Re-mapping the globe

Published : Oct 27, 2001 00:00 IST

What is new in the United States' foreign policy is the declaration that it has the unique right to make war against any government that it considers inimical to its interests, and the notice that has been served upon the world to either support this policy or face retribution.

AIJAZ AHMAD

AS I begin drafting this essay on October 18, on the twelfth day of the war on Afghanistan, it has become quite clear that the real strategic aim of the United States (U.S.) is not so much a change of regime in Afghanistan but to obtain realignments of power across the globe. The destruction of the World Trade Centre (WTC) was by any reckoning an act of a group of desperadoes with so few resources that even after 12 days of bombings, which have brought the main cities of Afghanistan - Mazaar-e-Sharif, Herat and even Kabul and Kandahar - close to collapse, the so-called "terror with a global reach" has not been able to retaliate even in one place in the entire world. Yet, the event has been cited by the U.S. time and again as the one that authorises it to make overt and covert wars wherever and whenever it so desires, in all corners of the globe.

In his televised address to the joint session of the U.S. Congress a few days after the hijackers' attack, President Bush claimed that there were tens of thousands of terrorists lurking in some 60 countries and the U.S. was going to wage a global, permanent war to weed them out from every nook and corner of the earth. As the pounding of Afghanistan began, John Negroponte, chief U.S. envoy to the United Nations, wrote a letter to the Security Council stating that "we may find that our self-defence requires further action with respect to other organisations and other states". This was undoubtedly the first communication in the history of the U.N. in which a member-state notified the Security Council of its intent to make war against other member-states without naming them, nor even revealing how many of the member-states were to be targeted. At about the same time, Canadian media revealed that soon after the WTC attack a Seattle-based company that makes maps had received instructions from the U.S. government to supply all existing maps of all parts of Afghanistan, and that by the end of the month it had received a similar instruction to forward all possible maps of Sudan and Yemen as well. Were they also to be targeted?

A week into the war on Afghanistan, International Herald Tribune reported that an influential group in the Pentagon, which possibly includes Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was arguing that the next step in the war should be the ouster of Saddam Hussein by American forces in an operation that might include occupation of a part of Iraq so as to instal a "government" comprised of Iraqi exiles close to the U.S. and even the capture of oil fields near Basra in southern Iraq so as to sell the oil from there to pay the expenses of this puppet regime. This, despite the fact that a whole host of intelligence agencies, from the Israeli to the Jordanian - not to speak of Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State - have said that Saddam had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. The Defence Policy Board, a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon, was reported to have met for 19 hours to consider this option, with Henry Kissinger (Nixon's Secretary of State), Harold Brown (Carter's Defence Secretary), James Woolsey (Central Intelligence Agency Director during the Clinton regime), Admiral David Jeremiah (a former Deputy Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff), Newt Gingrich (the infamous Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives) and other such luminaries in attendance. In the light of his career as a chief spook, Woolsey was assigned the task of assembling "evidence" that would show Saddam's links to "terror with a global reach" and would then be used to prepare a "legal case" to justify such an operation. By now, the U.S. has even invented a name for this new global policy: "regime replacement". Any regime that is not to the liking of the U.S. may face such "replacement".

ESSAY

In the strict sense, of course, this is not a new policy. The U.S. has a long history of overt and covert interventions around the globe with the explicit aim of overthrowing existing governments. The Islamicist jehad in Afghanistan, which eventually gave rise to the Taliban, was itself product of such a policy, which was aimed at overthrowing the government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and the policy had come into force well before the Soviet Union had intervened to defend that government. In more recent years, such a policy was implemented successfully in Yugoslavia and unsuccessfully in Somalia. What is new is a certain globalisation of this policy, a declaration that the U.S. has the unique right to make war against any and all governments that it considers inimical to its interests, and the notice that has been served upon the world to either support this policy or face retribution. Kofi Annan, who does the U.S. bidding in such matters, has even been awarded a Nobel prize for his efforts.

WHAT are the costs and prospects of success for this policy in Afghanistan? Estimates suggest that even before the bombings began many more Afghans had died than the total number killed in the WTC attack, owing to the chaos and devastation caused by just the threat of U.S. strikes, generating new internal refugees and leading to the collapse of the food aid programmes upon which some half a million Afghans had until then relied. Pakistan now expects a million new refugees; all the other neighbouring states are bracing for unpredicted levels of influx. British commanders have already warned that the campaign against the Taliban shall last "at least into next summer". The attendant and inevitable human suffering that such a campaign promises to bring about is strictly unimaginable.

