Searching for a rational solution
gulfnews.com
How many countries will you bomb to reach Afghanistan?
The Iraq war of 1991 ended, effectively, within about 72 hours of the start of Operation Desert Storm. The rest was politics.
This might seem strange to those who watched many weeks of action on television. But the war was over in terms of Iraq being unable to either hold on to Kuwait or counterattack, which were the two priorities of the military operation.
The sophistication, precision and power of America's military machine was sufficient to nullify and destroy the defences of Iraq's much-vaunted armed capabilities with dramatic speed.
George Bush the Elder, who was the American president at that time, disclosed this when he announced, with legitimate pride, that some 90 per cent of Iraq's effective capability had been knocked out within the first 72 hours.
The United States, and the allies, had a further purpose after that: first, to pulp Iraq's army so that it could not pose a threat to its neighbours again. Given the fact that the war had begun because of the invasion of Kuwait, this purpose had its logic.
Overthrow
The second aim was to create conditions for the elimination or at least the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein government. Ten years later, Saddam Hussein and his army are still around.
Operation Infinite Justice, or Enduring Freedom, or Finite Injustice, or whatever it is called just now, is, in a similar sense, already over.
Afghanistan no longer has the means to defend itself against the awesome firepower of the American and British forces. We have already entered the political phase of the operation.
This by itself is unexceptionable. All war must have a political purpose; there can be no other purpose, since no one wages war against Afghanistan to loot or pillage the country. There is nothing to loot and pillage. Which in turn brings us to the problem: how long will it take for the political aims of this war to be achieved?
Military language
Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf was talking a military language when he spoke of a short war. The air action to eliminate Afghanistan's military capability is over. American bombs can now search, locate and destroy clusters of targeted political leaders or families, which is why relatives of Mullah Omar are beginning to die.
But President George W Bush is the one who is more correct when he recognises that this is not a short war, because it is being waged against the perpetrators of terrorism.
Bush would, however, be very wrong if he believed that the length of this war is going to be determined by the time required to eliminate the camps and bases from where terrorism is planned and where its training is done.
The place where the attack on the towers of the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon began was in the mind. You can eliminate leaders and camps, although even here there are problems. What are you going to do? Close down all the flying clubs in America? Or bomb flying clubs all over the world?
But these questions are secondary to the basic one: how are you going to eliminate the next generation of young men who see their mission as one of death in a cause whose enemy is the United States and every government that supports the United States? Surely that is the question that must be haunting Washington.
Afghanistan is not geography. There is now, and visibly so, some part of Afghanistan in every country with a Muslim population. What do you do about that? How many countries do you bomb, George Bush?
The politics of the Afghanistan syndrome begins when conventional war ends. The Taliban are not relevant as a symbol of good governance or any civilisational values, whatever virtues they may claim. They have only one thing going for them. They are an anger that has found a political base.
It is important to repeat and stress that much of their strategy is directly opposed to the message of the Holy Quran.
Ayats or verses of the Holy Quran are specific and unambiguous in their command that in a jihad (and one might add, particularly in a true jihad, for jihad itself has become a shorthand for so much misunderstanding) you cannot kill the innocent: children, women, the elderly. You cannot even destroy trees and vegetation; it is as clear as that.
Perception
But the excesses of the response against America find an echo because of the perception in the Muslim mind that America has, over the last 50 years, and particularly through its pro-Israel policies, perpetrated unacceptable injustice against any cause dear to Muslims. Little angers the believer more than injustice.
This might seem ironic to a scholar of American history, because the fact is that America was not hidebound in its commitment to Israel for at least the first 25 years of Israel's existence.
Britain and France were the superpowers who supported the Israeli invasion of the Sinai and the Suez in 1956, and it was President Eisenhower who forced the European powers and Israel to retreat.
American policy changed only after the war of 1967, when Israel's new, regional superpower status tempted Washington (goaded by a resurgent pro-Israel lobby) into a deeper alliance.
Initial suspicion
But then, it was also the defeat of 1967 that radicalised the Muslim mind in the area. Thirty-five years of experience on many fronts, including the economic, has turned that initial suspicion into a belief that America is at the heart of all injustice. Perception has shaped reality.
The recesses of historical experience add their fuel to this furnace of perception. The impact of history is not necessarily logical; and indeed history may be far more powerful in its imagined form than in the approximation of facts that ends up in text books.
But the Muslim response today is also shaped in some part by the experience of the collapse of the last two great Muslim empires, the Ottoman in Eurasia and the Mughal in South Asia.
If the Ottoman became the "sick man of Europe" in the nineteenth century then the Mughal became the "sick man of India" in the eighteenth century. Both lost their eminence to the rising power of Western colonialism, led principally by Britain, with France taking its share of the spoils in the Middle East and Africa, and Russia seizing Central Asia.
The rise of Western power was not simply political and economic; it also had a cultural component that left deeper wounds.
In an echo of the rhetoric of the original crusades, Islamic civilisation was denigrated as barbaric and bigoted.
In India we saw how, for instance, the kings of Awadh were vilified when the British needed to destroy what was left of a self-destructive, decadent nobility. It is no accident that the most vicious comments that have appeared about Islamic civilisations have come from an Italian prime minister.
This has left a deep resentment.
If, to take a hypothetical instance, the Marathas, with Ibrahim Khan Gardi in their van, had defeated the Awadh-Rampur alliance led by the Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani, and the Mughals been replaced in Delhi by the Marathas, the Muslim response might have sought less one-dimensional answers. But this was not to be.
It is pertinent to point out that nowhere in the Hindu-Muslim relationship was there any attempt by either side to vilify the sacred. Battles may have taken place over the concept of idol worship but Muslim poets – including Iqbal, (since Iqbal continues to be a bugbear) – never denigrated Krishna or Ram and Hindu poetry never vilified the Prophet (PBUH). It was just not part of the culture of this subcontinent.
Emotionally distant
The Americans, and this is their tragedy, have inherited a European history that they did not create and from which they are, as a people, culturally and emotionally distant.
In fact when the European powers coolly distanced themselves from the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia, it was America under Bill Clinton that intervened on behalf of the Muslims to stop the most insane and cruel slaughter of a community in Europe since the Second World War.
The United States was after all created by refugees from European religious bigotry, so they do not need lessons on this score. Even today everyone searching for refuge in the United States seeks a liberal Utopia. But the fact of their superpower status has turned the United States into a symbol of past iniquity and modern injustice.
This is the complex problem that faces the United States as it attempts a multi-pronged solution to the most difficult dilemma in its history.
Paradoxically, what the United States might itself want, in the near future, is what might be called a non-American response to the problem of terrorism.
You cannot bomb terrorism out; on the other hand, each bomb may be a seed for a future that could be more terrible.
Muslim nations across the world have to balance the sentiment on the street with their legitimate anger against the use of a strategy that threatens their stability as much as that of the United States. The lead to find a rational response to an emotional problem has to be taken by someone.
Why cannot that lead be taken by India? |
