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 centers, 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 behavior. 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 defense 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.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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