Afghanistan is now in the midst of the scenario we had predicted (Frontline, October 12, 2001). The first phase of this scenario involves a round of massive bombings and well-orchestrated operations by "special forces" to disorganise the Taliban resistance and destroy what little infrastructure the devastated and drought-ridden country still had. At the time of this writing, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has already promised a new phase soon and all indications seem to be that the landing of ground forces is imminent, first to occupy some outlying areas to establish bases of operation and then to occupy ghost cities from where the population will be made to flee through saturation bombings. Regardless of what the U.S. says about its intent to avoid civilian casualties, population centres shall be bombed precisely because it is into the general population that the Taliban and their allies shall melt away. The U.S. would prefer to not occupy Afghanistan for long. Domestic support for this operation is likely to evaporate if any significant number of Americans start dying in the battlefields. They would like to hand over the occupied country to the U.N., which would be required to finish the job that the U.S. itself cannot.

There are problems, however. Whether the spectacular strikes end in weeks or in months, they will not be followed by peace. Afghans do not take kindly to foreign occupation, and there is bound to be a long period of low-intensity warfare, hit-and-run skirmishes and so on, which would involve many more than just the remaining Taliban. This would then be complicated by regional, ethnic and tribal conflicts and shifting alliances not only among the larger nationalities but even among the Pashtuns themselves who comprise some 40 per cent of the population.

The U.S. has thought up four responses to these difficulties. First, much hope is pinned on Zahir Shah, the 86-year old former king who has been cooling his heels in Rome since 1973 and whom Richard Haas, a senior State Department official, visited with the offer of a long-forgotten throne before the bombing began. Second, this fraudulent monarchical restoration is to be buttressed by a U.N.-sponsored loi jirga (grand gathering of the elders and notables from different ethnic groups) so as to prop up the pretence of a broad-based, indigenously constituted government. Third, a "green force" authorised by the Security Council and comprised of troops drawn from some Muslim countries is being mooted as a peacekeeping force to oversee a post-Taliban transition and the dawn of a new order. Turkey, a Muslim country that commands the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's second largest army, is being proposed to lead such a multilateral force. Finally, the U.S. hopes to win the loyalty of the vanquished Afghans with huge amounts of humanitarian aid for the populace and development aid for the well-heeled.

EACH of these proposals is beset with difficulties, however. A quick end to the operations is unlikely not only because the cessation of large-scale bombings would be followed by long-drawn low-intensity warfare but also because the U.S. does want the Taliban government to collapse but does not want to have the Northern Alliance occupy the cities on its own. The Alliance is supported by not only India, which makes it impossible for Pakistan to allow it to triumph, but also Russia and Iran, whom the U.S. itself will not like to give so prominent a role in the final settlement. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf claims that he has "iron-clad" guarantees from the U.S. that the Northern Alliance will not be allowed to gain much advantage in case of a Taliban collapse. Indeed, Pakistan is reported to have threatened to close its airspace to U.S. aircraft and cancel other kinds of support if the U.S. allows the Northern Alliance to occupy Kabul. Internally, the Alliance is comprised mainly of Tajiks and Uzbeks, and its victory is likely to unite most of the Pashtuns behind the Taliban. On the ground, therefore, the present situation is ambiguous.

The fighting front between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance lies some 55 kilometres from Kabul, and the Taliban, instead of disintegrating, is reported to have sent reinforcements to the front, assuming that the U.S. will not bomb them for fear of letting the Northern Alliance march on Kabul. The U.S. is indeed faced with a hard choice. It can either bomb the Taliban positions, let the Northern Alliance enter Kabul, allow the coalition around Pakistan unravel and accept enduring Russian influence in the country; or, it can leave the nucleus of the Taliban forces intact and send its own occupation force into the cities before taking on those forces, facing the possibility of guerilla attacks on its operating units. Sketchy reports seem to suggest that the U.S. has started bombing the Taliban forces and that units of the Northern Alliance led by Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek, are closing in on Mazaar-e-Sharif, a largely Uzbek city, while the units of Ismael Khan, a Tajik, are likewise closing in on Herat. Significantly, both Dostum and Ismael Khan are supported by Iran; Dostum in particular has also received aid from Russia and India. The U.S. thinking on all this remains unclear.

