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The
threat of international terrorism is surely severe. The horrendous
events of September 11 had perhaps the most devastating instant human
toll on record, outside of war. The word “instant” should not be
overlooked; regrettably, the crime is far from unusual in the annals
of violence that falls short of war. The death toll may easily have
doubled or more within a few weeks, as miserable Afghans fled—to
nowhere—under the threat of bombing, and desperately-needed food
supplies were disrupted; and there were credible warnings of much
worse to come.
The
costs to Afghan civilians can only be guessed, but we do know the
projections on which policy decisions and commentary were based, a
matter of utmost significance. As a matter of simple logic, it is
these projections that provide the grounds for any moral evaluation of
planning and commentary, or any judgment of appeals to “just war”
arguments; and crucially, for any rational assessment of what may lie
ahead.
Even before September 11, the UN estimated that millions were being
sustained, barely, by international food aid. On September 16, the
national press reported that Washington had “demanded [from Pakistan]
the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and
other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population.” There was no
detectable reaction in the U.S. or Europe to this demand to impose
massive starvation; the plain meaning of the words. In subsequent
weeks, the world’s leading newspaper reported that “The threat of
military strikes forced the removal of international aid workers,
crippling assistance programs”; refugees reaching Pakistan “after
arduous journeys from Afghanistan are describing scenes of desperation
and fear at home as the threat of American-led military attacks turns
their long-running misery into a potential catastrophe.” “The country
was on a lifeline,” one evacuated aid worker reported, “and we just
cut the line.” “It’s as if a mass grave has been dug behind millions
of people,” an evacuated emergency officer for Christian Aid informed
the press: “We can drag them back from it or push them in. We could be
looking at millions of deaths.”
The
UN World Food Program and others were able to resume some food
shipments in early October, but were forced to suspend deliveries and
distribution when the bombing began on October 7, resuming them later
at a much lower pace. A spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees warned that “We are facing a humanitarian crisis of epic
proportions in Afghanistan with 7.5 million short of food and at risk
of starvation,” while aid agencies leveled “scathing” condemnations of
U.S. air drops that are barely concealed “propaganda tools” and may
cause more harm than benefit, they warned.
A
very careful reader of the national press could discover the estimate
by the UN that “7.5 million Afghans will need food over the winter—2.5
million more than on September 11,” a 50 percent increase as a result
of the threat of bombing, then the actuality. In other words, Western
civilization was basing its plans on the assumption that they might
lead to the death of several million innocent civilians—not Taliban,
whatever one thinks of the legitimacy of slaughtering Taliban recruits
and supporters, but their victims. Meanwhile its leader, on the same
day, once again dismissed with contempt offers of negotiation for
extradition of the suspected culprit and the request for some credible
evidence to substantiate the demands for capitulation. The UN Special
Rapporteur on the Right to Food pleaded with the U.S. to end the
bombing that was putting “the lives of millions of civilians at risk,”
renewing the appeal of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary
Robinson, who warned of a Rwanda-style catastrophe. Both appeals were
rejected, as were those of the major aid and relief agencies. And
virtually unreported.
In
late September, the UN Food And Agricultural Organization warned that
over 7 million people were facing a crisis that could lead to
widespread starvation if military action were initiated, with a likely
“humanitarian catastrophe” unless aid were immediately resumed and the
threat of military action terminated. After bombing began, the FAO
advised that it had disrupted planting that provides 80 percent of the
country’s grain supplies, so that the effects next year are expected
to be even more severe. All ignored.
These unreported appeals happened to coincide with World Food Day,
which was also ignored, along with the charge by the UN Special
Rapporteur that the rich and powerful easily have the means, though
not the will, to overcome the “silent genocide” of mass starvation in
much of the world.
