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September
20, 2001
The Choice Is Ours
Law or Vengeance?
By Roger Normand
All the elements are in place NOW for
an attack against Afghanistan. Carrier-based fighter jets are
in position and on alert, heavy bomber squadrons and airborne
assault divisions have landed in north Pakistan. An attack
may well take place in the dead of night there, hours before
President Bush takes the extraordinary step of addressing both
houses of Congress tonight at 9pm.
What is going on? Since the
government is tightly controlling all information, without challenge
from the mainstream media, we can only make educated guesses
about the nature of the attack and its potential consequences.
Afghanistan's mountainous eastern
border with Pakistan, especially around the city of Kandahar,
is the power base of both the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah
Omar, and Osama bin Ladin and his networks of "Afghan Arab"
fighters. We can expect that US fighter jets will secure the
airspace and then heavy bombers will pound this region for a
sustained period, followed by airborne "search and destroy"
missions against Taliban and bin Ladin forces.
There are several immediate
strategic problems with this approach:
1. US officials have defined
the primary objective as attacking and killing specific human
targets, the command elements in the Taliban and bin Ladin networks.
But they are the most secure people in all of Afghanistan;
they alone have access to remote mountain bunkers and hideouts;
their families have already fled to Pakistan while everyone
else is trapped at the border. The only way to kill people who
cannot be specifically located is to kill everyone in the much
larger region within which the targets are presumed to be hiding.
2. A second target is likely
to be the Taliban's military forces. But this is not a modern,
centralized army as in Iraq. They operate as small, mobile
units led by local commanders with intimate knowledge of the
terrain. It is impossible to hit them with pinpoint strikes.
Carpet bombing may kill some of them, but will certainly kill
a far higher percentage of civilians and families who lack the
means to reach the safest places in the high mountains.
3. These strikes will be launched
from Pakistan, as demanded by our political and military leaders,
and against the desires and best judgment of every single political
and military leader in that country. Why are they opposed?
Because Pakistan is already bitterly divided. Very powerful
forces not just Islamic parties and major elements of
the intelligence services and military command, but also a significant
portion of the population, especially Pathans in the semi-autonomous
northwest region bordering Afghanistan have vowed to oppose
the presence of US troops in their land. They are explicitly
threatening civil war against a weak government in a nuclear
state already engaged in a low-intensity conflict with nuclear
India over the disputed territory or Kashmir.
4. A number of other Arab and
Muslim countries face a comparable (though less dramatic) dilemma
to Pakistan, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf dictatorships,
Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, even Jordan. The domestic backlash
against these fragile and repressive regimes could lead to heightened
internal conflict with regional and global consequences.
We can expect press briefings
from Washington describing targeted attacks against Taliban
command and control centers and bin Ladin mountain encampments.
We can expect canned footage of smart bombs striking their
targets shot by the Pentagon, fed to the media, and beamed
directly into every American home. We saw the same images during
the Gulf War ten years ago only to "learn" later that
88% of the bombs were dumb and inaccurate.
We can also expect that this
is only the first strike of a long war, a mere prelude of the
rising crescendo to come. The Times of London today described
"Operation Noble Eagle," a ten-year American-British
plan to eradicate global terrorism. Are the flashes of light
on our collective horizon merely the blazing of bombs or do
they herald the dawn of a new Cold War? Have we discovered
another Evil Empire to sustain the circle of violence, fear
and hatred that has plagued this bloodiest of centuries? Is
there no other way to bring us security other than the familiar,
rigid and deathly embrace of us versus them?
We are living in sad times,
dangerous times. We have not finished mourning our victims,
but soon there will be new victims to mourn. Talk of justice
is on everyone's lips today. But we must recognize that justice
is contested terrain. Do we mean the justice at the heart of
every enduring religious, ethical and legal tradition, the justice
born of love, courage and understanding that sees connections
between all humanity and seeks the root causes of violence,
the justice whose universal principles extend universally to
us all. Or the justice born of vengeance and the need to exorcise
grief and fear by striking out at ill-defined enemies, the justice
that seduces us with easy answers and simple formulas like us
good and them bad, the justice that divides humanity and turns
the wheel of endless violence and revenge.
No nation, no culture, no religion
is all good or all bad. This single world of ours is home
to six billion people, each of us capable of love, hate, hope
and fear. A few of us are also capable of unimaginable horrors
raping and killing little children, plowing hijacked airplanes
into crowded skyscrapers, or ordering the carpet bombing of
civilian areas. But most of us, given the chance and the information,
will do whatever we can to resist and prevent these horrors.
It is during moments of crisis
that all people of conscience must stand together and raise
our voices for sanity and hope. With political leaders in
Washington advocating restricted civil liberties at home and
indiscriminate violence abroad, with media outlets failing to
pose any real questions about this promised global war, with
people of Arab, Muslim and South Asian descent facing a sharp
increase in physical violence, we have NO CHOICE but to take
our message to the streets. Only respectful, non-violent but
determined protest throughout this country will convince our
leaders that Americans are good and decent people who desperately
want security as do all human beings on this planet
but who will not tolerate manipulation of our tragic losses,
our innocent blood, to justify spilling innocent blood of other
human beings, whose mothers and children will weep for them
as ours do.
Our message must be firmly
grounded in international law and human rights the very
values embedded in our Constitution. Respect for life. Equality
and non-discrimination. Freedom of speech and expression.
Protect the innocent and punish the guilty based on convincing
evidence and lawful procedure. Above all, we must squarely
confront the issue of national and individual security by insisting
that respect for civil liberties and human rights at home
and abroad is the only path towards security, for us and
all peoples on our small interconnected planet.
The rule of law or the law
of vengeance. The choice is ours, every one of us. CP
Roger Normand is director of the Center
for Economic and Social Rights.
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