Re: Okay, here's the actual article

[Guest guest]

Hi Everyone,

This is a long but very informative article that may interest some. I also

think it puts the question of feeding the fleeing Afghani people within an

acurate context. This isn't about some shallow offering of charity, it's

about plugging up a gushing wound in the side of humanity, a wound that we

have a major rolle in creating.

Love, Suzanne

THE ALGEBRA OF INFINITE JUSTICE

As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war,

Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengance

By Arundhati Roy

[The Guardian - U.K. - Saturday 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 Amer ica 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

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

Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full

of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn't

indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of

knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought

to know that it is not them but their government's policies that are so

hated. They can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary

musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their

cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage

and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in

the days since the attacks.

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 civilisation 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 civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and

eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military

equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed.

The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a " revolutionary tax " . The

ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two

years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become

the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of

the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn

and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

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 supported,

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 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 11 attacks 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 " .

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side

request for the extradition of Warren of the US? He was the chairman

of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000

people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the

files. Could we have him, please?)

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

doppelgänger. 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 $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.