Thanks to the prospect of continuing low-intensity warfare in which the indigenous guerillas would have great advantage, the U.S. and the United Kingdom are keen to disengage as soon as possible but the U.N. itself is not keen to step in, for fear of an unsustainable level of casualties. Nor is it at all clear that many Muslim countries would volunteer troops for such an engagement. On paper at least, Iran has not even allowed its airspace to be used for U.S. operations. It is also well-known that before agreeing to offer all the support to the U.S. even Pakistan got the latter to agree that its own troops shall not be available for operations in Afghanistan. Turkey is complaining that its compliance with the U.S.-imposed blockade of Iraq, previously its largest trading partner, has already cost it $30 billion. Nor can the government there ignore the fact that in a recent poll only 29 per cent of the Turks supported the U.S. action at all, let alone the deployment of their own troops. Arab governments are so fearful that Saudi Arabia itself, the arch enemy of Osama bin Laden, has refused to freeze the bank accounts of companies and charities associated with him, despite U.S. pressure, for fear of reprisals. Impressive anti-American protests have already taken place in every Muslim country, from Indonesia to Kenya, Iran to Morocco, not to speak of Pakistan where protests have broken out not only in the larger cities like Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta but even in the small town of Jacobabad in the interior of Sindh where thousands rampaged through the town and two were killed.

American difficulties regarding the projected post-Taliban setup are equally formidable. It is doubtful that Zahir Shah has much following beyond the circle of exiled notables or that any of the contenders for power inside Afghanistan want to be subjected to his titular authority. The Iranian regime, heir to an anti-monarchical revolution, has made known its great displeasure, and Pakistan was not enthusiastic about any such dispensation even in the 1980s when both the Soviets and the Americans had considered it at one time or another. Negotiations to bring back the king are reported to have stalled already. Nor would a loi jirga called by the Americans to instal a government favoured by them be acceptable to any of the Islamicist groups, and it is yet to be seen if many of the Muslim countries that could carry conviction in Afghanistan would be forthcoming to take over the responsibility to clean up the mess Americans are making.

Given all these factors, it would appear from currently available evidence that the U.S. would either be unable to extricate itself speedily from the engagement it has taken upon itself and would continue to bomb and kill in the name of what its ideologists and philosophers would sell to the world as a "just war"; or, the U.S. would at some point declare its war on Al Qaeda won and would then withdraw, leaving Afghanistan with a human tragedy even worse than what it currently faces. The one great asset the U.S. does have is money in unimaginably large quantities, which it can use to buy clients among the elite or to feed some of the millions whom its policies of the past 20 years have rendered hungry and hopeless. So, they are likely to throw money at the corpses and call it "humanitarian aid".

The compulsion to withdraw may come also from the shape of the U.S. economy, which declined in September for 12th consecutive month, experiencing the longest decline since 1975. The WTC attack only worsened the state of the investors' confidence, which had been plummeting for a whole year, despite nine interest cuts by the Federal Reserve, which brought the lending rate from close to 6 per cent down to 2.5 per cent within that year. This absence of investor confidence despite great incentives and inducements mirrors the loss of consumer confidence in an economy where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost during these months and millions of families are fearful of losing stable incomes and therefore reluctant to spend. This fear is fed further by the fear of war and terror, not to speak of warnings by the Federal Reserve itself that the economy shall decline further before any recovery can be firmly predicted.

Faced with this crisis of spending, a whole host of Western leaders, from Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Prime Minister of France, to officials of the U.S. Treasury, have started preaching a new kind of patriotism - "the patriotism of shopping" - whereby spending money, even money that one takes on loan, is said to be a patriotic duty. But spending on what? Fear of hijackings has already led to such a fear of flying that cutbacks in the number of flights have led to 200,000 job losses in the airline industry in just over a month. Twelve per cent of the world's consumer spending is now tied up with tourism, 25 per cent with entertainment as such; those beset by fear of war, terror and unemployment begin to abstain from such spending, contributing to stagnation. It is possible that a section of the capitalist class shall itself step forward to put an end to the zealotry of the warmongers even more effectively than the street protests can do.

IT would be extremely foolish, however, to imagine that the U.S. is headed for a policy failure. The retreat, if it comes, shall be an orderly one, with gains already made. For, the internal settlement in Afghanistan, or the well-being of its inhabitants, is an insignificant part of the U.S.' objectives. More crucial is the project to re-draw the geo-strategic and political maps of the world. If the relentless destruction of Iraq has been a project to consolidate the Western alliance and silence the Third World through a decade-long demonstration of what the "sole superpower" can do to a Third World country after the "other superpower" - the Soviet Union - has been dismantled, this so-called "war on terrorism", starting with one of the poorest and long-suffering countries on this earth, is designed to draw the member-countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development actively into junior partnerships in warmongering and to tell the Third World that it is not only to be silenced but to actively serve in the imperial project, much as native armies used to be activated for colonial conquest.