Let
us return briefly to the point of logic: ethical judgments and
rational evaluation of what may lie ahead are grounded in the
presuppositions of planning and commentary. An entirely separate
matter, with no bearing on such judgments, is the accuracy of the
projections on which planning and commentary were based. By year’s
end, there were hopes that unprecedented deliveries of food in
December might “dramatically” revise the expectations at the time when
planning was undertaken and implemented, and evaluated in commentary:
that these actions were likely to drive millions over the edge of
starvation. Very likely, the facts will never be known, by virtue of a
guiding principle of intellectual culture: We must devote enormous
energy to exposing the crimes of official enemies, properly counting
not only those literally killed but also those who die as a
consequence of policy choices; but we must take scrupulous care to
avoid this practice in the case of our own crimes, on the rare
occasions when they are investigated at all. Observance of the
principle is all too well documented. It will be a welcome surprise if
the current case turns out differently.
Another elementary point might also be mentioned. The success of
violence evidently has no bearing on moral judgment with regard to its
goals. In the present case, it seemed clear from the outset that the
reigning superpower could easily demolish any Afghan resistance. My
own view, for what it is worth, was that U.S. campaigns should not be
too casually compared to the failed Russian invasion of the 1980s. The
Russians were facing a major army of perhaps 100,000 people or more,
organized, trained, and heavily armed by the CIA and its associates.
The U.S. is facing a ragtag force in a country that has already been
virtually destroyed by 20 years of horror, for which we bear no slight
share of responsibility. The Taliban forces, such as they are, might
quickly collapse except for a small hardened core.
To
my surprise, the dominant judgment—even after weeks of carpet bombing
and resort to virtually every available device short of nuclear
weapons (“daisy cutters,” cluster bombs, etc.)—was confidence that the
lessons of the Russian failure should be heeded, that airstrikes would
be ineffective, and that a ground invasion would be necessary to
achieve the U.S. war aims of eliminating bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Removing the Taliban regime was an afterthought. There had been no
interest in this before September 11, or even in the month that
followed. A week after the bombing began, the president reiterated
that U.S. forces “would attack Afghanistan ‘for as long as it takes’
to destroy the Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden, but he
offered to reconsider the military assault on Afghanistan if the
country’s ruling Taliban would surrender Mr. bin Laden”; “If you cough
him up and his people today, then we’ll reconsider what we are doing
to your country,” the president declared: “You still have a second
chance.”
When Taliban forces did finally succumb, after astonishing endurance,
opinions shifted to triumphalist proclamations and exultation over the
justice of our cause, now demonstrated by the success of overwhelming
force against defenseless opponents. Without researching the topic, I
suppose that Japanese and German commentary was similar after early
victories during World War II, and despite obvious dis-analogies, one
crucial conclusion carries over to the present case: the victory of
arms leaves the issues where they were, though the triumphalist cries
of vindication should serve as a warning for those who care about the
future.
Returning
to the war, the airstrikes quickly turned cities into “ghost towns,”
the press reported, with electrical power and water supplies
destroyed, a form of biological warfare. The UN reported that 70
percent of the population had fled Kandahar and Herat within two
weeks, mostly to the countryside, where in ordinary times 10-20
people, many of them children, are killed or crippled daily by land
mines. Those conditions became much worse as a result of the bombing.
UN mine-clearing operations were halted, and unexploded U.S. ordnance,
particularly the lethal bomblets scattered by cluster bombs, add to
the torture, and are much harder to clear.
By
late October, aid officials estimated that over a million had fled
their homes, including 80 percent of the population of Jalalabad, only
a “tiny fraction” able to cross the border, most scattering to the
countryside where there was little food or shelter or possibility of
delivering aid; appeals from aid agencies to suspend attacks to allow
delivery of supplies were again rejected by Blair, ignored by the U.S.
Months later, hundreds of thousands were reported to be starving in
such “forgotten camps” as Maslakh in the North, having fled from
“mountainous places to which the World Food Program was giving food
aid but stopped because of the bombing and now cannot be reached
because the passes are cut off”—and who knows how many in places that
no journalists found—though supplies were by then available and the
primary factor hampering delivery was lack of interest and will.
By
early January, the reported death toll in Maslakh alone—near Herat,
therefore accessible to journalists—had risen to 100 a day, and aid
officials warned that the camp is “on the on the brink of an
Ethiopian-style humanitarian disaster” as the flight of refugees to
the camp continues to increase, an estimated three-fourths of its
population since September.
