Arundhati Roy on the War

'Brutality smeared in peanut
butter'

Why America must stop the war now. By Arundhati
Roy

Tuesday October 23, 2001

As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday October 7
2001, the US government, backed by the International Coalition
Against Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United
Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels
lingered on computer-animated images of cruise missiles,
stealth bombers, tomahawks, "bunker-busting" missiles and
Mark 82 high drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched
goggle-eyed and stopped clamouring for new video games.

The UN, reduced now to an ineffective acronym, wasn't even
asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once
said, "We will behave multilaterally when we can, and
unilaterally when we must.") The "evidence" against the
terrorists was shared amongst friends in the "coalition".

After conferring, they announced that it didn¹t matter whether or
not the "evidence" would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an
instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.
Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is
committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people's
resistance movements - or whether it's dressed up as a war of
retribution by a recognised government. The bombing of
Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is
yet another act of terror against the people of the world.
Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off
against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and
Washington.

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People
get killed.

Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags
first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and
then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead. On both
sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now
hostage to the actions of their own governments.

Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common
bond - they have to live with the phenomenon of blind,
unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on
Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding escalation of mass
hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other
terrorist acts.

There is no easy way out of the spiralling morass of terror and
brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the
human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective
wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on
September 11 changed the world forever.

Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war - these words have
taken on new meaning.

Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and
approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and
humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any
introspection from the leaders of the International Coalition. Or
the Taliban.

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush
said: "We're a peaceful nation." America¹s favourite
ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of prime
minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people."

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is
peace.

Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President
Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United
States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation
built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence,
rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire."

Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with
- and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46,
1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69),
Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964),
Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia
(1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s),
Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia
(1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.

Certainly it does not tire - this, the most free nation in the world.
What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms
of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits,
sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other
exemplary, wonderful things.

Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and
subjugate ­ usually in the service of America¹s real religion, the
"free market". So when the US government christens a war
"Operation Infinite Justice", or "Operation Enduring Freedom",
we in the third world feel more than a tremor of fear.

Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite
Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means
Enduring Subjugation for others.

The International Coalition Against Terror is a largely cabal of the
richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture
and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the
largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction - chemical,
biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account
for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and
human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored,
armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots.

Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of
violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't
in the same league.

The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of
rubble, heroin and landmines in the backwash of the cold war.
Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are
disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg.

They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war.
Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about
$45bn (£30bn) worth of arms and ammunition was poured into
Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of
modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society.

Young boys ­ many of them orphans - who grew up in those
times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of
family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as
adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalise
women, they don't seem to know what else to do with them.

Years of war has stripped them of gentleness, inured them to
kindness and human compassion. Now they've turned their
monstrosity on their own people.

They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down
around them.

With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world
do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US
government. All the beauty of human civilisation - our art, our
music, our literature - lies beyond these two fundamentalist,
ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the
world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that
they will all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not
about good v evil or Islam v Christianity as much as it is about
space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the
impulse towards hegemony ­ every kind of hegemony,
economic, military, linguistic, religious and cultural.

Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a
monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government
without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship.
It¹s like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it
from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.

One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20
years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was
reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into
finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were
returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload
of bombs. As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich
environment". At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald
Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked if America had
run out of targets.

"First we're going to re-hit targets," he said, "and second, we're
not running out of targets, Afghanistan is ..." This was greeted
with gales of laughter in the briefing room.

By the third day of the strikes, the US defence department
boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan"
(Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16,
of Afghanistan's planes?)

On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance - the
Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the international coalition's
newest friend - is making headway in its push to capture Kabul.
(For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track
record is not very different from the Taliban's. But for now,
because it's inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.)
The visible, moderate, "acceptable" leader of the alliance,
Ahmed Shah Masud, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early
in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle
confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists and unbending
clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some
of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.

Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about
5% of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the
coalition's help and "air cover", it is poised to topple the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have
begun to defect to the alliance. So the fighting forces are busy
switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as
cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all.

Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.

Among the global powers, there is talk of "putting in a
representative government". Or, on the other hand, of "restoring"
the kingdom to Afghanistan's 89-year old former king Zahir
Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That's the way
the game goes - support Saddam Hussein, then "take him out";
finance the mojahedin, then bomb them to smithereens; put in
Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be a good boy. (Is it possible
to "put in" a representative government? Can you place an order
for democracy - with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)

Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about
cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders
which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up
or sealed off. Those who have experience of working in
Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not
be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5m, according to the
UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the
course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left
before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to
reach food to the hungry. Not both.

As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government
air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into
Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 500,000 packets.
That will still only add up to a single meal for half a million
people out of the several million in dire need of food.
Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous,
public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food
packets is worse than futile.

First, because the food will never get to those who really need it.
More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk
being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.

Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to
themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers.
They were vegetarian, we're told, as per Muslim dietary law (!)
Each yellow packet, decorated with the American flag,
contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam,
crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning,
matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user
instructions.

After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline
meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to
understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding
poverty really mean, the US government¹s attempt to use even
this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description.

Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban
government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while
that its real target was the US government and its policies. And
suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban
dropped a few thousand packets containing nan and kebabs
impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York
ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even
if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they
ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension?
Rudi Guiliani, Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10m
from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly
advice about American policy in the Middle East. Is pride a
luxury that only the rich are entitled to?

Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what
creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don't go back into the box
once you've let them out. For every "terrorist" or his "supporter"
that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too.
And for every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good
chance that several future terrorists will be created.

Where will it all lead?

Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that
the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what
"terrorism" is. One country's terrorist is too often another¹s
freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world's
deep-seated ambivalence towards violence.

Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument,
then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists
(insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy
terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed and
sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world.
The CIA and Pakistan's ISI trained and armed the mojahedin
who, in the 80s, were seen as terrorists by the government in
Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Today, Pakistan - America's ally in
this new war - sponsors insurgents who cross the border into
Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as "freedom-fighters",
India calls them "terrorists". India, for its part, denounces
countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army
has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a
homeland in Sri Lanka - the LTTE, responsible for countless
acts of bloody terrorism.

(Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had
served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for
a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide
bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv
Gandhi in 1989.)

It is important for governments and politicians to understand that
manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own
narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and
inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and
exploiting religious sentiments for reasons of political
expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or
politicians can bequeath to any people - including their own.

People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal
bigotry know that every religious text - from the Bible to the
Bhagwad Gita - can be mined and misinterpreted to justify
anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate
globalisation.

This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the
outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and
brought to book. They must be.

But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the
haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and
make the world a living hell for all of us?

At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how
many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations
can you eavesdrop on, how many emails can you intercept, how
many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap?
Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more
information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes,
too much data can actually hinder intelligence - small wonder
the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that
preceded India's nuclear tests in 1998.)

The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical,
ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean
crazy. And freedom - that precious, precious thing - will be the
first casualty. It's already hurt and haemorrhaging dangerously.

Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing
paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of
unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for
instance, members of the All India People's Resistance Forum,
who were distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi,
have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested.
The rightwing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists
groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal)
has banned the Islamic Students Movement of India and is
trying to revive an anti- terrorist Act which had been withdrawn
after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been
more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim.
Can anything be gained by alienating them?

Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let
loose into the world. The international press has little or no
independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream
media, particularly in the US, have more or less rolled over,
allowing themselves to be tickled on the stomach with press
handouts from military men and government officials. Afghan
radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban
has always been deeply suspicious of the press. In the
propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many
people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken
place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumours
spread.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can
hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger.

Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died.
The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing
up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

President George Bush recently boasted, "When I take action,
I'm not going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a
camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush
should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will
give his missiles their money's worth.

Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some
cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in
the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make
good business sense to the coalition¹s weapons manufacturers.
It wouldn't make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle
Group - described by the Industry Standard as "the world's
largest private equity firm", with $13bn under management.
Carlyle invests in the defence sector and makes its money from
military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US
defence secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and
managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald
Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US
secretary of state James A Baker III, George Soros and Fred
Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American
paper ­ the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel - says that former
president George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments
for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets.

He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make
"presentations" to potential government-clients.

Ho hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family.

Then there's that other branch of traditional family business - oil.
Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick
Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.
Turkmenistan, which borders the north-west of Afghanistan,
holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six
billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet
American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing
country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.)

America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and
protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt
that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its
concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its
strategic interest in oil.

Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward
to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and
Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998,
Dick Cheney - then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil
industry - said, "I can't think of a time when we've had a region
emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as
the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen
overnight." True enough.

For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has
been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an
oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the
Arabian sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative
"emerging markets" in south and south-east Asia. In December
1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs travelled to America and
even met US state department officials and Unocal executives in
Houston. At that time the Taliban's taste for public executions
and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the
crimes against humanity that they are now.

Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged
American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton
administration.

Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes
the US oil industry's big chance.

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media
networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by
the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to
expect this talk of guns and oil and defence deals to get any
real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused
people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones
have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the
inanities about the "clash of civilisations" and the "good v evil"
discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by
government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or
anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland
America continues to remain the enigma it has always been - a
curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically
meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught
of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily
consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and
strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those
yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we're
hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding
in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice,
that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one
wonders - have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be
able to re-imagine beauty?

Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of
a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who
has just whispered in your ear - without thinking of the World
Trade Centre and Afghanistan?

© Arundhati Roy