The Algebra Of Infinite Justice

The Algebra Of Infinite Justice

From the magazine "OUTLOOK"

The Algebra Of Infinite Justice

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction
between civilisation and savagery, between the
'massacre of innocent people' or, if you like, 'a
clash of civilisations' and 'collateral damage'. The
sophistry and fastidious algebra of Infinite
Justice... Free Speech

ARUNDHATI ROY

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11
suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade
Center, an American newscaster said: "Good and Evil
rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last
Tuesday. People who we don't know, massacred people
who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee."
Then he broke down and wept.
Here's the rub: America is at war against people it
doesn't know (because they don't appear much on TV).
Before it has properly identified or even begun to
comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government
has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric,
cobbled together an "International Coalition Against
Terror", mobilised its army, its airforce, its navy
and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it
can't very well return without having fought one. If
it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged
folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once
war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a
justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why
it's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the
world's most powerful country, reaching reflexively,
angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of
war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself,
America's streamlined warships, its Cruise missiles
and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As
deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer
worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and
cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the
new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It
slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in
baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said
that it had doubts about the identities of some of the
hijackers. On the same day, President George W. Bush
said: "We know exactly who these people are and which
governments are supporting them." It sounds as though
the President knows something that the FBI and the
American public don't.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress,
President Bush called the enemies of America "Enemies
of Freedom".

"Americans are asking why do they hate us?" he said.
"They hate our freedomsâ€â€our freedom of religion, our
freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble
and disagree with each other." People are being asked
to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that
The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even
though it has no substantial evidence to support that
claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's motives
are what the US government says they are, and there's
nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is
vital for the US government to persuade the American
public that America's commitment to freedom and
democracy and the American Way of Life is under
attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage
and anger, it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if
that were true, it's reasonable to wonder why the
symbols of America's economic and military
dominanceâ€â€the World Trade Center and the Pentagonâ€â€were
chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the
Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger
that led to the attacks has its taproot not in
American freedom and democracy, but in the US
government's record of commitment and support to
exactly the opposite thingsâ€â€to military and economic
terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship,
religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside
America)?

It must be hard for ordinary Americans so recently
bereaved to look up at the world with their eyes full
of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be
indifference. It isn't indifference. It's just augury.
An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing
that what goes around, eventually comes around.
American people ought to know that it is not them, but
their government's policies that are so hated. They
can't possibly doubt that they themselves, their
extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors,
their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are
universally welcomed.

All of us have been moved by the courage and grace
shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary
office-goers in the days and weeks that followed the
attacks.

America's grief at what happened has been immense and
immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it
to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will
be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity
to try and understand why September 11 happened,
Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole
world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own.
Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the
hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our
pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked,
ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated
those particular hijackers who flew planes into those
particular American buildings. They were not glory
boys. They left no suicide notes, no political
messages, no organisation has claimed credit for the
attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they
were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for
survival or any desire to be remembered. It's almost
as though they could not scale down the enormity of
their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And
what they did has blown a hole in the world as we know
it. In the absence of information, politicians,
political commentators, writers (like myself) will
invest the act with their own politics, with their own
interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of
the political climate in which the attacks took place,
can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said,
must be said quickly.
Before America places itself at the helm of the
"international coalition against terror", before it
invites (and coerces) countries to actively
participate in its almost godlike missionâ€â€Operation
Infinite Justiceâ€â€it would help if some small
clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice
for whom? Is this America's War against Terror in
America or against Terror in general? What exactly is
being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost
7,000 lives, the gutting of 5 million square feet of
office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a
section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds
of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline
companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange?
Or is it more than that?

In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US Secretary of
State, was asked on national television what she felt
about the fact that 5,00,000 Iraqi children had died
as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that
it was "a very hard choice", but that all things
considered, "we think the price is worth it."
Madeleine Albright never lost her job for saying this.
She continued to travel the world representing the
views and aspirations of the US government. More
pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in
place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction
between civilisation and savagery, between the
'massacre of innocent people' or, if you like, 'a
clash of civilisations' and 'collateral damage'. The
sophistry and fastidious algebra of Infinite Justice.
How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a
better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead
American? How many dead women and children for every
dead man? How many dead mujahideen for each dead
investment banker?

