On Terror And War

No. The food drops were pure public relations, perhaps doing more harm than good. While left critics of the war certainly argued this, they did so by quoting the World Food Program, the Red Cross, and others aid agencies, and even the Financial Times, all of whom issued scathing denunciations of this propaganda tool. Nothing has changed about that. What has now occurred is that the Northern Alliance has occupied Kabul, and what's left of the Taliban has retreated, it appears, to the mountains, virtually without a fight, under the weight of the most powerful non-nuclear bombs ever created, perhaps with the intention of waging an ongoing guerilla war from outside the main cities.

The end to major fighting in the north may well have humanitarian consequences. But what does that lead us to conclude about the morality of U.S. actions? Suppose the Taliban were to issue a proclamation declaring “we left the cities for the mountains so that the bombing would halt and food aid would get to our fellow citizens. We have sacrificed our hold on power to avert starvation among our people.”

Would we take that seriously? It would be true that their having left the field of battle created the conditions mentioned in the question. It would be true that it was a choice on their part and that they could have instead fought on into the winter, etc. Nevertheless, we would deduce, based on our knowledge of their past policies, that they made the choice for their own strategic concerns, not out of concern for those suffering hunger. When the U.S. claims to care about the Afghan poor, we should not relinquish our critical faculties, just as we wouldn't were the Taliban to make the claim.

Note, incidentally, that every indication suggests that the Taliban retreat was as much a surprise to the Pentagon as to everyone else. Just two days ago Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was warning that, though victory wouldn't take years, it would take months (which, he observed, meant that he had 23 months in which to operate).

4. Do you still think we're targeting civilians in our bombing?

We never thought or stated that the bombing was targeting civilians per se. We did say that the direct violent affects on civilians were predictable. U.S. military planners know how often their smart bombs miss and how often their cluster bombs fail to detonate, thereby laying future death traps across the land.

But the real issue, from the beginning, was not the hundreds of civilians killed by bombs, horrible as that is, but the tens or hundreds of thousands, or maybe more, who might die quietly out of camera range. Some will be victims of the destruction of what little civilian infrastructure there is in the country: for example, electrical transmission from the power station at the Kajaki Dam has been knocked out, creating (according to UN officials) the risk of massive flooding and crop failures (Independent, 8 November 2001). Some will be driven into the landmine-infested countryside. But the potentially most disastrous effect of the bombing—as we have maintained, and as various aid agencies have warned—has been to put huge numbers of people at risk of starvation. This remains the case. We also said that the latter was the most heinous aspect of the project—beyond that it was undertaken outside the law, specifically to delegitimate the law, maintain military credibility, and propel a “war on terrorism” whose purpose to no small degree is to organize domestic fear in support of elite agendas: financial redistribution from poor to rich and draconian social reaction against civil liberties.

5. There's been lots of criticism of the Northern Alliance. But haven't they been pretty effective?

Criticism of the Northern Alliance has been not that they are incompetent soldiers, but social monsters, slightly different in kind from the Taliban, but small improvement morally. Nothing in the past few days changes the historical record of the Northern Alliance, and indeed, the first sketchy reports of executions and looting in cities newly fallen under their control suggests that their thuggish practices continue.

RAWA, perhaps the foremost organization fighting for the rights of women in Afghanistan, announced as the Northern Alliance entered Kabul, “The retreat of the terrorist Taliban from Kabul is a positive development, but the entering of the rapist and looter Northern Alliance in the city is nothing but dreadful and shocking news for about two million residents of Kabul whose wounds of the years 1992-96 have not healed yet. Thousands of people who fled Kabul during the past two months were saying that they feared coming to power of the NA in Kabul much more than being scared by the US bombing.”

Moreover, while they are no doubt capable warriors, what has occurred has little or perhaps nothing to do with their battlefield abilities, since there was no battle. The Taliban essentially withdrew without a fight, apparently choosing to cede the cities to continue the struggle from the mountains, depending on how much there is left to them, under the onslaught of the bombing.

6. Since anthrax probably has a domestic source and since the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 probably was accidental, don't your concerns about creating more terrorists seem a little alarmist?

Not at all—unfortunately. The assessment of this miserable and depressing prediction against actual outcomes is in the future, not the present. It is similar to when critics warned in the 1980s that supporting bin Laden and the Mujahideen would have horrible future blowback ramifications. To say a week or two, or even a year or two after that prediction that it was proved false would have been a bit premature, obviously.

7. Aren't your worries about uprisings throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds (including nuclear-armed Pakistan) rather exaggerated?

We and other critics said that the policies undertaken in Afghanistan and proposed for the rest of the world risked such destabilization. They did, and they still do. Does anyone think that Pakistan's stability is assured as the battle moves to the southern Pashtun region of Afghanistan, a region with many cross-border ties to Pakistan? If the U.S. decides to expand the “war on terrorism” to some new defenseless venue (the Sudan) or perhaps a not entirely defenseless venue (Iraq) the prospects of general social dissolution in the region will enlarge, again.

Numerous surveys in Arab and Muslim nations show extremely high levels of opposition to the U.S. war, even in supposedly friendly states. Most people are not inclined to heed bin Laden's call to holy war, but as the U.S. pushes its dictatorial allies to join Washington's holy war, instability is likely to spread.

8. Isn't it time to celebrate the demise of the Taliban and return to healing our country, setting aside the negative talk about U.S. criminality and the opposition to U.S. policies?

If the Taliban were finished as a social force, that would be something worth “celebrating” in that the Taliban is a reactionary and violent organization impeding justice by its very existence and practices. But, regrettably, it is quite possible that they are off planning their next actions, not disintegrating.

As to setting aside criticisms of the U.S., nothing could be less constructive.

First, to continue to criticize and, more importantly, to pressure for an end to bombing and undertaking food aid in all endangered regions is paramount. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Second, addressing the just grievances of people throughout the Middle East and the world regarding U.S. foreign policies is necessary, both on behalf of those who suffer the impact of those policies, but also to eliminate the cause of support for terrorism against the U.S.

Third, the events in NYC, Washington, and Afghanistan, we are told by our government, auger a larger project, a war on terrorism, whose character, as we can already see, is to be like that of the Cold War. It will, if it actually transpires as intended, marshal hate and fear through manipulation and misrepresentation into support for policies that further enrich and empower the already rich and powerful. Everyone, at some level, knows this. The average American is not surprised that corporations and the government seek to use fear of terror to redistribute funds upward by means of regressive tax reforms and boondoggle military spending, to gut public programs, to stifle public debate by calls for patriotism from the media, and to restrict rights by draconian legislation. But not as commonly understood is that active dissent can curb these trends and can foster opposite ones. Dissenters continuing to dissent and to make known the power of dissent are absolutely essential now, as at any other time.              Z

Michael Albert is co-founder of South End Press and Z Magazine, and founder and sysop of Znet. He is author and co-author (with Robin Hahnel) of numerous books, including Moving Forward (AK Press), Parecon (forthcoming, Verso) and Trajectory of Change (forthcoming, South End Press).

Stephen R. Shalom teaches political science at William Paterson University and is the author of numerous articles and books, including Imperial Alibis (South End), and a textbook, Which Side Are You On?: An Introduction to Politics.