Made-in-America terrorism

Daniel Thwaites

AFGHANISTAN BECAME a wasteland in the 1980s when a Soviet-backed government was at war with American-backed rebels. The Taliban and Osama bin Laden are the wayward children of a superpower foreign policy that, precisely because it was so ugly, is being swept under the rug of our collective memory.

But some things will be hard to forget, like when Najibullah, leader of the communists, was found hanging from a lamppost in Kabul with his genitals in his mouth.

As I write the drumbeat of war is drowning out any other discussion. Most of the American television coverage, always just a few seconds from showing yet another shot of the old stars and stripes waving defiantly, is unflagging in its determination to shed as little light on the antecedents of the terrorist attack as is possible.

The question of why such an outrageous event was planned and executed by people who, say what you like, are certainly not cowards, is rarely addressed with anything like the seriousness it demands. But faced with the genuine grief, it seems the only permissible thought is that the monsters did it because they hate America for her freedom and wealth.

Analysis is always in short supply. Now it is virtually banished to create more space for the touching, heart-breaking stories of families left to suffer in the aftermath. The truth is that the terrorists have exposed a great vulnerability. Civilian warriors now have the capacity to visit upon citizens vengeance for the acts of their government in a way heretofore undiscovered. This fact alone changes everything and must be on George W's mind right at this time.

According to Francis Fukuyama, former adviser to President Reagan, it "sets up a kind of deterrence, in which the US for the first time will have to consider the direct costs of its actions [and] will force on it a certain kind of realism as it interacts with the world". Right now we are all looking to the Middle East for perpetrators because that is where the American government indicates the nerve-centre of the terrorist planning took place. Fine. But then surely there is a need for explanation of why some Arabs feel so aggrieved with the United States. Indeed, as many have pointed out, this is an opportunity for America to look at aspects of its foreign policy that have the effect of creating enemies in many parts of the world.

What is that? Here is a summation by a European, Seamus Milne: "Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages".

So one immediate danger is that little of substance will be learned from the horrific events and the world will just be treated to a high-tech bloodbath courtesy of the American taxpayer. By all means look east to Afghanistan. But don't forget that the terrorists got into the act from inside the United States. So even as the warships head to the Gulf, the audacious bombings represent the dawn of a new kind of threat.

Unlike Timmy McVeigh, these terrorists weren't home-grown. But like Timmy, they took training from Americans in America. It must be said that the American government has been conducting itself with remarkable restraint in the circumstances. Domestically, powerful voices have been raised against attacks on Americans of Arab origin. And despite angering some people by using the word "crusade" last Sunday, and alarming others by Texas-twanging about wanting bin Laden "dead or alive", President Bush has been performing his duties with determination. America seems to have learned from the experience of the internment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbour.

It is perhaps painful for Americans to be reminded that Osama bin Laden was a client of their CIA, and so, to some extent, their own creation. But poor Afghanistan, like so many other countries, had to struggle on the periphery of two superpowers in the Cold War that preferred to engage each other in the colonies and backwaters of their empires. And these creatures of the empire sometimes strike back with all the cunning and evil that they learned, but with the added vehemence of one who was once a friend.

Even as Operation Infinite Justice is launched, and the military might of the US sets out in search of a worthy rival, the dangers are increasing. Civilians are pawns in this serious game, just as they were for the disgusting terrorists.

For Pakistan, acting on US instructions, has closed its border with Afghanistan, and the Taliban is blockading civilians in Kabul and Jalalabad. Each for their own reason is holding back men, women and children who want to flee for their lives before the sky starts to rain bombs.

Daniel Thwaites is involved in teaching and writing.

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