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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.