The
destruction of lives is silent and mostly invisible, by choice; and
can easily remain forgotten, also by choice. An even sorrier sight is
denial—or worse, even ridicule—of the efforts to bring these tragedies
to light so that pressures can be mounted to relieve them, which
should be a very high priority whatever one thinks about what has
happened.
By
the year’s end, long after fighting ended, the occasional report noted
that “the delivery of food remains blocked or woefully inadequate,” “a
system for distributing food is still not in place,” and even the main
route to Uzbekistan “remains effectively closed to food trucks” over
two weeks after it was officially opened with much fanfare; the same
was true of the crucial artery from Pakistan to Kandahar, and others
were so harassed by armed militias that the World Food Program, now
with supplies available, still could not make deliveries, and had no
place for storage because “most warehouses were destroyed or looted
during the U.S. bombardment.”
A
detailed year-end review found that the U.S. war “has returned to
power nearly all the same warlords who had misruled the country in the
days before the Taliban”; some Afghans see the resulting situation as
even “worse than it was before the Taliban came to power.” The Taliban
takeover of most of the country, with little combat, brought to an end
a period described by Afghan and international human rights activists
as “the blackest in the history of Afghanistan,” “the worst time in
Afghanistan’s history,” with vast destruction, mass rapes and other
atrocities, and tens of thousands killed. These were the years of rule
by warlords of the Northern Alliance and other Western favorites, such
as the murderous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the few who has not
reclaimed his fiefdom. There are indications that lessons have been
learned both in Afghanistan and the world beyond, and that the worst
will not recur, as everyone fervently hopes.
Signs were mixed, at year’s end. As anticipated, most of the
population was greatly relieved to see the end of the Taliban, one of
the most retrograde regimes in the world; and relieved that there was
no quick return to the atrocities of a decade earlier, as had been
feared. The new government in Kabul showed considerably more promise
than most had expected. The return of warlordism is a dangerous sign,
as was the announcement by the new justice minister that the basic
structure of sharia law as instituted by the Taliban would remain in
force, though “there will be some changes from the time of the
Taliban. For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim’s body in
public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say
15 minutes.” Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif added that some new location
would be found for the regular public executions, not the Sports
Stadium. “Adulterers, both male and female, would still be stoned to
death, Zarif said, ‘but we will use only small stones’,” so that
those who confess might be able to run away; others will be “stoned to
death,” as before. The international reaction will doubtless have a
significant effect on the balance of conflicting forces.
As
the year ended, desperate peasants, mostly women, were returning to
the miserable labor of growing opium poppies so that their families
can survive, reversing the Taliban ban. The UN had reported in October
that poppy production had already “increased threefold in areas
controlled by the Northern Alliance,” whose warlords “have long been
reputed to control much of the processing and smuggling of opium” to
Russia and the West, an estimated 75 percent of the world’s heroin.
The result of some poor woman’s back-breaking labor is that “countless
others thousands of miles away from her home in eastern Afghanistan
will suffer and die.”
Such consequences, and the devastating legacy of 20 years of brutal
war and atrocities, could be alleviated by an appropriate
international presence and well-designed programs of aid and
reconstruction; were honesty to prevail, they would be called
“reparations,” at least from Russia and the U.S., which share primary
responsibility for the disaster. The issue was addressed in a
conference of the UN Development Program, World Bank, and Asian
Development Bank in Islamabad in late November. Some guidelines were
offered in a World Bank study that focused on Afghanistan’s potential
role in the development of the energy resources of the region. The
study concluded that Afghanistan has a positive pre-war history of
cost recovery for key infrastructure services like electric power, and
“green field” investment opportunities in sectors like
telecommunications, energy, and oil/gas pipelines. It is extremely
important that such services start out on the right track during
reconstruction. Options for private investment in infrastructure
should be actively pursued.
One
may reasonably ask just whose needs are served by these priorities,
and what status they should have in reconstruction from the horrors of
the past two decades.
