The algebra of infinite justice

As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war,Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengeance. A borrowed piece from the Guardian

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World TradeCentre, an American newscaster said: "Good and evilrarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did lastTuesday. People who we don't know massacred people whowe do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Thenhe broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people itdoesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV.Before it has properly identified or even begun tocomprehend the nature of its enemy, the US governmenthas, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric,cobbled together an "international coalition againstterror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navyand its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, itcan't very well return without having fought one. Ifit doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enragedfolks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Oncewar begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and ajustification of its own, and we'll lose sight of whyit's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of theworld's most powerful country reaching reflexively,angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind ofwar. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself,America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles andF-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. Asdeterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longerworth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, andcold anger are the weapons with which the wars of thenew century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. Itslips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up inbaggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI saidthat it had doubts about the identities of some of thehijackers. On the same day President George Bush said,"We know exactly who these people are and whichgovernments are supporting them." It sounds as thoughthe president knows something that the FBI and theAmerican public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress,President Bush called the enemies of America "enemiesof freedom". "Americans are asking, 'Why do they hateus?' " he said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedomof religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom tovote and assemble and disagree with each other."People are being asked to make two leaps of faithhere. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the USgovernment says it is, even though it has nosubstantial evidence to support that claim. Andsecond, to assume that The Enemy's motives are whatthe US government says they are, and there's nothingto support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it isvital for the US government to persuade its publicthat their commitment to freedom and democracy and theAmerican Way of Life is under attack. In the currentatmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easynotion to peddle. However, if that were true, it'sreasonable to wonder why the symbols of America'seconomic and military dominance - the World TradeCentre and the Pentagon - were chosen as the targetsof the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Couldit be that the stygian anger that led to the attackshas its taproot not in American freedom and democracy,but in the US government's record of commitment andsupport to exactly the opposite things - to militaryand economic terrorism, insurgency, militarydictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginablegenocide (outside America)? It must be hard forordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look upat the world with their eyes full of tears andencounter what might appear to them to beindifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury.An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowingthat what goes around eventually comes around.American people ought to know that it is not them buttheir government's policies that are so hated. Theycan't possibly doubt that they themselves, theirextraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors,their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, areuniversally welcomed. All of us have been moved by thecourage and grace shown by firefighters, rescueworkers and ordinary office staff in the days sincethe attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense andimmensely public. It would be grotesque to expect itto calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it willbe a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunityto try to understand why September 11 happened,Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the wholeworld's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own.Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask thehard questions and say the harsh things. And for ourpains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked,ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivatedthose particular hijackers who flew planes into thoseparticular American buildings. They were not gloryboys. They left no suicide notes, no politicalmessages; no organisation has claimed credit for theattacks. All we know is that their belief in what theywere doing outstripped the natural human instinct forsurvival, or any desire to be remembered. It's almostas though they could not scale down the enormity oftheir rage to anything smaller than their deeds. Andwhat they did has blown a hole in the world as we knewit. In the absence of information, politicians,political commentators and writers (like myself) willinvest the act with their own politics, with their owninterpretations. This speculation, this analysis ofthe political climate in which the attacks took place,can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be saidmust be said quickly. Before America places itself atthe helm of the "international coalition againstterror", before it invites (and coerces) countries toactively participate in its almost godlike mission -called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointedout that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims,who believe that only Allah can mete out infinitejustice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom-it would help if some small clarifications are made.For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom forwhom? Is this America's war against terror in Americaor against terror in general? What exactly is beingavenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000lives, the gutting of five million square feet ofoffice space in Manhattan, the destruction of asection of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundredsof thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airlinecompanies 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 nationaltelevision what she felt about the fact that 500,000Iraqi children had died as a result of US economicsanctions. She replied that it was "a very hardchoice", but that, all things considered, "we thinkthe price is worth it". Albright never lost her jobfor saying this. She continued to travel the worldrepresenting the views and aspirations of the USgovernment. More pertinently, the sanctions againstIraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinctionbetween civilisation and savagery, between the"massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "aclash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". Thesophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world abetter place? How many dead Afghans for every deadAmerican? How many dead women and children for everydead man? How many dead mojahedin for each deadinvestment banker? As we watch mesmerised, OperationEnduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across theworld. A coalition of the world's superpowers isclosing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, mostravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose rulingTaliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, theman being held responsible for the September 11attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possiblycount as collateral value is its citizenry. (Amongthem, half a million maimed orphans.There are accountsof hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbsare airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.)Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, theproblem for an invading army is that Afghanistan hasno conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on amilitary map - no big cities, no highways, noindustrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farmshave been turned into mass graves. The countryside islittered with land mines - 10 million is the mostrecent estimate. The American army would first have toclear the mines and build roads in order to take itssoldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizenshave fled from their homes and arrived at the borderbetween Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimatesthat there are eight million Afghan citizens who needemergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aidagencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reportsthat one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recenttimes has begun to unfold. Witness the infinitejustice of the new century. Civilians starving todeath while they're waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombingAfghanistan back to the stone age". Someone pleasebreak the news that Afghanistan is already there. Andif it's any consolation, America played no small partin helping it on its way. The American people may be alittle fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (wehear reports that there's a run on maps of thecountry), but the US government and Afghanistan areold friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, theCIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence)launched the largest covert operation in the historyof the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy ofAfghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into aholy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslimcountries within the Soviet Union against thecommunist regime and eventually destabilise it. Whenit began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union'sVietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Overthe years, through the ISI, the CIA funded andrecruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war.The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware thattheir jihad was actually being fought on behalf ofUncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equallyunaware that it was financing a future war againstitself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years ofrelentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leavingbehind a civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread toChechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIAcontinued to pour in money and military equipment, butthe overheads had become immense, and more money wasneeded. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opiumas a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds ofheroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within twoyears of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistanborderland had become the biggest producer of heroinin the world, and the single biggest source of theheroin on American streets. The annual profits, saidto be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed backinto training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect ofdangerous, hardline fundamentalists - fought its wayto power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI,that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by manypolitical parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed aregime of terror. Its first victims were its ownpeople, particularly women. It closed down girls'schools, dismissed women from government jobs, andenforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be"immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty ofbeing adulterous are buried alive. Given the Talibangovernment's human rights track record, it seemsunlikely that it will in any way be intimidated orswerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, orthe threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anythingmore ironic than Russia and America joining hands tore-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can youdestroy destruction? Dropping more bombs onAfghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramblesome old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burialground of Soviet communism and the springboard of aunipolar world dominated by America. It made the spacefor neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, againdominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised tobecome the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers whofought and won this war for America.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too hassuffered enormously. The US government has not beenshy of supporting military dictators who have blockedthe idea of democracy from taking root in the country.Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural marketfor opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, thenumber of heroin addicts grew from zero toone-and-a-half million. Even before September 11,there were three million Afghan refugees living intented camps along the border. Pakistan's economy iscrumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation'sstructural adjustment programmes and drug lords aretearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight theSoviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs,sown like dragon's teeth across the country, producedfundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal withinPakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistangovernment has sup ported, funded and propped up foryears, has material and strategic alliances withPakistan's own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan togarotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard forso many years. President Musharraf, having pledged hissupport to the US, could well find he has somethingresembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part tothe vision of its former leaders, has so far beenfortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game.Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that ourdemocracy, such as it is, would not have survived.Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indiangovernment is furiously gyrating its hips, begging theUS to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan.Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordidfate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable, that Indiashould want to do this. Any third world country with afragile economy and a complex social base should knowby 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 yourwindscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being foughtto uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably endup undermining it completely. It will spawn more angerand more terror across the world. For ordinary peoplein America, it will mean lives lived in a climate ofsickening uncertainty: will my child be safe inschool? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bombin the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight?There have been warnings about the possibility ofbiological warfare - smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax- the deadly payload of innocuous crop-dusteraircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end upbeing worse than being annihilated all at once by anuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all overthe world, will use the climate of war as an excuse tocurtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay offworkers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cutback on public spending and divert huge amounts ofmoney to the defence industry. To what purpose?President Bush can no more "rid the world ofevil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It'sabsurd for the US government to even toy with thenotion that it can stamp out terrorism with moreviolence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, notthe disease. Terrorism has no country. It'stransnational, as global an enterprise as Coke orPepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble,terrorists can pull up stakes and move their"factories" from country to country in search of abetter deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if itis to be contained, the first step is for America toat least acknowledge that it shares the planet withother nations, with other human beings who, even ifthey are not on TV, have loves and griefs and storiesand songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights.Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defencesecretary, was asked what he would call a victory inAmerica's new war, he said that if he could convincethe world that Americans must be allowed to continuewith their way of life, he would consider it avictory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling cardfrom a world gone horribly wrong. The message may havebeen written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and deliveredby his couriers, but it could well have been signed bythe ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. Themillions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invadedLebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed inOperation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinianswho have died fighting Israel's occupation of the WestBank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia,Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, theDominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all theterrorists, dictators and genocidists whom theAmerican government supported, trained, bankrolled andsupplied with arms. And this is far from being acomprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare andconflict, the American people have been extremelyfortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only thesecond on American soil in over a century. The firstwas Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a longroute, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thistime the world waits with bated breath for the horrorsto come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn'texist, America would have had to invent him. But, in away, America did invent him. He was among the jihadiswho moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIAcommenced its operations there. Bin Laden has thedistinction of being created by the CIA and wanted bythe FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has beenpromoted from suspect to prime suspect and then,despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up thecharts to being "wanted dead or alive".

