
> George Monbiot
> Guardian Unlimited
>
> Tuesday September 25, 2001
>
>
>
> Like almost everyone, I want to believe that the attack on New York was the
> work of a single despot and his obedient commando. But the more evidence
> United States intelligence presents to this effect, the less credible the
> story becomes.
>
> First there was the car. A man had informed the police, we were told, that
> he'd had a furious argument with some suspicious looking Muslims in the
> parking lot at Boston airport. He led investigators to the car, in which
> they found a copy of the Koran and a flight manual in Arabic, showing that
> these were the fundamentalists who had hijacked one of the planes. Now,
> flying an aeroplane is not one of those things you learn in the back of a
> car on the way to the airport. Either you know how to do it or you don't.
> Leaving the Koran unattended, a Muslim friend tells me, is considered
> sinful. And if you were about to perpetrate one of the biggest terrorist
> outrages the world has ever seen, would you draw attention to yourself by
> arguing over a parking place?
>
> Then there was the passport. The security services claim that a passport
> belonging to one of the hijackers was extracted from the rubble of the
> World Trade Centre. This definitive identification might help them to track
> the rest of the network. We are being asked to believe that a paper
> document from the cockpit of the first plane - the epicentre of an inferno
> which vapourised steel - survived the fireball and fell to the ground
> almost intact.
>
> When presented with material like this, I can't help suspecting that
> intelligence agents have assembled the theory first, then sought the facts
> required to fit it. I think there are grounds to suggest that the attacks
> were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, even if we don't know
> precisely who they were. But why do the agents appear to be overdressing
> their case?
>
> It's partly, I think, because they need to show that they are not as
> clueless as their failure to predict the atrocity suggests. But it's also
> because, understandably enough, they want a discrete and discernable enemy
> to confront, a structure they can penetrate, a membership they can round
> up, and a figure whose personal evil is commensurate with the crime.
>
> Partly as a result of this wishful thinking, the west found itself in a
> curious position last week. The Taliban, possibly the most brutal and
> barbaric regime on earth, was requesting evidence before considering Osama
> bin Laden's extradition: they insisted that he was innocent until proven
> guilty. The west, in the name of civilisation, was insisting that Bin Laden
> was guilty, and it would find the evidence later.
>
> For these reasons and many others (such as the initial false certainties
> about the Oklahoma bombing and the Sudanese medicine factory, and the
> identification of live innocents as dead terrorists), I think we have some
> cause to regard the new evidence against Bin Laden with a measure of
> scepticism. There is no question that he is dangerous, and there is
> convincing evidence connecting him to previous attacks, but if the west
> starts chasing the wrong man across the Hindu Kush while the real
> terrorists are planning their next atrocity, this hardly guarantees our
> security.
>
> The British minister Peter Hain argued on these pages yesterday that "the
> values that the terrorists attacked last week were human rights, democracy
> and the rule of law". If this is so, then the terrorists have won already.
> The presumption of innocence is just one of the human rights both Mr Hain
> and Mr Bush appear prepared to abandon in response to the attacks.
> Operation Infinite Justice begins with the renunciation of justice. The
> force Bush and Blair have mobilised is a gigantic death squad, dispatched
> to enact extrajudicial executions.
>
> Already the deployment has almost certainly killed more innocent people
> than the terrorist outrage in New York. The UN world food programme has
> pulled out of a country in which 5.5m are at imminent risk of starvation.
> The victims are invisible, their language incomprehensible, so the world
> neither knows nor cares.
>
> At a huge anti-war meeting in London on Friday, I saw just how unfairly we
> objectors have been characterised. When I described what happened in New
> York as a crime against humanity, only one person in the hall demurred ("It
> was self-defence!"), and he was immediately shouted down by what appeared
> to be the entire audience. No one suggested that the victims of the attack
> deserved what they got. No one advocated the appeasement of terrorists.
> But, just as the militarists need a single, Hitler-like figure to launch
> their new world war, they also need to invoke a fabled set of beliefs which
> allows the peace campaigners to be dismissed before they have been heard.
>
> But in one respect we have not, perhaps, made ourselves sufficiently clear.
> Assuming the unassumable, namely that Bin Laden was responsible and that he
> and his lieutenants are still in Afghanistan, how would we deal with them?
> The answer is obvious: let's cut out the world war and go straight to
> Nuremburg.
>
> This begs the question, of course, of how we would extract the defendants.
> I believe that this is a lot less complicated than the militarists have
> made it. Until a few years ago, the Afghan people regarded the western
> powers as their allies, as they fought to rid themselves of Soviet
> occupation. We squandered their goodwill when we encouraged the Taliban to
> move in as an ideological bulwark against communism. But reclaiming it, in
> Afghanistan's desperate circumstances, is surely only a matter of months.
>
> Vast humanitarian interventions, dragging the population back from the
> brink of famine, would show the people that, unlike the Taliban, the west
> is on their side. The Taliban thrive on the fear of outsiders, which, as
> far as Afghans are concerned, has so far been amply justified. If the
> outside world proves that it is friendly, not hostile, the regime's grip
> begins to weaken. As the debilitated population begins to recover, the
> Taliban's chances of retaining power will be approximately zero. Bin Laden,
> long hated and feared by most Afghans, would be handed over just as soon as
> they could grab him.
>
> All this, of course, will take time, and it's not hard to see why the
> American people want instant results. But justice requires patience, and
> infinite justice requires infinite patience. The great advantage of this
> strategy is that it's safe. Far from spawning future conflicts, it is
> likely to defuse them. Far from immersing a new generation in hatred of the
> west, it's likely to inculcate a hatred of those who would deprive them of
> friendly contact with outsiders. Far from triggering off fundamentalist
> uprisings all over the Muslim world, it could lead to a new understanding
> between cultures, even a sense of common purpose. The likes of Bin Laden
> would then have nowhere to hide.
>
> And there is an accidental by-product, which has nothing to do with the
> west's strategic objectives. Rather than killing thousands of civilians, we
> would save the lives of millions. Let's make this the era of collateral
> repair.
>
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