The Unending War on Terror

Tribune, 28 February 2002

On 19 February, the Pentagon Central Command confirmed that it has launched missile strikes in Afghanistan on “enemy forces” who are neither Al Qaeda nor Taliban, but are apparently hostile to the interim regime of Hamid Karzai.

Asked by reporters in Delhi about the progress of the war in Afghanistan, General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said, ‘it’s just the beginning’. In Kabul, British Major General John McColl, commander of the international peacekeeping force, said he expected shooting incidents involving his troops and local gunmen to continue. Karzai, who rules exclusively at the pleasure of the USA, has made it clear that he cannot sustain that rule without a massive increase in foreign troops.

All of which are powerful reasons to join the Stop the War demonstration this Saturday in London. But there’s much more.

The Project on Defense Alternatives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is advised by figures from the establishment conclaves of the Rand Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Brookings Institute, has issued a “critical appraisal” of the US operation in Afghanistan. It finds that most of Al Qaeda’s facilities and forces in Afghanistan were dedicated to fighting the civil war within the country, and that most of its terrorist capabilities were and remain elsewhere. The war drove the Taliban from power and uprooted the Qaeda organization from most of Afghan territory, but “substantial humanitarian costs were associated with these outcomes.” The military action has led to “warlordism, banditry, and [revived] opium production … In some areas virtual anarchy prevails. … The new Afghanistan is more chaotic and less stable than the old.”

On 22 February, the BBC reported that one in every two children in Afghanistan is malnourished, and one in four is destined to die from preventable causes before the age of five. Yet at the Tokyo conference on Afghan reconstruction, the US pledged (conditionally) a measly $296 million in non-military aid (the British record is little better – a promise of $200 million over five years). Meanwhile, the US has spent $1 billion a month on its military assault in Afghanistan, and is set to increase its annual military budget by $45 billion to just under $400 billion.

It’s reported that part of that sum will fund a full-scale invasion of Iraq later this year by 200,000 US troops. Already, small numbers of US troops have been engaged in combat in the Philippines, and US troops have been sent for the first time to Georgia, joining those now stationed across central Asia, Pakistan, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

And where US troops are not directly involved, the US war against terrorism has given a green-light to renewed military aggression and domestic repression, from Sharon’s assault on the Palestinians to the Colombian regime’s withdrawal from peace talks and carpet-bombing of vast areas of FARC-dominated countryside. In South Asia, the future of billions is hostage to a terrifying military stand-off, as the right-wing Hindu chauvinist government in India claims the same prerogatives in relation to the attack on the parliament in Delhi on 13 December as the US claimed in its response to 11 September.

When people in the west fulminate about the dangers of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of religious fundamentalists, they should remember that in India this has already happened. In 1992, Hindu chauvinists demolished the historic Babri mosque in Ayodhya in north India, an act of vandalism and intolerance every bit as unacceptable as the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Today, individuals complicit in that act sit in the Indian cabinet and are lauded by the US and Britain as partners in the war against terrorism. Since 11 September, the US’s contribution to peace in south Asia is to have paid the Pakistani military $300 million for logistical support in Afghanistan, while at the same time supplying India with $1 billion worth of new weapons technology.

If other countries took it upon themselves to make war on the basis that the US has made war, the human race would be plunged into perpetual anarchy and violence. The ethic of vigilanteeism that has guided and justified the US response to 11 September, and which is now being intensively promoted to the domestic public by corporate America, was always objectionable on the most elementary principles of humanist rationalism, but by now it should also be clear that it has engendered a predatory world order. Unless it is challenged, restrained, and rolled-back, it will subvert all efforts to secure democracy, social justice and an end to violence.

The perpetual and arbitrary expansion of the US target-list, coupled with Bush’s ‘axis of evil speech’, has confirmed that the war on terrorism is nothing but an open-ended mandate for the imposition of the US’s will by force of arms where it pleases. It is a fig-leaf for the plunder of the public purse by the giant corporations and especially those enmeshed in the military-industrial complex, and an excuse for the curtailment of dissent and civil liberties – and not only in the USA.

Long before 11 September, US government strategists articulated their aim as the achievement of “Full Spectrum Dominance”. Specifically, they argued that such a strategy was required in a world sharply polarised between haves and have-nots. The idea is not a subtle one: namely, that US military power – in space as well as land, sea and air – polices an informal global empire administered in the interests of a wealthy corporate elite. Not the least disturbing question about these arrangements is the one put to me by a 15 year old at a school in Hackney: ‘If the USA is to be the world’s policeman, who will police the USA?’

At the moment, certainly not the British government or Tony Blair, the man who has done so much to enhance the global reputation of the UK as the 51st state. Those who justified British support for the US action in Afghanistan on the grounds that Blair or Straw would act as a restraining influence ought now to concede the error of their analysis. All this government has succeeded in doing is issue the USA a license to kill.

Of all the people in Afghanistan who have suffered as a result of the US and British attacks – the many thousands of dead, the far greater numbers wounded, displaced, bereaved, hungry and malnourished, fearful and disempowered, exposed to the whims of warlords and untold quantities of unexploded ordinance – how many could remotely be said to be in any way complicit with the attacks of 11 September? And how did any of this suffering bring justice to the victims of 11 September, deter future acts of terrorism, or make the world better or safer for anyone apart from the greedy few in the west, and their allies elsewhere, whose economic interests have been strengthened?

Compared to the USA or indeed India or Pakistan, those who oppose the war against terrorism in this country have it relatively easy. Over the past six months, the anti-war movement has not only sustained a lively public presence in communities across the country, it has clearly secured an ever-widening audience. As so often, however, the depth and breadth of dissent has not been reflected in our political institutions. The large demonstrations last year established the undeniable existence of mass opposition to Blair’s support for Bush. The larger the turn-out on the 2nd March demonstration, organised by the Stop the War Coalition and supported by CND, and again on the 30th March demonstration, organised by CND and supported by the Stop the War Coalition, the harder it will be for Blair to claim that on this issue he speaks for Britain.

The brave and beleaguered US anti-war movement – who will be demonstrating in Washington on 20 April – has sent out a call to the global majority who oppose this war. Citing a slogan made popular in a public service ad campaign in the US, they say, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk… please take the keys away from the USA.”