Kaleidoscope
A war without end
Syed Fattahul Alim
A decade has passed since the World Trade Centre (Twin Tower) collapsed in a suicide plane attack on September 9, 2001 (9/11). The attack was termed an act of international terrorism. And al-Qaeda, a militant Islamist outfit led by infamous Osama bin Laden was believed to be the destroyer of the Twin Tower.
It was described by the then US President George W. Bush as an act of "evil," an evil that was out to destroy America, a champion of democracy and civilisation. Civilisation because about a decade and a half before the Twin Tower tragedy, the Reagan administration had defined international terrorism as one that is sponsored by a state.
It said, according to the celebrated scholar Noam Chomsky: "State-supported international terrorism a 'plague spread by depraved opponents of civilisation itself' in a "return to barbarism in the modern age' -- I'm quoting [Secretary of State] George Shultz who was the administration moderate."
So, international terrorism was an evil force, something that opposed civilisation and wanted to take the modern world back to "barbarism."
A decade later, it was again an international terrorism, which was, of course, not a state-sponsored one, as the identified perpetrator of the Twin Tower destruction, al-Qaeda, did not represent a state. Since this kind of international terrorism had no state, the "war" against it could not have any particular state as its front. It can be anywhere on earth. That, in other words, is a war without front.
The implication was clear and simple. As the US was spearheading this war, it had the right to attack any state or place on earth if it was found that it was harbouring such force of international terrorism.
And the war being against an evil that is hell-bent on destroying human civilisation, it could not be but just another war, rather it must be a just and sacred war. Now that the US was leading the war, it could claim a universal support for such a just cause.
So, it became the bounden duty of any nation that believed in peace, democracy and as such willing to protect civilisation, to be with the US in the war against terrorism.
To extend the argument, anyone, who was not with the US in this war, was against the cause. And anyone against the cause, anyone not with the US, was by definition against US. A very simple, cogent and convenient logic.
And following the 9/11, the war began first at the end of 2001 in Afghanistan, where the supposed perpetrator of the Twin Tower tragedy was hiding. The US sent bombers, missiles from US fleet in the Persian Gulf and special CIA forces to ferret out the culprit headquartered at Tora Bora. Even with intensive bombing of Tora Bora, a complex of caves in the so-called Safed Koh Mountains, which in English stands for "White Mountains," nothing could be attained.
Though the US forces, along with British commandos assisted by local tribals, were not able to capture Tora Bora, neither a large depot of arms and ammunitions, nor big training centres of the Laden forces could be traced. And Laden vanished as if into thin air.
Since Laden could not be found, the war continued and the blood of the Afghan people was spilled in profusion. The search for Laden and as such the war endured.
The war spread into Pakistan from where the Afghan Taleban, another force against civilisation, (ironically, though, it was created by the US itself to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan), were giving support to Laden's al-Qaeda.
Meanwhile as the war had been raging in Afghanistan, another front was opened in the first quarter of 2003, in Iraq, though under a different excuse. It was that the then Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein had amassed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that it was a threat against America, the protector of modern civilisation. The war had already cost US around US$900 billion and more than 4,400 body bags. About Iraqi casualties, though there is no exact figure, yet according to a London-based independent polling agency, Opinion Research Survey Business (ORB) survey disclosed in 2007, the number was more than one million.
So, by 2011, the figure must have risen further, say, to another half a million, since the nature of the engagement is not as intensive as it was in the beginning.
Similarly the Afghan war cost has reached over US$ 117 billion and casualty figure of Afghans at over one million, while those of the coalition forces over 2,700 including 1,700 US servicemen.
But what has been achieved by these wars? Is the world securer now than it was before the collapse of Twin Tower? Now that the most hunted lynchpin of terrorism Bin Laden had been tracked down in Pakistan by the CIA on May 2 this year and was killed, has international terrorism subsided?
Quite to the contrary. It has widened its sphere further. Pakistan is in the grip of worst kind of terrorism and virtually an extended front of the Afghan war. World is now more divided and xenophobic.
War begets, if anything, only war and not peace. And that is the lesson of history.
The writer is Editor, Science & Life, The Daily Star.
Sigh.. Pakistanis..and their logic