Under Blair's stewardship, Britain has been drawn actively into a military action which, for that wretched country of colonial nostalgia, serves as something resembling the fourth Afghan War, with success guaranteed by the U.S. this time around. In Germany, where the post-War settlement had restricted the country's military might at home and military operations abroad, Gerhard Schroeder, at the head of the Socialist-led government, announced "unlimited solidarity" with the U.S.' "war on terrorism" and won 71 per cent of public support in the polls. He went on to announce the possibility of German troop involvement abroad, while his coalition partners, the supposedly pacifist Greens who supported the U.S. in the Kosovo invasion, sat gaping. In Japan, equally constrained after the Second World War, a parliamentary panel has already drafted a new law that would enable the country to despatch troops for war operations abroad. China, the most powerful country in the Third World, has abandoned its long-standing policy of opposition to any U.N. role in the internal affairs of member-states, calling upon the U.N. to play an active role in putting together the ruling coalition in Afghanistan after the Americans have succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban regime.

The case of Russia is the most pathetic. Inheriting a land that had been defeated by the U.S. when the latter foisted a bunch of Islamicist murderers upon Afghanistan, the current Russian Duma simply passed a resolution echoing the words of Bush to the effect that not only terrorist organisations but also governments that support terrorism must be punished. Russian President Vladimir Putin briefly balked at the idea that member-states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) would offer any facilities for the Americans, but then fell in line as other states simply ignored him. Tajikistan, a member of the CIS Collective Security Treaty, offered its airspace; Uzbekistan went further and offered its military bases; Kazakhstan offered air corridors for access to Afghanistan, as did Kyrgyzstan; and Turkmenistan, eying the possibility for a pipeline to take its gas through Afghanistan and thus realigning its oil economy with the U.S. instead of Russia, opened up its airspace as well as territory for military operations. In the process, Uzbekistan became almost as important as Pakistan for the American war on Afghanistan. At length Russia too offered airspace for so-called "humanitarian aid".

These items of piecemeal news in fact signify a historic realignment in maps of global power. For, America's Afghan War, which began in the Soviet period and has now lasted for over two decades, has always had the key dimension of a fight for control over the immense and largely untapped economic resources of the Asian republics of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The competition for pre-eminence in the region has been fierce between Russia and the U.S. even after the dissolution of the USSR. Even the Taliban was brought in, by the Pakistanis but with American backing, with the calculation that its dependence on Pakistan would facilitate the American and Pakistani economic interests in the region, notably the oil and gas interests in Turkmenistan. Turkey itself was once encouraged to play a forward role in the region on America's behalf, thanks to its historic ties with the region, harking back to the Ottoman period, and if Turkey now agrees to play the gendarme in Afghanistan, it would be with an eye to that role in a region for which Afghanistan is something of an underbelly. What this current phase of the war on Afghanistan has brought about is this re-alignment of the resource-rich Central Asian states with the U.S. at the expense of Russia, in a time when Russia itself has no alternatives.

Iran presents us with an equally important and complex case. Ali Khamenei, heir to the authority of the chief jurisconsult in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, has denounced American attack on Afghanistan and the government of President Khatami has dutifully denied the U.S. the use of Iranian airspace for those operations. However, the same government has offered cooperation in rescuing and safeguarding any personnel if a U.S. aircraft were shot down in that airspace and is urging the Northern Alliance to cooperate with the U.S. This paradoxical policy framework is related to the fact that Iran almost went to war with the Taliban in 1998, has always feared for the plight of the Shia sectarian minority under the rabidly Sunni rule of the Taliban, is host to over a million Afghan refugees, and is fearful of the influx of more refugees, narcotics and weapons. It also fears that the war may lead to a north-south division of Afghanistan and a continued civil war as a consequence; or that Pakistan would engineer a government out of its clients, past and present; or that the monarchy would be re-established in Afghanistan. Its official position is that Burhanuddin Rabbani's government, which is recognised by the U.N., should take power after the Taliban has been routed, as an interim step before a broad-based government is assembled. In this context, then, Iran is reported to have intelligence-sharing arrangements with the U.S. and is in active dialogue over the question of the post-Taliban dispensation in Kabul. The U.S. has returned the favour by carrying out a comprehensive policy review so as to prepare a 'tilt' toward Iran against Iraq. Enemies of the recent past are fast becoming strategic allies.

Tests of loyalty have been required globally. Most of the bombing missions have been carried out from offshore aircraft-carriers but troops have been stationed in "countries within striking distance", such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Tajikistan, Pakistan, as well as Diego Garcia. NATO was reminded early that the U.S. had treaty rights to seek cooperation. Australia has been pressed to promise active military support while Canada is pressed to alter even its own regulations for immigration and border checking. Indonesia has had to pledge support in the face of a popular opposition so threatening that U.S. operatives are already stationed in the country to pick out the more militant elements. Even North Korea has issued a statement that could be construed, and has been so construed in Washington, as a declaration of support for the U.S.

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