As we watch mesmerised, Operation Infinite Justice
unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition
of the world's superpowers is closing in on
Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged,
war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban
government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man
being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly
count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among
them, half a million maimed orphans. There are
accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when
artificial limbs are airdropped into remote,
inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a
shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is
that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or
signposts to plot on a military mapâ€â€no big cities, no
highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment
plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The
countryside is littered with landminesâ€â€10 million is
the most recent estimate. The American army would
first have to clear the mines and build roads in order
to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens
have fled from their homes and arrived at the border
between Pakistan and Afghanistan. As supplies run
outâ€â€food and aid agencies have been asked to leaveâ€â€the
BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian
disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness
the Infinite Justice of the new century. Civilians
starving to death, while they're waiting to be killed.


By contributing to the killing of Afghan civilians,
the US government will only end up helping the Taliban
cause.

In America there has been rough talk of "bombing
Afghanistan back to the stone age". Someone please
break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And
if it's any consolation, America played no small part
in helping it on its way. The American people may be a
little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we
hear reports that there's a run on maps of
Afghanistan), but the US government and Afghanistan
are old friends. In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI
(Inter-Services Intelligence) launched the largest
covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their
purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance
to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an
Islamic jehad, which would turn Muslim countries
within the Soviet Union against the Communist regime
and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was
meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out
to be much more than that. Over the years, the CIA
funded and recruited almost 1,00,000 radical
mujahideen from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for
America's proxy war. The rank and file of the
mujahideen were unaware that their jehad was actually
being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam.(The irony is that
America was equally unaware that it was financing a
future war against itself).

By 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of
relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving
behind a civilisation reduced to rubble. Civil war in
Afghanistan raged on. The jehad spread to Chechnya,
Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to
pour in money and military equipment, but the
overheads had become immense, and more money was
needed. The mujahideen ordered farmers to plant opium
as 'revolutionary tax'. The ISI set up hundreds of
heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two
years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan
borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin
in the world, and the single biggest source on
American streets.

The annual profits, said to be between 100 and 200
billion dollars, were ploughed back into training and
arming militants.

In 1995, the Talibanâ€â€then a marginal sect of
dangerous, hardline fundamentalistsâ€â€fought its way to
power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that
old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political
parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of
terror. Its first victims were its own people,
particularly women. It closed down girls' schools,
dismissed women from government jobs, enforced Sharia
laws in which women deemed to be 'immoral' are stoned
to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are
buried alive. Given the Taliban government's human
rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in
any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by
the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its
civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything
more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to
re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you
destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on
Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble
some old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial
ground of Soviet Communism and the springboard of a
unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space
for neo-capitalism and corporate globalisation, again
dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to
be the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought
and won this war for America.
And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has
suffered enormously. The US government has not been
shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked
the idea of democracy from taking root in the country.
Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market
for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the
number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one and a
half million. There are three million Afghan refugees
living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's
economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence,
globalisation's Structural Adjustment programmes and
drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up
to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres
and madrassas, sown like dragon's teeth across the
country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous
popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban,
who the Pakistan government has supported, funded and
propped up for years, has material and strategic
alliances with Pakistan's own political parties. Now
the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to
garrot the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for
so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his
support to the US, could well find he has something
resembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to
the vision of its former leaders, has so far been
fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game.
Had it been drawn in, it's more than likely that our
democracy, such as it is, would not have survived.
Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian
government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the
US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan.
Having had this ringside view of Pakistan's sordid
fate, it isn't just odd, it's unthinkable that India
should want to do this. Any Third World country with a
fragile economy and a complex social base should know
by now that to invite a superpower like America in
(whether it says it's staying or just passing through)
would be like inviting a brick to drop through your
windscreen.