U.S. and British intellectual opinion, across the political spectrum,
assured us that only radical extremists can doubt that “this is
basically a just war.” Those who disagree can therefore be dismissed,
among them, for example, the 1,000 Afghan leaders who met in Peshawar
in late October in a U.S.-backed effort to lay the groundwork for a
post-Taliban regime led by the exiled King. They bitterly condemned
the U.S. war, which is “beating the donkey rather than the rider,” one
speaker said to unanimous agreement.
The
extent to which anti-Taliban Afghan opinion was ignored is rather
striking—and not at all unusual; during the Gulf war, for example,
Iraqi dissidents were excluded from press and journals, apart from
“alternative media,” though they were readily accessible. Without
eliciting comment, Washington maintained its long- standing official
refusal to have any dealings with the Iraqi opposition even well after
the war ended. In the present case, Afghan opinion is not as easily
assessed, but the task would not have been impossible, and the issue
is of such evident significance that it merits at least a few
comments.
We
might begin with the gathering of Afghan leaders in Peshawar, some
exiles, some who trekked across the border from within Afghanistan,
all committed to overthrowing the Taliban regime. It was “a rare
display of unity among tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious
politicians, and former guerrilla commanders,” the New York Times
reported. They unanimously “urged the U.S. to stop the air raids,”
appealed to the international media to call for an end to the “bombing
of innocent people,” and “demanded an end to the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan.” They urged that other means be adopted to overthrow the
hated Taliban regime, a goal they believed could be achieved without
slaughter and destruction.
Reported, but dismissed without further comment.
A
similar message was conveyed by Afghan opposition leader Abdul Haq,
who condemned the air attacks as a “terrible mistake.” Highly regarded
in Washington, Abdul Haq was considered to be “perhaps the most
important leader of anti-Taliban opposition among Afghans of Pashtun
nationality based in Pakistan.” His advice was to “avoid bloodshed as
much as possible”; instead of bombing, “we should undermine the
central leadership, which is a very small and closed group and which
is also the only thing which holds them all together. If they are
destroyed, every Taliban fighter will pick up his gun and his blanket
and disappear back home, and that will be the end of the Taliban,” an
assessment that seems rather plausible in the light of subsequent
events.
Several weeks later, Abdul Haq entered Afghanistan, apparently without
U.S. support, and was captured and killed. As he was undertaking this
mission “to create a revolt within the Taliban,” he criticized the
U.S. for refusing to aid him and others in such endeavors, and
condemned the bombing as “a big setback for these efforts.” He
reported contacts with second-level Taliban commanders and
ex-Mujahidin tribal elders, and discussed how further efforts could
proceed, calling on the U.S. to assist them with funding and other
support instead of undermining them with bombs.
The
U.S., Abdul Haq said, “is trying to show its muscle, score a victory
and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering
of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don’t like
that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab
fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in
the 1980s, armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and
the CIA. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good
careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and
their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the
Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans.”
We
can also look elsewhere for enlightenment about Afghan opinions. A
beneficial consequence of the latest Afghan war is that it elicited
some belated concern about the fate of women in Afghanistan, even
reaching the First Lady. Perhaps it will be followed some day by
concern for the plight of women elsewhere in Central and South Asia,
which, unfortunately, is often not very different from life under the
Taliban, including the most vibrant democracies. Of course, no sane
person advocates foreign military intervention to rectify these and
other injustices. The problems are severe, but should be dealt with
from within, with assistance from outsiders if it is constructive and
honest.
Since the harsh treatment of women in Afghanistan has at last gained
some well-deserved attention, one might expect that attitudes of
Afghan women towards policy options should be a primary concern. A
natural starting point for an inquiry is Afghanistan’s “oldest
political and humanitarian organisation,” RAWA (Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan), which has been “foremost in
the struggle” for women’s rights since its formation in 1977. RAWA’s
leader was assassinated by Afghan collaborators with the Russians in
1987, but they continued their work within Afghanistan at risk of
death, and in exile nearby.
RAWA has been quite outspoken. Thus, a week after the bombing began,
RAWA issued a public statement entitled: “Taliban should be overthrown
by the uprising of Afghan nation.” It continued as follows: “Again,
due to the treason of fundamentalist hangmen, our people have been
caught in the claws of the monster of a vast war and destruction.