>From all accounts, it will be impossible to produceevidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in acourt of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11attacks. So far, it appears that the mostincriminating piece of evidence against him is thefact that he has not condemned them.

>From what is known about the location of Bin Laden andthe living conditions in which he operates, it'sentirely possible that he did not personally plan andcarry out the attacks - that he is the inspirationalfigure, "the CEO of the holding company". TheTaliban's response to US demands for the extraditionof 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 - canIndia put in a side request for the extradition ofWarren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman ofUnion Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leakthat killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collatedthe necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Couldwe have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrasethat. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's familysecret. He is the American president's darkdoppelg’nger. The savage twin of all that purports tobe beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted fromthe spare rib of a world laid to waste by America'sforeign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nucleararsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrumdominance", its chilling disregard for non-Americanlives, its barbarous military interventions, itssupport for despotic and dictatorial regimes, itsmerciless economic agenda that has munched through theeconomies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.Its marauding multinationals who are taking over theair we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water wedrink, the thoughts we think. Now that the familysecret has been spilled, the twins are blurring intoone another and gradually becoming interchangeable.Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been goingaround in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missilesthat will greet US helicopters were supplied by theCIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts comesfrom Afghanistan. The Bush administration recentlygave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a "war ondrugs"....)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow eachother's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "thehead of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loosemillenarian currency of good and evil as their termsof reference. Both are engaged in unequivocalpolitical crimes. Both are dangerously armed - onewith the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful,the other with the incandescent, destructive power ofthe utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick.The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keepin mind is that neither is an acceptable alternativeto the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world- "If you're not with us, you're against us" - is apiece of presumptuous arrogance. It's not a choicethat people want to, need to, or should have to make.

(c) Arundhati Roy 2001