Pankaj Mishra: In search of monsters to destroy


Bush said soon after 9/11, "I'm not going to fire a $2m missile at a
$10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt."

Source: Guardian (UK) (10-4-08)
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/55243.html
[Pankaj Mishra is an Indian author and writer of literary and
political essays.]

We are winning in Iraq, John McCain declared in the presidential
debate last week, "and we will come home with victory and with
honour." This may sound like some perfunctory keep-the-pecker-up stuff
from a former military man. But the Republican candidate, who believes
that the "surge" has succeeded in Iraq, also possesses the fanatical
conviction that heavier bombing and more ground troops could have
saved the United States from disgrace in Vietnam.

On the same occasion, Barack Obama, who seems more aware of the costs
of American honour to the American economy, claimed he would divert
troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and, if necessary, order them to
assault "safe havens" for terrorists in Pakistan's wild west. Both
candidates sought the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, the co-alchemist,
with Richard Nixon, of the "peace with honour" formula in Vietnam,
which turned out to include the destruction of neighbouring Cambodia.

An ominously similar escalation of the "war on terror" has ensured
that the next American president will receive a septic chalice from
George Bush in January 2009. In July, Bush sanctioned raids into
Pakistan, pre-empting Obama's tough-sounding strategy of widening the
war in Afghanistan, where resurgent Taliban this year account for
Nato's highest death toll since 2001. Pakistan's army chief vowed to
defend his country "at all costs", and his soldiers now clash with US
troops almost daily. Obscured by the American economy's slow-motion
train wreck, the war on terror has already stumbled into its most
treacherous phase with the invasion of fiercely nationalistic and
nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Most of the recent disasters of geopolitical machismo could have been
foretold. In late 2003, when the occupation of Iraq was beginning to
go badly wrong, the American journalist Dexter Filkins came across a
village called Abu Hishma in the Sunni triangle. Rubble-strewn and
"encased in razor wire", Abu Hishma resembled, Filkins writes in The
Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (Bodley Head), "a town
in the West Bank". Its terrified residents told him about the local
American commander Nathan Sassaman, who bulldozed homes and called in
air strikes, and who was fond of proclaiming that "there is no God - I
am god here".

Sassaman sounds like something out of Conrad, the white man in the
tropics driven to lunacy by absolute power and extreme isolation. But,
according to Filkins, he is a bright man, even the "embodiment of the
best that America could offer" in his desire to bring democracy to
Iraqis. A serious reader of history and anthropology, Sassaman, along
with fellow officers, is very impressed by a book entitled The Arab
Mind, by Raphael Patai, a Hungarian-Israeli-American academic.
Apparently, it makes clear that the "only thing" the denizens of the
Middle East "understand is force - force, pride and saving face", and
Sassaman believes that, "with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a
lot of money for projects ... we can convince these people that we are
here to help them".

Filkins doesn't mention that The Arab Mind, originally published in
1973, was the bible of neocon commentators in Washington and New York
cheerleading the Bush administration's audacious venture: what
Condoleezza Rice in the new book by Bob Woodward, The War Within: A
Secret White House History 2006-2008 (Simon & Schuster), describes as
shifting the "epicentre of American power" from Europe, where it had
rested since the second world war, to the Middle East. Widely read in
the US military, The Arab Mind later inspired the modus operandi of
the jailers of Abu Ghraib.

More surprisingly, respectable intellectuals, journalists and
academics echoed its generalisations. Among these people was the
historian Bernard Lewis, who assured Dick Cheney, one of his most
devoted readers, that "in that part of the world, nothing matters more
than resolute will and force". The New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman (who is on Sassaman's reading list) exhorted the US to act
"just a little bit crazy", since "the more frightened our enemies are
today, the fewer we will have to fight tomorrow". Accordingly, Richard
Armitage, assistant secretary of state and a relative moderate among
the Bush administration's hawks, told Pakistani diplomats that the US
would bomb their country "back to the stone age" if it did not
withdraw its support for the Taliban.

The idea that the natives would recognise superior firepower when they
saw it seemed to be validated by Pakistani acquiescence, followed by
the Taliban's swift capitulation. Iraq was logically the next setting
for shock-and-awe tactics - Donald Rumsfeld was complaining even
before the aerial bombing of the Taliban had finished that Afghanistan
had run out of targets. The Bush administration claimed that Saddam
Hussein had to be disarmed to make the Middle East safe for democracy.
But invading Iraq was also an image-making exercise - what Hannah
Arendt, commenting on the absence of clear military goals in America's
previous war of choice in Vietnam, described as the attempt by "a
superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the
world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth'".

Busy unleashing his awesome firepower on Iraq, Rumsfeld had no idea
what to do after his streamlined army reached Baghdad, apart from
letting stuff happen. Wiser in Battle, the memoir of the US lieutenant
general Ricardo Sanchez (HarperCollins), reveals that, as the Iraqi
resistance unexpectedly intensified, the defeat in Vietnam began to
prey on Bush's mind, unravelling his syntax as he harangued his
commanders in Iraq:

Kick ass! ... We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this
is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's
an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal ... There is a series of
moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are
resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill
them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not
blinking!

Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, describes
in his book Fiasco (Penguin) how, after a mob ambushed and killed four
American military contractors in Falluja, the commanders were ordered
to "go in and clobber". Citing strategic and logistical reasons, the
military chiefs pleaded for restraint, but they were overruled by the
White House: the destruction of Falluja was as essential to the image-
making exercise as the carpet-bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia.

The geopolitical consequences as well as the "collateral" damage of
the exhibition of US might are succinctly outlined by the titles of
recent books - The Forever War, Fiasco and Ahmed Rashid's Descent into
Chaos (Allen Lane). Rashid is clearly the most despairing among the
journalists accompanying the march of folly, even though, as a
Pakistani long accustomed to the pretensions and limits of US power in
south Asia, he didn't start off with many illusions. His previous book
described how a combination of selfish motives and reckless actions by
the US facilitated the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. "Outsiders like me," he writes in Descent into Chaos,
"found it remarkable that a US president could live in such an unreal
world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were
so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning - all
of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public."

The habitual deceivers are often, in the end, the most deceived.
According to Rashid, Pervez Musharraf's regime in Pakistan may have
pulled off one of the biggest swindles in recent history by persuading
the Bush administration to part with $10bn in exchange for mostly
empty promises of support for its "war on terror". Most Pakistanis
feel a mix of contempt and distrust for the US, which abandoned their
country after enlisting it in a proxy war against the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan. Confronted with a choice between regressing to the stone
age and meeting crazy Uncle Sam's demands, Musharraf's regime adopted
a policy of dissembling that the then foreign minister outlined as
"First say yes, and later say but". Since 9/11, the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's rogue spy agency, which has long
considered Afghanistan as its backyard, has continued to provide
sanctuary and military support for the Taliban while occasionally
arresting some al-Qaida militants to appease Washington. Mullah Omar
and the original Afghan Taliban Shura, Rashid claims, are serenely
resident in Pakistan's borderlands, along with "a plethora of Asian
and Arab terrorist groups who are now expanding their reach into
Europe and the United States".

"I'm not," Bush said soon after 9/11, "going to fire a $2m missile at
a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." Hitting camels in the
butt may have been more useful than disbursing $70m in bribes to
warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom Rashid revealed in his
previous book to be fond of driving tanks over his opponents. The US
coaxed many of Afghanistan's old villains out of retirement to defeat
the Taliban with minimum use of US troops, and then lost interest in
the country.

Rashid believes that the US could have done more to help "nation-
building" in Afghanistan or at least prop up Hamid Karzai, who last
week was reduced to plaintively asking Mullah Omar to return to
Afghanistan for the sake of "peace". But as Tariq Ali bluntly
clarifies in his new book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of
American Power (Simon & Schuster), the post-9/11 project of "nation-
building" in Afghanistan, which prioritised western interests over all
others, was always doomed. It was "a top-down process", trying to
create "an army constituted not to defend the nation but to impose
order on its own people, on behalf of outside powers; a civil
administration that will have no control over planning, health,
education etc, all of which will be run by NGOs, whose employees will
be far better paid than the locals, and answerable not to the
population but to their overseas sponsors; and a government whose
foreign policy is identical to Washington's."

American bombing raids, which have killed hundreds of civilians in
Afghanistan, further unite fractious Afghans against foreign usurpers.
Tariq Ali correctly prescribes scepticism against strategists and
journalists who blame Pakistan for increasing attacks on western
forces in Afghanistan while disregarding the fact that "many Afghans
who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of Nato and the
behaviour of its troops that they will support any opposition."

In Pakistan, too, public anger against the US is fuelled largely by
the "knowledge that Washington has backed every military dictator who
has squatted on top of the country". Contemptuously dismissing the
alarmist cliché that jihadis are very close to getting their grubby
fingers on the country's nuclear button, Ali points to the deep and
persistent unpopularity of religious parties in Pakistan. The jihadis
would only get that far, he asserts, if "the army wanted them to",
which is virtually impossible unless, as may be beginning to happen
now, American assaults on the country's hard-won sovereignty causes
deep ideological ruptures within the country's strongest institution.

Filkins doesn't set out any future trajectory for the venture in Iraq.
He reported from the country for the New York Times, but the first-
person narrator of The Forever War is less a journalist than an
existential hero, eloquent with the pathos of Sisyphean striving,
impotence and failure. Composed in short, often lyrical, sections,
Filkins's book often seems aimed at literary posterity, where it would
join such modern classics of war literature as Ernst Junger's Storm of
Steel, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine and Michael Herr's
Dispatches

Unlike the war in Vietnam, which exercised some of the keenest
literary sensibilities in America (Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Susan
Sontag), the entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced, so far
at least, a meagre crop of quality journalism...

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/55243.html