Terrorism, Inc, or the Family of Fundamentalisms - I
Vinay Lal
Among the most arresting of the tidbits that emerged in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was the news that George W. Bush had abandoned the capital. His entire deportment marred by an offensive smirk, the vocabulary of a high school student and painfully evident difficulties in thinking beyond the limited briefings devised for him by his equally mediocre advisers, the present occupant of the White House has never cut a very dignified figure, but the visceral impression of the President of the United States cowering in his bunker in an undisclosed location must have struck the US government as one that cried for immediate elimination. Who could have thought that the lines which Auden appears to have scripted for Osama bin Laden — "In a lonely field the rain / Lashes an abandoned train; / Outlaws fill the mountain caves" (‘The Fall of Rome’) — would serve as an apt description for an outlaw president gone into hiding? The similarities between bin Laden and Bush merely begin here: both are scions of wealthy families, and both are enchanted by guns and military solutions. The CIA, in the figure of Papa Bush, is the symbiotic link between the two.
Bush diverted his energies after the events of September 11 towards the creation of an ‘International Coalition against Terror’, but this is much ado about nothing: all too often the US has declared that it will act unilaterally when it must, and much like the coalition of a decade ago, when Saddam Hussein was the villain of the piece, the present coalition means little more than the partnership of the US and its dependent mother, Great Britain, with various errant vassals and truant children cajoled, bribed and threatened into cooperation. The official narrative has also conjured an ‘International Coalition for Terror’, more popularly known as the ‘Al-Qaeda network’: this is a coalition of Muslim fanatics, though occasionally it is feared that the network may successfully appeal to that worldwide coalition of Muslims known as the ummah. Yet, at other moments, it appears that just as the singularity of the US as the sole superpower and preeminent rogue state cannot be denied, so — notwithstanding all claims about the ‘network’ — the US would be only too pleased if its efforts yielded only bin Laden, "dead or alive". Bush and bin Laden have much more in common: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists", intoned the President — an assessment shared by bin Laden, whose taped message to the world states candidly: "These events have divided the whole world into two sides", the "side of believers and the side of infidels." If anything, bin Laden’s parochialism is slightly less offensive: whereas Bush concludes his addresses to the nation with "God bless America", as though God should care about nation-states or has earmarked America as especially deserving of His approbation, bin Laden is content to observe, "God is great, may pride be with Islam." The fundamentalism of fanatical conviction knows no boundaries; rogues do understand each other. The world is caught between two long arms of extreme parochialism.
Mixed media by SUNIL PADWAL
Many frameworks and points of reference have been brought into service to characterise the events of September 11. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the media recalled the treachery of the Japanese at Pearl Harbour (1941); other commentators, endowed with a longer historical memory, noted that mayhem on this scale on the American mainland was last witnessed during the Civil War (1861-1865); and indeed, one may have to go further back, to the sacking of Washington in 1812 by Britain, now America’s most "trusted friend", to discover a moment when the US may have been humbled by the unpleasant experience of vulnerability at the hands of a foreign agent. America’s discovery that it is no longer inviolable, and that it may be susceptible to the very suffering that it has so cavalierly visited upon others, is frequently mentioned as one of the most chastening aspects of the September 11 events. The idea of Fortress America turned overnight into an anachronism, the Hollywood fantasies transmogrified into the real. Yet others suggest that this quest for precedents is nearly fruitless: the enemy is now "invisible", dispersed, nomadic and insofar as the US has targeted the Taliban government of Afghanistan as the chief sponsor of the Al-Qaeda network, it is slipping into the well-worn groove of thought that requires a state entity for an enemy. Bush has on nearly every formal occasion since September 11 spoken of a "new" kind of war, an "unconventional" war, though the clear implication that savage terrorists refuse to subscribe to civilised standards for warfare is really the more interesting subtext of his pronouncements. No American official doubts that they alone know what constitutes the "right" kind of warfare. Guerrilla warfare-type military engagement is frequently mentioned by commentators, and Vietnam is often invoked; but this comparison is scarcely apt, since the terrorists lacked the advantage of fighting on their own turf and ferried themselves to their destinations on little else but rational cost-calculus and steely determination. Perhaps military strategists at the Pentagon would be well advised to shelve their Clausewitz and embrace the nomadic and rhizomatic tropology of Deleuze and Guattari if they wish to bring the hydra-headed monster of terrorism within their ambit.