America, by forming an international coalition against Osama and his
Taliban-collaborators and in retaliation for the 11th September
terrorist attacks, has launched a vast aggression on our country...
what we have witnessed for the past seven days leaves no doubt that
this invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men, children,
young and old of our country.”
The
statement called for “the eradication of the plague of Taliban and Al
Qaeda” by “an overall uprising” of the Afghan people themselves, which
alone “can prevent the repetition and recurrence of the catastrophe
that has befallen our country....”
In
another declaration on November 25, at a demonstration of women’s
organizations in Islamabad on the International Day for the
Elimination of Violence against Women, RAWA condemned the
U.S./Russian-backed Northern Alliance for a “record of human rights
violations as bad as that of the Taliban’s,” and called on the UN to
“help Afghanistan, not the Northern Alliance.” RAWA issued similar
warnings at the national conference of the All India Democratic
Women’s Association on the same days.
Also ignored.
One
might note that this is hardly the first time that the concerns of
advocates of women’s rights in Afghanistan have been dismissed. Thus,
in 1988 the UNDP senior adviser on women’s rights in Afghanistan
warned that the “great advances” in women’s rights she had witnessed
there were being imperilled by the “ascendant fundamentalism” of the
U.S.-backed radical Islamists. Her report was submitted to the New
York Times and Washington Post, but not published; and her
account of how the U.S. “contributed handsomely to the suffering of
Afghan women” remains unknown.
Perhaps it is right to ignore Afghans who have been struggling for
freedom and women’s rights for many years, and to assign
responsibility for their country’s future to foreigners whose record
in this regard is less than distinguished. Perhaps, but it does not
seem entirely obvious.
The
issue of “just war” should not be confused with a wholly different
question: Should the perpetrators of the atrocities of September 11 be
punished for their crimes—“crimes against humanity,” as they were
called by Robert Fisk, Mary Robinson, and others. On this there is
virtually unanimous agreement—though, notoriously, the principles do
not extend to the agents of even far worse crimes who are protected by
power and wealth. The question is how to proceed.
The
approach favored by Afghans who were ignored had considerable support
in much of the world. Many in the South would surely have endorsed the
recommendations of the UN representative of the Arab Women’s
Solidarity Association: “providing the Taliban with evidence (as it
has requested) that links bin Laden to the September 11 attacks,
employing diplomatic pressures to extradite him, and prosecuting
terrorists through international tribunals,” and generally adhering to
international law, following precedents that exist even in much more
severe cases of international terrorism. Adherence to international
law had scattered support in the West as well, including the
preeminent Anglo-American military historian Michael Howard, who
delivered a “scathing attack” on the bombardment, calling instead for
an international “police operation” and international court rather
than “trying to eradicate cancer cells with a blow torch.”
Washington’s refusal to call for extradition of the suspected
criminals, or to provide the evidence that was requested, was entirely
open, and generally approved. Its own refusal to extradite criminals
remains effectively secret, however. There has been debate over
whether U.S. military actions in Afghanistan were authorized under
ambiguous Security Council resolutions, but it avoids the central
issue: Washington plainly did not want Security Council authorization,
which it surely could have obtained, clearly and unambiguously. Since
it lost its virtual monopoly over UN decisions, the U.S. has been far
in the lead in vetoes, Britain second, France a distant third, but
none of these powers would have opposed a U.S.-sponsored resolution.
Nor would Russia or China, eager to gain U.S. authorization for their
own atrocities and repression (in Chechnya and western China,
particularly). But Washington insisted on not obtaining Security
Council authorization, which would entail that there is some higher
authority to which it should defer. Systems of power resist that
principle if they are strong enough to do so. There is even a name for
that stance in the literature of diplomacy and international affairs
scholarship: establishing “credibility,” a justification commonly
offered for the threat or use of force. While understandable, and
conventional, that stance also has lessons concerning the likely
future, even more so because of the elite support that it receives,
openly or indirectly. |
