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Column/2001/09/2001091401.php3

American view of terrorism as criminal act wrong

CHIAROSCURO

MGG Pillai

2:26pm, Fri: The focus shifts in the United States from the carnage and horror of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC to what should now be done. It is more of less accepted as an article of faith that it was Osama bin Laden who perpetrated this horror, the US Congress and Senate now look to see how he could be snared without loss of American life.

The Taliban is targeted for allowing him protection. Pakistan, one of the few countries to recognise the Taliban, is under pressure to cooperate with the United States and provide what it knows about Osama bin Laden and his shadowy organisation.

One thing is forgotten: all these options are discussed in the public eye, on chat shows and the 24 hour coverage CNN, CNBC and others provide. It reflects not confidence but embarrassment that can only be resolved by attacking the enemy, whoever he is, at his lair. Long after the hurt disappears, the horror that the United States government, the most powerful on earth, could be thrown into irrational turbulence would remain, as Pearl Harbour in the American psyche.

The United States would probably bomb a few places in retaliation, indiscriminately if she has to. A few years ago she bombed a vaccine producing factory in Khartoum in retaliation, so we were told, for Sudan harbouring Osama bin Laden. It turned out to be a wrong target.

Like often during the Vietnam War, when ?solacium? payments were made to people and targets wrongly bombed, the United States paid the factory owner for his loss with money and an apology. Nothing was said of the innocents who were killed, nor that it destroyed inadvertently the only vaccine producing factory in central Africa.

Palestinian cause

I have received much hate mail for what I wrote, but terror breeds terror, and what happened in New York and Washington was one the United States should have expected for all the mayhem her official policy spreads around the world, particularly in the Middle East. When death is close to home, emotion takes over. Much of the hate mail, from Americans, comes from that helplessness at what happened.

It is not the first time I have seen that helplessness. I saw it aplenty during the Vietnam War in the 1960s as a Reuters reporter when visiting sites bombed by America outside its technologically-defined coordinates. Then it was justified for harbouring the mysterious and faceless Vietcong. Today, Afghanistan is targeted for harbouring the mysterious Osama bin Laden.

We see that now in the aftermath of this carnage and destruction. But would it resolve the matter? It would not. For America's enemies are no longer states and ideologies but those who are marginalised by its policies around the world. Washington went into the Middle East like a bull in a china shop, its neutrality heavily leaning towards Israel.

The Palestinian cause, for the all the hurt it spewed, still remains at the heart of the latest carnage. Resolve that, and the United States could well have a freer ride. Though it may not, with its insistence on technological and electronic supremacy not backed by solid ground information.

When the United States drops bombs in contentious areas, the frustrations of the governments of those areas is as President George Bush displayed after the carnage: impotence. The chat shows show that with stark reality. There is an attempt to rouse up the American people to back the government, and contrary but sane opinions are cut short.

It is not without reason that the most sane reports of this sordid episode come from European newspapers and television channels. What the United States opinion does not accept is a view contrary to its own. That is at the heart of the present official and private hysteria.

Pakistani dilemma

This is not to undermine the extent of the tragedy. But that tragedy must be put in perspective. It is tragic only in the sense that it hit the United States. It is seen differently elsewhere in the world. Especially in the Middle East.

The official United States policy is to root out terrorism as a criminal act. This is wrong. It should instead look upon it as another face of war, and root it out as the Allied Forces did Germany during the Second World War. Otherwise, she could be felled as she was in Vietnam.

The measures announced so far puts friendly governments in fright and fear. Pakistan could not but recognise the Pathan Taliban; the rulers in Kabul come from the same Pathan stock that inhabit its Northwest Frontier province. Every Pakistani spokesman I heard or saw on television, with a knowledge of the Taliban, were Pathans.

So, if Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff decides to hand over all his country's information on Osama bin Laden to the United States, as is reported, he invites internal convulsions he could not get out of. As a frontline state, Pakistan is more vulnerable to such pressures than the United States - 15,000 kilometres away. Unless the United States can build up a force of Pathans that can topple the Taliban, this is bound to end in failure.

Would it resolve the matter? Even assuming Osama bin Laden is caught or killed. No. It would create another area of uncertainty in an otherwise uncertain area, putting more pressure on the United States' allies in the region, including India and the Soviet Union. Would it then root out terrorism in the area? No. The United States can only expect a temporary reprieve.

The terrorism would not stop because one ringleader is killed. There are too many groups using terrorism and terror as an policy to confront the United States over the Palestinian issue alone. Besides, as Robert Fisk mentioned in The Independent in London, Osama bin Laden told him in several interviews that his twin aim is to destroy the United States and its satrap nations in the region.

Israeli plot?

One question is unresolved: how could such a brilliantly coordinated plan be put into operation with the resources the Osama bin Laden or anyone else? Latest reports suggest that the hijackers knew enough of top secret information to raise questions if someone in the highest reaches of the US government provided the information. Whether he or she is a mole is beside the point, which is the sophistication with which the preparations were done.

This suggests two possibilities: one Muslim group suggests it could be a deliberate Israeli plot to blame the Muslims for the carnage and destruction; two, rogue intelligence specialists, not necessarily from the KGB but from Western agencies as well, could have planned this for a fee. I doubt if any Arab organisation could have pulled off singlehandedly what happened. Whoever did it had specialist help beyond their capabilities.

Francis Fukuyama's theory of the end of the history in the unipolar world we now live in reflected the complacency monopolists have. It ignored the power of the dispossessed.

What happened in the United States this week is similar in scope and scale to the increasingly virulent computer viruses that down computer systems, even the rise of Aids, in this era of complacency and a belief that terror and mishaps only strike the other fellow. Samuel P Huntington's thesis in the Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order presumes civilisational clashes, in which the world would be divided into civilisations.

I have an unconventional view of the incident: What happened is the continuing disturbances thrown up by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The rise of the central European power of Germany in the 1870s accelerated the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which began in 1348 and finally ended in 1922.