The tropos of war extends beyond to the culture of war, to the "war on drugs" and even "the clash of civilisations". America needs war to lift it out of both collective depression and the vacuum of manifest destiny. War is the reigning metaphor of American experience, it dominates the idioms of speech and conduct: in the last decade alone, the airwaves have been full of the "war on cancer", the "war on crime", the "war on drugs". The largest hoaxes are bathed in the language of war: thus all types of crime have declined, but with 2 million Americans in jail, the country has the largest prison population in the world. If Palestinians could be locked away, doubtless Israel would be entitled to declare success in its war on the aspirations of a people. The trillions of dollars expended in the "war on cancer" have yielded almost nothing by way of a cure, but cancer research is a sacrosanct cause which no one dare criticise and it is one of the largest profit-making enterprises in American medicine. No modern power has so consistently been at war with such a wide range of political regimes; no other culture has so elaborate a mythology of guns, so profound an affection for the right to own guns, so immense a laxity in gun ownership laws and such a gun-ridden political climate that presidents openly declare their membership in the National Rifle Association. Americans are by no means unique in experiencing the adrenaline of warfare, but their celebration of it has a distinct tinge, uncontaminated as it has been by the possibility of war striking home. World War I, to which the United States was a strategically late entrant, lifted the country to the ranks of the great powers; World War II elevated it to the status of the supreme power. Despite all the sound and fury over the expense of the Gulf War, it was an immense boost to the American economy, and to that very large segment of it which trades in arms, ammunition, warplanes and all the paraphernalia of modern warfare. Imports of American armament by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which were already among the most generous of clients, doubled in the aftermath of Desert Storm. Politicians and the much-feted "American public", whose "compassion" and "values" are tirelessly trotted out at every turn, recognise that war is good for America. That, alone, raises the most terrifying prospects for the future of humankind.
It may be that the "war on terrorism", predicated on the prior framing of the terrorist attacks as a "war", will be modelled on the "war on drugs". The very idea is chilling: there will be much talk of the war lasting for years, the need to squeeze dry the financial networks, and the desirability of cutting off the supply side of terrorism. Apparently, only the civilised are deserving of supply-side economics. The war on drugs has had little impact on drug use, but it has dramatically increased the incarceration rates of minority users and small-time pushers; and across Latin America, it has left behind gruesome traces of ruined lives. Every such war is an occasion for the strategic gain of hegemonic power, and countries that fail to fall in line face the real prospect of war through other means: there is no escaping the stranglehold of American power. When no justification can be found to maim, bomb, embargo or starve the evildoers, the "clash of civilisations" thesis will be resuscitated. Let us recall that tiny little fact, now largely buried under the morass of commentary, the daily bombings and the anthrax scares: $43 million was gifted by the United States to the Taliban earlier this year as a reward for the regime’s good conduct in eradicating poppy cultivation over a part of the country. No "clash of civilisations" here, only the amiable gift-giving between nations joined together in doing God’s work on earth. It is not for this reason, however, that the US government has adamantly declared that its battle is not with Islam and that it disavows the idea of civilisational conflict; quite to the contrary, the battle is said to be pitched between "civilisation" and "barbarism", between those who (in Bush’s words to Congress) "believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom" and those committed to "evil and destruction".[1] Nonetheless, the "clash of civilisations" thesis persists among those who are convinced that the Taliban represents no fringe element, but the heart of Islam: they point to the perpetrators of terror, who certainly thought of themselves as good Muslims, indeed as shaheeds (martyrs), and are inclined to think that the "extremists" have crowded out the "moderates". Lately, a number of commentators have been inclined to chart a third course, describing the conflict between the US government and the Al-Qaeda Taliban nexus as clash of ignorance" (Edward Said), "the clash of terrors" (Asghar Ali Engineer) and the "clash of fundamentalisms".
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Gandhi, who insisted upon the most excating standards of non-violence, considered the Pathans, the ancestors of the contemporary Taliban, as the most perfect practitioners of non-violence that he had ever encountered. Such was the resolve and strength of the Khudai Khidmatgars, the 'Servants of God', that they even paralysed the British administration of Peshawar. Where is this history?
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All the interpretative frameworks share this: they presume to "know" the Afghans, and so have failed to ponder how these people came to this pass. In the late 1970s, the Soviets might have been "trapped" into invading Afghanistan, and the then National Security Adviser to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has admitted that the US plotted to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.[2] There was a grand plan to enlist Islam in the battle against communism. The resistance to the Soviet invasion was further fuelled by the arrival between 1984 and 1986 of a great many Arabs, including Osama bin Laden, sworn to defend Islam against atheists: so was born what might be called the international Mujahideen movement. The Americans also directly stepped in with military aid and the Stinger anti-aircraft missile is said to have contributed formidably in decimating the Soviet Air Force in Afghanistan. The Soviets were forced out in 1989; the Afghans then fell, supposedly in their time-honoured tradition, to fighting each other. From the "chaos", "anarchy" and wild bloodshed of the ensuing years emerged the Taliban, who managed to impose a draconian regime over the greater part of the country in 1996. There are not insignificant details to be added to this: the role of the CIA, the hand of Pakistan in abetting the Taliban, and so on. The principals are largely agreed on this narrative, but attach different ethical significance to its various parts: thus, to adduce two examples, some commentators are inclined to view the Northern Alliance as perhaps slightly less inclined towards religion, while others view them as equally disdainful of democratic traditions. Similarly, the actions of the Americans in the 1980s are thought by some to be well-intentioned, emanating from classical geopolitical thinking; others declare that the Americans were typically short-sighted. This narrative is often entangled within a larger narrative about Afghanistan in the form of a cautionary tale. Americans are warned that Afghanistan has never been conquered in the last millennium, and that it will be their graveyard: the British were unable to subdue the Afghans, the Soviets got quagmired in that hostile terrain, and it is the fate of each superpower to be humbled by the intractable Afghans. If one desired a demonstration of the efficacy of iteration in political discourse, one could not have asked for more. The battles with the British were seldom as one-sided as some would like to believe; Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler, had extended his empire to Kabul in the 1830s and the ferocious economic pressure that the Americans placed on the Soviets did as much to drive them out of Afghanistan as the actions of the Mujahideen. But who is listening?
