A war that can't be won
The west isn't just losing the fight against terrorism - it is fueling it
across the globe
Seumas Milne
Thursday November 21, 2002
The Guardian
This time last year, supporters of George Bush's war on terror were in
euphoric mood. As one Taliban stronghold after another fell to the
US-backed Northern Alliance, they hailed the advance as a decisive blow to
the authors of the September 11 atrocities. The critics and doom-mongers
had been confounded, cheerleaders crowed. Kites were flying again, music
was playing and women were throwing off their burkas with joyful abandon.
As the US president demanded Osama bin Laden "dead or alive", government
officials on both sides of the Atlantic whispered that they were less than
48 hours from laying hands on the al-Qaida leader. By destroying the
terrorist network's Afghan bases and its Taliban sponsors, supporters of
the war argued, the Americans and their friends had ripped the heart out of
the beast. Washington would now begin to address Muslim and Arab grievances
by fast-tracking the establishment of a Palestinian state. Downing Street
even published a rollcall of shame of journalists they claimed had been
proved wrong by a hundred days of triumph. And in parliament, Jack Straw
ridiculed Labour MPs for suggesting that the US and Britain might still be
fighting in Afghanistan 12 months down the line.
One year on, the crowing has long since faded away; reality has sunk in.
After six months of multiplying Islamist attacks on US, Australian and
European targets, civilian and military - in Tunisia, Pakistan, Kuwait,
Russia, Jordan, Yemen, the US and Indonesia - western politicians are
having to face the fact that they are losing their war on terror. In
Britain, the prime minister has taken to warning of the "painful price"
that the country will have to pay to defeat those who are "inimical to all
we stand for", while leaks about the risk of chemical or biological attacks
have become ever more lurid. After a year of US military operations in
Afghanistan and around the world, the CIA director George Tenet had to
concede that the threat from al-Qaida and associated jihadist groups was as
serious as before September 11. "They've reconstituted, they are coming
after us," he said.
In other words, the global US onslaught had been a complete failure - at
least as far as dealing with non-state terrorism was concerned. Tom
Daschle, the Democrats' leader in the Senate, was even more brutal. Summing
up a litany of unmet objectives in the US confrontation with militant
Islamism, he asked: "By what measure can we say this has been successful?"
But most galling of all has been the authentication of the latest taped
message from Bin Laden himself, promising bloody revenge for the deaths of
the innocent in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the man whose
capture or killing was, after all, the first objective of Bush's war. And
yet, along with the Taliban leader and one-eyed motorbiker Mullah Omar, the
mastermind of America's humiliation remains free.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan itself, the record is just as dismal. By using
the heroin-financed gangsters of the Northern Alliance to overthrow the
Taliban regime and pursue al-Qaida remnants ever since, the US has handed
over most of the country to the same war criminals who devastated
Afghanistan in the early 1990s. In Kabul, the US puppet president Hamid
Karzai can rely on foreign troops to prop up his fragile authority. There,
and in a few other urban centres, some girls' schools have re-opened and
the worst manifestations of the Taliban's grotesque oppression of women
have gone.
But in much of what is once again the opium capital of the world, the
return of the lawlords has meant harsh political repression, lawlessness,
mass rape and widespread torture, the bombing or closure of schools, as
well as Taliban-style policing of women's dress and behaviour. The
systematic use by Ismail Khan, who runs much of western Afghanistan with US
support, of electric shock torture, arbitrary arrests and whippings to
crush dissent is set out in a new Human Rights Watch report. Khan was
nevertheless described by the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently
as a "thoughtful" and "appealing" person. His counterpart in the north,
General Dostam, has in turn just been accused by the UN of torturing
witnesses to his troops' murder of thousands of Taliban prisoners late last
year, when he was working closely with US special forces.
The death toll exacted for this "liberation" can only be estimated. But a
consensus is growing that around 3,500 Afghan civilians were killed by US
bombing (which included the large-scale use of depleted uranium weapons),
with up to 10,000 combatants killed and many more deaths from cold and
hunger as a result of the military action. Now, long after the war was
supposed to be over, the US 82nd airborne division is reported to be
alienating the population in the south and east with relentless but largely
fruitless raids and detentions, while mortar and rocket attacks on US bases
are now taking place at least three times a week. As General Richard Myers,
chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, puts it, the US military campaign
in Afghanistan has "lost momentum".
All this has been the inevitable product of the central choice made last
autumn, which was to opt for a mainly military solution to the challenge of
Islamist terrorism. That was a recipe for failure. By their nature,
terrorist or guerrilla campaigns which have deep social roots and draw on a
widespread sense of injustice - as militant Islamist groups do, regardless
of the obscurantism of their ideology - cannot be defeated militarily. And
as the war on terror has increasingly become a war to enforce US global
power, it has only intensified the appeal of "asymmetric warfare" to the
powerless.
The grievances al-Qaida is able to feed on throughout the Muslim world were
once again spelled out in Bin Laden's latest edict. But there is little
sign of any weakening of the wilful western refusal to address seriously
the causes of Islamist terrorism. Thus, during the past year, the US has
armed and bolstered Pakistan and the central Asian dictatorships, supported
Putin's ongoing devastation of Chechnya, continued to bomb and blockade
Iraq at huge human cost, established new US bases across the Muslim world
and, most recklessly of all, provided every necessary cover for Ariel
Sharon's bloody rampages through the occupied Palestinian territories. In
most of this, despite Tony Blair's muted appeals for a new Middle East
peace conference, Britain has played the role of faithful lieutenant.
Now, even as "phase one" of its war on terror has been seen to have failed,
the US shows every sign of preparing to launch phase two: its long-planned
invasion and occupation of Iraq. Perhaps some of the intensity of the
current warnings about terrorist threats is intended to help soften up
public opinion for an unpopular war. But what is certain about such an act
of aggression is that it will fuel Islamist terrorism throughout the world
and make attacks on those countries which support it much more likely. If
such outrages take place in Britain, there can no longer be any surprise or
mystery about why we have been attacked, no point in asking why they hate
us. Of course, it wouldn't be the innocents who were killed or injured who
would be to blame. But by throwing Britain's weight behind a flagrantly
unjust war, our political leaders would certainly be held responsible for
endangering their own people.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
