A war that is supposed to help feed the desperate people of Afghanistan will
in fact help starve them.
A war supposedly brought on by Taliban intransigence was actually provoked
by our own government.
A war that the majority of the American people believe is about their grief,
anger and desire for revenge is really about the cold-blooded calculations
of a small elite seeking to extend its power.
And a war that is supposed to make us safer has put us in far greater danger
by increasing the likelihood of further terrorist attacks.
Let’s take those points in order.
Our undeclared war on Afghanistan is the culmination of a decade of U.S.aggression
with a humanitarian façade.
Once the natural sympathies of the American people were touched by the plight
of the long-suffering Afghan people, public opinion swung toward helpingthem.
In response to this, the administration concocted the most shamelessand cynical
cover story for military strikes in recent memory. The idea,leaked last Thursday,
went like this:
-- The Afghan people are starving, so we need to do food drops. (Never mind
that all those experienced in humanitarian aid programs are opposed to food
drops because they are dangerous and wasteful, and, most important, preclude
setting up the on-the-ground distribution networks necessary to making aid
effective.)
-- We need to destroy the Taliban’s air defenses before doing fooddrops.
-- The transport planes may be endangered by the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles
that the United States supplied the mujaheddin in the 1980s when they were
fighting the Soviet Union, and some of which ended up in the Taliban’s
hands.
-- We have to destroy the Taliban’s air defense. Because so much of
it is mobile, we have to bomb all over.
The bombing will seriously hinder existing aid efforts. The World Food Program
operates a bakery in Kabul on which thousands of families depend, as well
as many other programs. A number of United Nations organizations have been
mounting a major new coordinated humanitarian campaign. These efforts were
not endangered by the Taliban before, but the chaos and violence createdby
this bombing -- combined with a projected assault by the Northern Alliance
-- will likely force UN personnel to withdraw, with disastrous effects for
the Afghan people.
To add insult to injury, in the first day the United States dropped only37,500
packaged meals, far below the daily needs of even a single large refugeecamp.
With 7.5 million people on the brink of death and existing programsdisrupted,
this is a drop in the bucket compared to the damage caused bythis new war.
Those who starve or freeze will not be the only innocents to die. It should
finally be clear to all that “surgical strikes” are a myth. In
the Gulf War, only 7 percent of the munitions used were “smart,”
and those missed the target roughly half the time. One of those surgicalstrikes
destroyed the Amiriyah bomb shelter, killing somewhere from 400 to1,500 women
and children. In Operation Infinite Reach, the 1998 attacks onAfghanistan,
some of the cruise missiles went astray and hit Pakistan. Militaryofficials
have already admitted that not all of the ordnance being used is“smart,”
and even the current generation of smart weapons hittheir target only 70to
80 percent of the time.
Contrary to U.S. propaganda, civilian targets are always on the list.
There are already reports that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was
targeted for assassination, and the Defense Ministry in Kabul -- surely no
more military a target than the Pentagon -- and located in the middle ofthe
city, has been destroyed.
This is standard U.S. practice. In the Gulf War, virtually every power station
in Iraq was destroyed, with untold effects on civilians. A correspondentfor
al-Jazeera TV reported that power went out in Kabul when the bombingstarted,
although it was restored in some places within hours. Targetingof any pitiful
remnants of civilian infrastructure in Afghanistan would beconsistent with
past U.S. policy.
George Bush said we are not at war with the Afghan people -- just as we were
not at war with the Iraqi people or the Serbian people. The hundreds of thousands
of Afghans who fled the cities knew better.
Military analysts suggest that the timing of the strikes had to do with the
weather. Another possible interpretation is that the Taliban’s recently-expressed
willingness to negotiate posed too great a danger that peace might breakout.
The Orwellian use of the term “diplomacy” to describe theconsistent
U.S. policy of no negotiations -- accept our peremptory demandsor else --
helps to mask the fact that the administration always intendedto launch this
war.
The same tactic was used against Serbia; at the Rambouillet negotiationsin
March 1999, demands were pitched just high enough that the Serbian government
could not go along.
In this case, the Taliban’s offer to detain bin Laden and try him before
an Islamic court, while unacceptable, was a serious initial negotiating position
and would have merited a serious counteroffer -- unless one had already decided
to go to war.
The administration has many reasons for this war.
-- The policy of imperial credibility, carried to such destructive extremes
in Vietnam. In perhaps the last five years of direct U.S. involvement there,
the goal was not to “win,” but to inflict such a price on Vietnam
that other nations would not think of crossing the United States.
-- The oil and natural gas of central Asia, the next Middle East. Afghanistan’s
location between the Caspian basin and huge markets in Japan, China and the
Indian subcontinent gives it critical importance. A U.S-controlled client
state in Afghanistan, presumably under the exiled octogenarian former king,
Zahir Shah, would give U.S. corporations great leverage over those resources.
Just as in the Middle East, the United States does not seek to own all those
resources, but it wants to dictate the manner in which the wells and pipelines
are developed and used.
-- The potential to push a radical right-wing domestic agenda. War makesit
easier to expand police powers, restrict civil liberties, and increasethe
military budget.
This war is about the extension of U.S. power. It has little to do with bringing
the terrorists to justice, or with vengeance. Judging from initial polls,
the war has been popular as the administration trades on people’s desire
for revenge -- but we should hardly confuse the emotional reaction of the
public with the motivation of the administration. Governments do not feel
emotions.
This war will not make us more secure. For weeks, many in the antiwar movement
-- and some careful commentators in more mainstream circles -- have beensaying
that military action was playing into the hands of Osama bin Laden,who may
have been hoping for such an attack to spark the flames of anti-Americanfeeling
in the Muslim world. Bin Laden’s pre-taped speech, broadcaston al-Jazeera
television after the bombing started, vindicates that analysis.
“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” Bush
said on Sept. 20. Bin Laden’s appeal to the ummah, the whole Islamic
world, echoed this logic: “The world is divided into two sides -- the
side of faith and the side of infidelity.”
The American jihad may yet be matched by a widely expanded Islamic one, something
unlikely had we not bombed. Remember, we have seen only the opening shots
of what many officials are calling a long-term, multi-front war in whichthe
secretary of defense has told us there will be no “silver bullet.”
The administration has clearly been preparing the American people to accept
an extended conflict.
Bin Laden’s world is Bush’s, in some strangely distorted mirror.
A world divided as they seem to want would have no place in it for thoseof
us who want peace with justice.
All is not yet lost. The first step is for us to send a message, not just
to our government but to the whole world, saying, “This action done
in our name was not done by our will. We are against the killing of innocents
anywhere in the world.”
The next step is for us to build a movement that can change our government’s
barbaric and self-destructive policy.
If we don’t act now to build a new world, we may just be left withno
world.
Rahul Mahajan serves on the National Board of Peace Action. Robert Jensen
is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas. Both are members
of the Nowar Collective (www.nowarcollective.com
). They can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu or rahul@tao.ca.