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                           America's Imperial War
         The liberals who supported the bombing of Afghanistan have
            aligned themselves with a ruthless military machine

                             By George Monbiot
                              12 Febraury 2002
                             The Guardian [UK]



     Never was victory so bitter. Those liberals who supported the war
     in Afghanistan, and so confidently declared that their values had
     triumphed in November, must now be feeling a little exposed.
     Precisely who has lost, and what the extent of their loss may be,
     is yet to be determined, but there can now be little doubt that
     the dangerous and illiberal people who control the US military
     machine have won. The bombing of Afghanistan is already starting
     to look like the first shot in a new imperial war.

     In 30 years' time we may be able to tell whether or not the people
     of Afghanistan have benefited from the fighting there. The
     murderous Taliban have been overthrown. Women, in Kabul at any
     rate, have been allowed to show their faces in public, and
     readmitted into professional life. Some $3bn has so far been
     pledged for aid and reconstruction. But the only predictable
     feature of Afghan politics is their unpredictability. In the
     absence of an effective peace-keeping force, the tensions between
     the clan leaders could burst into open warfare when the fighting
     season resumes in the spring. Iran, Russia and the US are
     beginning, subtly, to tussle over the nation's future, with
     potentially disastrous consequences for its people.

     In the meantime, seven million remain at risk of starvation. Some
     regions have been made safer for aid workers; others have become
     more dangerous, as looting and banditry fill the vacuum left by
     the Taliban's collapse. Already, some refugees are looking back
     with nostalgia to the comparative order and stability of life
     under that brutal government. For the Afghan people, the only
     certain and irreversible outcome of the war so far is that some
     thousands of civilians have been killed.

     But other interests in Afghanistan are doing rather nicely. On
     January 29, the IMF's assistant director for monetary and exchange
     affairs suggested that the country should abandon its currency and
     adopt the dollar instead. This would, he explained, be a
     "temporary" measure, though, he conceded, "when an economy
     dollarizes, it takes a little while to undollarize." The day
     before, the administrator of the US Agency for International
     Development revealed that part of its aid package to Afghan
     farmers would take the form of GM seed.

     Both Hamid Karzai, the interim president, and Zalmay Khalilzad,
     the US special envoy, were formerly employed as consultants to
     Unocal, the US oil company which spent much of the 1990s seeking
     to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. Unocal appears to have
     dropped the scheme, but smaller companies (such as Chase Energy
     and Caspian Energy Consulting) are now lobbying for its revival.
     In October the president of Turkmenistan wrote to the United
     Nations, pressing for the pipeline's construction.

     More importantly, the temporary US bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan
     and the Caspian states appear to be putting down roots. US
     military "tent cities" have now been established in 13 places in
     the states bordering Afghanistan. New airports are being built and
     garrisons expanded. In December, the US assistant Secretary of
     State Elizabeth Jones promised that "when the Afghan conflict is
     over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and
     interests in this region."

     This is beginning to look rather like the "new imperium" which
     commentators such as Charles Krauthammer have been urging on the
     US government. Already there are signs that confrontation with the
     "axis of evil" is coming to involve more than just containing
     terrorism. Writing in the Korea Times last month, Henry Kissinger
     insisted that, "The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the
     terrorist attack on the United States, though no doubt there was
     some intelligence contact between Iraqi intelligence and one of
     the chief plotters. The challenge of Iraq is essentially
     geopolitical."

     An asymmetric world war of the kind George Bush and Donald
     Rumsfeld have proposed provides the justification, long sought by
     the defence companies and their sponsored representatives in
     Washington, for a massive increase in arms spending. Eisenhower
     warned us to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
     influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial
     complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
     exists and will persist." But we have disregarded his warning, and
     forgotten how dangerous the people seeking vast state contracts
     can be.

     In October I wrote that "the anthrax scare looks suspiciously
     convenient. Just as the hawks in Washington were losing the public
     argument about extending the war to other countries, journalists
     start receiving envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well
     have been labelled "a gift from Iraq". This could indeed be the
     work of terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening
     the conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who
     would benefit from a shift in public opinion." The suggestion was
     widely ridiculed.

     This week's New Scientist reports that the FBI has yet to catch
     the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks. "Investigators are
     virtually certain of one thing, though: it was an inside job. The
     anthrax attacker is an American scientist -- and worse, one from
     within the US's own biodefence establishment. . . . If he wished
     to scale up US military action against Iraq, he almost succeeded
     -- many in Washington tried hard to see Saddam Hussein's hand in
     the attacks. If he wished merely to make the US pour billions into
     biodefence, he did succeed."

     Now Bush has secured a further $48bn for the defence contractors
     who helped him into office, and those who contested the first
     phase of his war are still reviled, by people such as the British
     minister Peter Hain, as "rejectionists" and "isolationists". In
     truth, it is those who supported the war who have endorsed US
     isolationism. Hain insists that Britain will use its influence to
     restrain the "hawks on Capitol Hill", but I fear that Henry
     Kissinger comes closer to the truth when he suggests that "Britain
     will not easily abandon the pivotal role based on its special
     relationship with the United States that it has earned for itself
     in the evolution of the crisis. . . . A determined American policy
     thus has more latitude than is generally assumed." Jack Straw's
     newfound enthusiasm for the US missile defence programme (which
     necessitated, of course, the unilateral abandonment of the
     anti-ballistic missile treaty) suggests that Dr Kissinger is
     rather better versed in British politics than Mr Hain.

     Over the past few weeks, the men who run the military-industrial
     complex have shoved aside the government of the Philippines,
     despatched 16 Black Hawk helicopters to Colombia, arrested the
     Cuban investigators seeking to foil a bomb plot in Miami, alarmed
     Russia and China by scrambling for central Asia, begun developing
     a new tactical nuclear weapon, and all but declared war on three
     nations. Yet still the armchair warriors who supported their
     bombing of Afghanistan cannot understand that these people now
     present a threat not just to terrorism but to the world.