Failed Prophetess?

On the eve of the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan late last year, Arundhati Roy fired offan epic protest note challenging the instinct for vengeance. The Algebra of Infinite Justice was published inNew Delhi's Outlook,  London's Guardian, and reprinted in many other publications around the world.

Inspired no doubt by her international-celebrity status, and the lively debate triggered off by a previousmonumental critique of India's decision to detonate nuclear devices in May 1998, Roy had decided to take on amuch bigger foe this time around, and without wasting too much time because, as she said, ". war islooming. 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 inits almost Godlike mission ..."

In writing The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Roy steered clear of the semantic tricks synonymous withThe God of Small Things in favour of a more serious, almost dialectical approach. On display were Roy'sdazzling polemical skills, honed by the experience of penning similar angry treatises both before and aftershe achieved literary stardom with her novel.

Even as I admired the passion and conviction that underpinned The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Ifelt it would be a good idea to re-read her essay a year on, if only to subject some of her apocalypticpredictions to reality check and, for good measure, to help laypersons judge Arundhati Roy's credibility as a mobiliser of internationalpublic opinion, not on the basis of her reputation as a novelist but purelyon merit.

In retrospect, Roy did get a few things right, notably that it was America's misguided Cold War-eraobsession with the Communist threat that was the true begetter of the kind of religious extremism that iscurrently rampant across a large swath of the globe. As she observed accurately,  

"In 1979, after theSoviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI launched the largest covert operation in thehistory of the CIA. The purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand itinto a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against thecommunist regime and eventually destabilise it. . The rank and file of the mojadehin were unaware that theirjihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that itwas financing a future war against itself.)" 

Similarly, it is difficult to challenge Roy's assertionthat 

"the September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong".Indeed, from the perspective of a non-American, she struck a particularly poignant chord when she wrote:"The message may have been written by bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it couldwell have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea,Vietnam and Cambodia . . And the millions who died in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, ElSalvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whomthe American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms." 

It's a pity this wasabout all that she got right in The Algebra of InfiniteJustice. 

In any case, the aforesaid accusations arenow well-documented, if understated, facts of Cold War history. As for the rest of her essay, it might as wellbe consigned to the scrap heap of political criticism -- a long homily memorable for its polemic rather thanits substance or prescience. To be sure, no opinion piece comes with a guarantee of  the validity of itscontents,and Roy certainly didn't claim that her views were everlasting truths. 

Still, if I were Arundhati Roy and Iwere to re-read the piece, I would wonder what was so terribly wrong with my understanding of geopolitics thatmy predictions couldn't stand the test of just a year's time.

Consider this statement to start with: 

"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 natureof its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an'international coalition against terror', mobilised its army, air force, its navy and its media, and committedthem to battle". 

Well, the jury is already in with a verdict in favour of Enduring Freedom. Indeed,anyone with access to CNN or BBC knows by now that the military operation accomplished its primary mission ofdestroying the epicentre of terrorism in Afghanistan. And for this, Americans have earned the gratitude notonly of the long-suffering people of that country but in fact of the entire civilised world, which faced aclear and grave danger as long as Afghanistan was in the control of religious extremists bent on exportingterror and disrupting stability everywhere. 

If the US was guilty of anything, it was really the tardiness ofits military response, which allowed many senior Al Qaeda leaders to escape the security dragnet and thousandsof Taliban fighters to melt into the crowd only to reappear as a fifth column inside the new Afghanistan.Cobbling together "an international coalition against terror" may have been diplomatically sound asa strategy, but its success came at a high price, as the mystery surrounding the fates of Osama bin Laden andMullah Omar proves. One thing is for sure, however: the world's most dreaded terrorist group no longer has afiefdom of its own.

Next, Roy joined issue with President Bush's September 20, 2001, address to the US Congress,wherein he posed the now famous question: "Why do they hate us?" From this speech she concluded thatpeople were being asked to make two leaps of faith - 

"first to assume that The Enemy is who the USgovernment says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And, second, toassume that The Enemy's motives are what the US government says they are, and there's nothing to support thateither". 

As luck would have it, The Enemy has since shown its face and made its voice heard on numerousoccasions, courtesy Qatar's enterprising Al Jazeera channel. Of course The Enemy had hardly been reticentbefore September 11, but, alas, nobody in the Clinton administration had the patience to sit down with avideocassette of Osama's many interviews to Al Jazeera before disaster struck. Actually, The Enemy had beensending signals for many years of its desire to stage a truly spectacular attack that would put the previousWorld Trade Centre bombing in the shade. But no one was listening, except the odd junior US intelligenceofficial.

With attacks on Western lives and interests from Bali to Amman becoming an almost everydayoccurrence worldwide, one Roy observation in particular sticks in one's throat. 

"For strategic, militaryand economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment tofreedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the currentatmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it'sreasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and military dominance - the World Trade Center andthe Pentagon - were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty?" 

In theory, Roycould argue now that the Australians, Germans, Britons, French and other Western nationals who are beinghounded by terrorists are paying the price for joining forces with the arrogant Americans, and by the way whoknows that the bombings are the handiwork of the same group that President Bush accuses of masterminding theSeptember 11 assault. But she wouldn't of course. For, this is the same justification being peddled by the AlQaeda through tapes and statements released to the media.

True to the liberal tenor of her essay, Roy made an attempt to portray the hijackers asvictims too, but this was at best a premature exercise:

"The world will probably never know whatmotivated 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 claimedcredit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural humaninstinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered." 