So, then, how did the Afghans come to this pass, that they are now the very embodiment of brutality and ruthless violence? The salience of that query acquires all the greater force when we consider that no less a person than Mohandas Gandhi, who insisted upon the most exacting standards of non-violence, considered the Pathans, the ancestors of the contemporary Taliban, as the most perfect practitioners of non-violence that he had ever encountered. In the late 1920s, the Pathan leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, later nicknamed the ‘Frontier Gandhi’, came to embrace the Gandhian doctrine of satyagraha.[3] He forged an army of volunteers and disciplined them into a fighting force of satyagrahis: these were no effete rice-eating vegetarians or banias, to use the mocking language of some of Gandhi’s critics, but towering men. Their reputation for military prowess was legendary. Such was the strength and resolve of the Khudai Khidmatgars, the ‘Servants of God’, that they even paralysed the British administration in Peshawar.[4] Where is this history, and what is the politics of this amnesia? Apparently, Afghanistan required a Soviet invasion so that it could at least become an entry in the fossil record of humanity. This is the condition of the wretched of the earth: an impregnation by Europe, or by ideological movements of Western provenance, is required before they can be said to have entered into the pages of history. If the friends of Afghanistan care not to know more than what is required for an "authentic" left history, does the country need any enemies?
One of the most widely accepted representations of the events of September 11 is to think of them in tandem with other terrorist attacks in recent years upon the visible emblems of American military and political power, such as the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the suicide attack upon the warship USS Cole, as well as in association with the activities of various groups around the world, such as Hamas, militant organisations in Kashmir, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, the Taliban and the Egyptian Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya. The term ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ was unloaded upon these diverse phenomena some years ago, and is resuscitated whenever the occasion calls for it; indeed, one could go much further and suggest that one strand of political commentary sees ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ as a needlessly belaboured term, since fundamentalism — interpreted diversely as political extremism, textual authoritarianism and the forcible invocation of Islam as a religion in which temporal and spiritual power are inseparable — is construed as the eternal condition of Islam. Some political commentators have gone so far as to suggest that local histories scarcely matter, and that it is enough to understand that everywhere, fanatical Muslims are animated by the desire to restore the glory of Islam, rid Muslim lands of infidels and ensure that Muslim countries are governed by the Sharia. Osama bin Laden’s own historical memory of Islam’s emasculation, if his reference — in his taped speech released after the first American bombs fell upon Afghanistan — to the "80 years" that Muslims have been living in fear and degradation is a reliable indication, seems to extend back to the time after World War I when the Ottoman empire was dismembered and the Caliphate abolished.[5]
A decade ago, Bernard Lewis, whose shadow over Middle Eastern studies has loomed large in the American academy, spoke rather incomprehensibly of the "roots of Muslim rage", which he located in the inability of Muslims to live in the modern world, their antiquated social and political institutions, their loss of power, and their exclusion from the orbit of world political activity. To be sure, he was not the first to represent Islam as an obscurantist faith that had clumsily inserted itself into modernity. Nor should one think that this style of thinking does not continue to resonate widely among educated and influential Americans. Thus, in seeking to explain the recent attacks, William Bennett has argued that "We (Americans) are not hated because we support Israel; we are hated because liberal democracy is incompatible with militant Islam."[6] The editorialists for the New York Times weighed in along similar lines with their learned commentary: Americans were assured that the attacks arose from "religious fanaticism", the "anger among those left behind by globalisation" and "the distaste of Western civilisation and cultural values" among the perpetrators and even the dispossessed of the world.[7] Witness that inadvertent slip which betrays the true conservative and liberal sentiment alike about Islam: though it is a mandated form of political correctness to say that the handiwork of a few terrorists does not implicate all of Islam, and though Bush and other American leaders have been at pains to describe Islam as a "religion of peace", blasphemed by those purportedly acting in its name, the supposition that the terrorist attacks represent the "anger among those left behind by globalisation" implicates nearly all the Muslim masses of the Middle East, Indonesia, South Asia, Central Asia and elsewhere. What, after all, do the frequent invocations of a vast "terrorist network" — apparently extending to 60 countries, adorned by many faces, fed by a maze of financial institutions — mean except to signify the fact that ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is rooted in all lands and competes with transnational capitalism as the twenty-first century’s form of globalisation? Here again, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ points not to terrorist networks and the murderous behaviour of disgruntled thugs and religious fanatics, but to Islam itself, to a religion that is global in its reach, uneasy with the idea of the nation-state and beholden to no notion of boundaries.
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