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| The Algebra of Infinite Justice Arundhati Roy The Guardian (London) September 29, 2001 In the aftermath of the unconscionable
September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre,
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, because 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',
mobilised 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 Centre 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 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 organisation 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 civilisations' 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 mesmerised, 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 destabilise 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. 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 globalisation, 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, globalisation's structural adjustment programmes and drug lords
are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the
terrorist training centres 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 defence 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 defence 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 11attacks 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 Harbour. 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'. 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 doppelganger. The savage twin of all that
purports to be beautiful and civilised. 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 Dollars 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. Arundhati Roy 2001 |