In the media blitz that followed the September 11
events, no mainstream TV station thought it fit to
tell the story of America's involvement with
Afghanistan. So, to those unfamiliar with the story,
the coverage of the attacks could have been moving,
disturbing and perhaps to cynics, self-indulgent.
However, to those of us who are familiar with
Afghanistan's recent history, American television
coverage and the rhetoric of the "International
Coalition Against Terror" is just plain insulting.
America's 'free press' like its 'free market' has a
lot to account for.

Operation Infinite Justice is ostensibly being fought
to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end
up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger
and more terror across the world. For ordinary people
in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of
sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in
school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb
in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight?
Already CNN is warning people against the possibility
of biological warfareâ€â€small pox, bubonic plague,
anthraxâ€â€being waged by innocuous crop duster aircraft.
Being picked off a few at a time may end up being
worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear
bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over
the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to
curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off
workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut
back on public spending and divert huge amounts of
money to the defence industry.

To what purpose? President George Bush can no more
"rid the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it
with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even
toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism
with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the
symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country.
It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or
Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble,
terrorists can pull up stakes and move their
'factories' from country to country in search of a
better deal. Just like the multinationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it
is to be contained, the first step is for America to
at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with
other nations, with other human beings, who, even if
they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories
and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights.
Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence
Secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in
America's New War, he said that if he could convince
the world that Americans must be allowed to continue
with their way of life, he would consider it a
victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card
from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have
been written by Osama bin Laden (who knows?) and
delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been
signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old
wars.

The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia,
the 17,500 killed when Israelâ€â€backed by the USâ€â€invaded
Lebanon in 1982, the 2,00,000 Iraqis killed in
Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians
who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West
Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia,
Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the
Dominican republic, Panama, at the hands of all the
terrorists, dictators and genocidists who the American
government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied
with arms.

And this is far from being a comprehensive list. For a
country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the
American people have been extremely fortunate. The
strikes on September 11 were only the second on
American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl
Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route,
but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the
world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't
exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a
way, America did invent him. He was among the jehadis
who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA
commenced operations. Osama bin Laden has the
distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by
the FBI. In the course of a fortnight, he has been
promoted from Suspect, to Prime Suspect, and then,
despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the
charts to being "wanted dead or alive".

>From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce
evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a
court of law) to link Osama bin Laden to the September
11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most
incriminating piece of evidence against him is the
fact that he has not condemned them.

>From what is known about the location and the living
conditions from which Osama bin Laden operates, it's
entirely possible that he did not personally plan and
carry out the attacksâ€â€that he is the inspirational
figure, 'the CEO of the Holding Company'.

The Taliban's response to US demands for the
extradition of Osama bin Laden has been
uncharacteristically reasonable: Produce the evidence,
we'll hand him over. President Bush's response is that
the demand is "non-negotiable".

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOsâ€â€can
India put in a side-request for the extradition of
Warren Anderson of the USA? He was Chairman of Union
Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that
killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the
necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we
have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really?

Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden?

He's America's family secret. He is the American
President's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all
that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has
been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to
waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat
diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated
policy of "full spectrum dominance", its chilling
disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous
military interventions, its support for despotic and
dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda
that has munched through the economies of poor
countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding
multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe,
the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the
thoughts we think.

Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins
are blurring into one another and gradually becoming
interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs
have been going around in the loop for a while. (The
Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were
supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's
drug-addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush
administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43 million
subsidy for a "war on drugs"...) Now they've even
begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to
the other as 'the head of the snake'. Both invoke God
and use the loose millenarian currency of Good and
Evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in
unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously
armedâ€â€one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely
powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive
power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the
ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important
thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable
alternative to the other.

President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the
worldâ€â€"If you're not with us, you're against s"â€â€is a
piece of presumptuous arrogance.

It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or
should have to make.

 

Re: The Algebra Of Infinite Justice

It good to hear a alternative take on this. The american media has been very reluctant to say things of this nature. The climate in America is very strange right now. It's either you agree with us or we call you unamerican.

Under the surface of the most jaded cynic lies a dissappointed idealist- George Carlin