A War Of Lies

A war that is supposed to help feed the desperate people ofAfghanistan will in fact help starve them.

A war supposedly brought on by Taliban intransigence wasactually provoked by our own government.

A war that the majority of the American people believe isabout their grief, anger and desire for revenge is really about the cold-bloodedcalculations of a small elite seeking to extend its power.

And a war that is supposed to make us safer has put us infar 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 adecade of U.S. aggression with a humanitarian façade.

Once the natural sympathies of the American people weretouched by the plight of the long-suffering Afghan people, public opinion swungtoward helping them. In response to this, the administration concocted the mostshameless and cynical cover story for military strikes in recent memory. Theidea, leaked last Thursday, went like this:

• The Afghan people are starving, so we need to do food drops. (Nevermind 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 food drops.
  

• 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. TheWorld Food Program operates a bakery in Kabul on which thousands of familiesdepend, as well as many other programs. A number of United Nations organizationshave been mounting a major new coordinated humanitarian campaign. These effortswere not endangered by the Taliban before, but the chaos and violence created bythis bombing -- combined with a projected assault by the Northern Alliance --will likely force UN personnel to withdraw, with disastrous effects for theAfghan people.

To add insult to injury, in the first day the United Statesdropped only 37,500 packaged meals, far below the daily needs of even a singlelarge refugee camp. With 7.5 million people on the brink of death and existingprograms disrupted, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the damage causedby this new war.

Those who starve or freeze will not be the only innocentsto die. It should finally be clear to all that "surgical strikes" are amyth. 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 surgical strikesdestroyed the Amiriyah bomb shelter, killing somewhere from 400 to 1,500 womenand children. In Operation Infinite Reach, the 1998 attacks on Afghanistan, someof the cruise missiles went astray and hit Pakistan. Military officials havealready admitted that not all of the ordnance being used is "smart," andeven the current generation of smart weapons hit their target only 70 to 80percent of the time.

Contrary to U.S. propaganda, civilian targets are always onthe list. There are already reports that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban,was targeted for assassination, and the Defense Ministry in Kabul -- surely nomore military a target than the Pentagon -- and located in the middle of thecity, has been destroyed.

This is standard U.S. practice. In the Gulf War, virtuallyevery power station in Iraq was destroyed, with untold effects on civilians. Acorrespondent for al-Jazeera TV reported that power went out in Kabul when thebombing started, 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. Thehundreds of thousands of Afghans who fled the cities knew better.

Military analysts suggest that the timing of the strikeshad to do with the weather. Another possible interpretation is that theTaliban’s recently-expressed willingness to negotiate posed too great a dangerthat peace might break out. The Orwellian use of the term "diplomacy" todescribe the consistent U.S. policy of no negotiations -- accept our peremptorydemands or else -- helps to mask the fact that the administration alwaysintended to launch this war.

The same tactic was used against Serbia; at the Rambouilletnegotiations in March 1999, demands were pitched just high enough that theSerbian government could not go along.

In this case, the Taliban’s offer to detain bin Laden andtry him before an Islamic court, while unacceptable, was a serious initialnegotiating position and would have merited a serious counteroffer -- unless onehad 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 makes it easier to expand police powers, restrict civil liberties, and increase the military budget.

This war is about the extension of U.S. power. It haslittle to do with bringing the terrorists to justice, or with vengeance. Judgingfrom initial polls, the war has been popular as the administration trades onpeople’s desire for revenge -- but we should hardly confuse the emotionalreaction of the public with the motivation of the administration. Governments donot feel emotions.

This war will not make us more secure. For weeks, many inthe antiwar movement -- and some careful commentators in more mainstream circles-- have been saying that military action was playing into the hands of Osama binLaden, who may have been hoping for such an attack to spark the flames ofanti-American feeling in the Muslim world. Bin Laden’s pre-taped speech,broadcast on al-Jazeera television after the bombing started, vindicates thatanalysis.

"Either you are with us or you are with theterrorists," Bush said on Sept. 20. Bin Laden’s appeal to the ummah, thewhole 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 expandedIslamic one, something unlikely had we not bombed. Remember, we have seen onlythe opening shots of what many officials are calling a long-term, multi-frontwar in which the secretary of defense has told us there will be no "silverbullet." The administration has clearly been preparing the American people toaccept an extended conflict.

Bin Laden’s world is Bush’s, in some strangelydistorted mirror. A world divided as they seem to want would have no place in itfor those of us who want peace with justice.

All is not yet lost. The first step is for us to send amessage, not just to our government but to the whole world, saying, "Thisaction done in our name was not done by our will. We are against the killing ofinnocents anywhere in the world."

The next step is for us to build a movement that can changeour government’s barbaric and self-destructive policy.

If we don’t act now to build a new world, we may just beleft with no world.

(Rahul Mahajan serves on the National Board of PeaceAction. Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas.Both are members of the NowarCollective. They can be reached at rahul@tao.ca)