In truth, although some people initiallyspeculated that the attacks of September 11 were a reaction to the Israeli military crackdown on thePalestinian Al Aqsa intifada, later it was established that not one of the hijackers was a Palestinian or hadsuffered hardships directly on account of US policies. And some among the 19 young men had left behind enoughconfessional materials, not to speak of circumstantial evidence, for investigators both to paint theirchilling psycho-profiles and to prove their links to Al Qaeda beyond reasonable doubt.

Roy wrote: 

"Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from theirhomes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. . As supplies run out . the BBC reports thatone of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice ofthe new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed."

Mercifully, thosegloom-and-doom scenarios conjured up by NGOs remained just that, and not many Afghans eventually died ofstarvation although, regrettably and to the Pentagon's undying shame, the number of civilian deaths fromaerial bombardment and land combat did climb into the high thousands.

Talking about Afghanistan, here is another of Roy's many forgettable predictions: 

"Thedesolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolarworld dominated by America. . And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldierswho fought and won this war for America." 

Afghanistan could yet become a graveyard but certainly not ofAmericans, given the tiny fraction of the total US military troop strength currently stationed in thatcountry.

Taking a final swipe at Operation Enduring Freedom, Roy said that it 

"is ostensibly beingfought to uphold the American Way of Life. It will probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawnmore anger and terror across the world. For ordinary Americans, it will mean lives lived in a climate ofsickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? ." 

Assuming she meant the "war onterror" in general and not the Afghan theatre in particular, Roy's forecast has turned out to bechillingly accurate, and she must thank the terrorists more than Americans for that. These days, fear stalksall Westerners (and not only Americans), especially those in foreign lands. Whether that is because ofEnduring Freedom or in spite of it, is a difficult question to answer. After all, the bloodiest terroristattack so far (not to mention the first World Trade Centre bombing, the East African embassy bombings or theblast on the US warship Cole) took place before Enduring Freedom was even a gleam in Donald Rumsfeld's eye. 

Asfor the American Way of Life, the last time anybody checked, it was still alive and throbbing, the occasionalterror alerts notwithstanding.

Roy fretted that 

"the US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, willuse the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harassethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defenceindustry. To what purpose? ." 

Looking back, there is no denying that civil liberties and free speech inthe United States have been curtailed somewhat by the Bush administration's homeland security measures, thatethnic and religious minorities are facing harassment, that Western defence budgets are ballooning while therest of the economy is in dire straits. 

But, equally, it cannot be denied that for ideologically conservativeRepublicans, reducing the government's role in the public sphere and expanding personal liberties were twolongstanding articles of faith. It was September 11 that forced even the most diehard Republican critics ofbig government to modify their views. Likewise, it convinced even the most dovish Democrats of the need tospend more on defence and intelligence gathering if their country was not to follow in impotent Europe'sfootsteps.

Roy warned that 

"it's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that itcan stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.Terrorism has no country. ." 

For one thing, her characterisation of the American response to Osama'sterror campaign as "more violence and oppression" (What do liberated Afghans have to say, I wonder)was too simplistic to deserve a serious rebuttal. For another, whatever else may be known about terrorism as asocio-political phenomenon, no reputable scholar or expert has suggested so far that it is best to tackle theroot causes of terrorism first, and to accord secondary importance to the task of crushing terrorists.

Roy understandably had saved the best display of rhetorical flourish for the ending. ".What is Osama bin Laden?" she asked and then proceeded to answer the question herself. 

"He'sAmerica's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all thatpurports to be beautiful and civilised. . Now that the family secrets have been spilled, the twins areblurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. . Both are engaged in unequivocal politicalcrimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other withthe incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. . The important thing to keep in mind is thatneither is an acceptable alternative to the other." 

Such a sweeping assumption of moral equivalencebetween the United States and Al Qaeda, between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, was outrageous in its face.It is even more outrageous one year on, when terrorism linked to religious fanaticism is emerging in tandemwith Islamophobia as a serious threat to global harmony and stability, and as a catalyst for a real clash ofcivilisations. 

The US, as everyone knows, is guilty of many crimes, but it is hardly devoid of redeemingfeatures, unlike the Al Qaeda. It doesn't need a rocket scientist to see that the modern world cannot dowithout the US, whereas the world can do fine without the Al Qaeda. If the US wants to launch military strikesagainst a country (Iraq for instance), at least it serves numerous notices on that state and engages the restof the world in a freewheeling debate; the Al Qaeda, by contrast, strikes first, and lets the talking headsand policymakers do the debating afterwards. And yes, one is an acceptable alternative compared to the other(and no prizes for guessing which one.)

In the final analysis, just because The Algebra of Infinite Justice has turned out to a failed prophecy inno way though detracts from the good work that Arundhati Roy has been doing as the liberal conscience of anation going through a conservative reawakening. 

Through her bold denunciations of the growing climate ofreligious intolerance, the BJP-led government's misguided (if ultimately rewarding) move to go nuclear and theexcesses of the Indian judiciary, as also through her efforts to build bridges of friendship with Pakistanis,she has been a beacon of hope for Indians around the world who feel powerless in the face of the dauntingproblems facing the nation. 

Indeed, as a contrarian, she has a valuable role to play in a country that pridesitself on its secularist, tolerant and democratic character. Therefore, if The Algebra of Infinite Justiceproves anything, it is that she should continue to speak out on matters concerning our subcontinent, whileavoiding larger geopolitical issues that are clearly not for the squeamish.

Arnab Sengupta is a senior newspaper editor and international-affairs commentator.