Topic: How did we get from Manhattan to Kabul? - Conclusion

topic by
Sandra
11/16/2001 (14:55)

16 November 2001
How did we get from Manhattan to Kabul?
Part 2 - Conclusion

by Mick Hume

While the American airforce batters the retreating Taliban stragglers from on high, the Bush administration insists that American troops will not go in to reconstruct Afghanistan. A defence department official with responsibility for 'relief and peacekeeping issues' says that the dubious forces of the Northern Alliance can be left to provide 'security' in the areas it now controls (2).

Tony Blair, meanwhile, has pledged thousands of British troops to an Afghan mission. Blair seems to be the one statesman who believes his rhetoric about rebuilding the world in his own image. There is no reason why the rest of us should join him on such a dangerous crusade.

So much for the great victory in Afghanistan. But remember, changing the clique of warlords atop that ruined country was never supposed to be the goal of the Bush-Blair war on terrorism. It was meant to be an effective response to 11 September. Less than a fortnight after those terrorist attacks, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined Washington's aims in sweeping terms: 'The ultimate victory in this war is when everyone who wants to can do what every one of us did today, that is get up, let your children go to school, go out of the house and not in fear, stand here on a sidewalk and not worry about a truck bomb driving into us.' (3)

From this Western viewpoint, the war has been more of a failure than in Afghanistan. But then, how could it be otherwise? The terrorists who carried out the attacks on America did not come from Kabul. Their zealotry was not forged in the caves of southern Afghanistan. Many of them were effectively made in the West, where they lived and studied and then moved in the circles of contemporary exile politics. Their outlook was arguably shaped more by the experience of identity politics in the West than by Islamic fundamentalism in the East. Their nihilistic fanaticism was moulded in the context of widespread alienation in our societies which, as Michael Fitzpatrick has previously argued on spiked, provides fertile ground for the growth of all manner of irrational fundamentalism (4). No amount of military action in Afghanistan could solve that problem.

Since 11 September, many in the West have been in a kind of denial, refusing fully to face up to the home-grown character of the problem. Instead, the Bush administration took America off to Afghanistan in search, not just of bin Laden, but of itself. It hoped to find a new sense of purpose and mission for both the government and the nation, which could replicate the powerful sense of 'Manifest Destiny' with which the USA had entered the twentieth century. In effect, as we suggested on spiked, Bush was seeking to export America's internal malaise on to Afghan soil, in the same way that his predecessors tried, through the war on drugs, to externalise the crisis of America's inner cities on to the coca fields of Colombia. Blair rushed to join him in an effort to boost the moral authority of his exhausted-looking government.

This focus on the home front has provided the central aim of the war. It helped to explain why the campaign in Afghanistan itself so often lacked direction; the purpose was to be seen to act decisively in order to galvanise a domestic and global audience, rather than pursuing any clear strategic goals on the ground. And it is by these criteria that the war has most clearly failed.

There have certainly been a lot of flags flying in America since 11 September. But the angry, defensive response to the terrorist outrages should not be mistaken for the confident patriotism of the past (5). If anything, the crisis has left America more fragmented, fearful and inward-looking than ever. The all-pervasive anthrax scare has become a powerful metaphor for the newly globalised culture of fear. Many in America have been far more concerned about acquiring an antidote to the hypothetical possibility of anthrax infection, than about the real issues of how the USA should wage war in Afghanistan. (In Britain, too, it was notable that even when an actual Irish republican bomb went off in Birmingham on 3 November, much of the panic that followed centred on rumours that a white powder had been released.)

Bush's claim that America has become more united and stronger is refuted by everything from the mountains of unopened mail in the capital of the Western world, to the scenes of heroic firefighters fighting with policemen at Ground Zero, to the national wave of fear and paranoia sparked by the latest tragic plane crash in New York. Post-11 September, many in America complain of feeling permanently ill - perhaps the clearest symptom of how American society as a whole is ailing and vulnerable today.

In recent weeks, we have noted on spiked how a mood of something approaching moral defeatism seemed to have settled over the Western elite. This week's displays of short-term triumphalism cannot stem the underlying corrosion of self-confidence and authority in the West. Throughout, Washington and Whitehall have remained reluctant to send their forces in to fight a war in which they claimed that our very civilisation was on the line. And there has been no wave of public enthusiasm for signing up to fight, even among the angry youth of America.

The West's inability to hold the line and fight for its own principles has been a hallmark of this crisis, most clearly illustrated by the desperate attempt to accommodate to Islam. In American cities, many of the ubiquitous Stars-and-Stripes flags were accompanied by signs announcing a 'Hate-free zone'. This must be the first war in which everybody from governments downwards have considered it illegitimate to hate the enemy (6).

Even for those of us who have been opposed to the war all along, these developments raise troubling questions. As we have noted, what does it say of our society that it cannot offer people anything bigger than themselves that they deem worth fighting and possibly dying for? Indeed, many in the anti-war movement appear to have been infected by the general mood of powerlessness and loss of principle, content with making woolly requests to the government not to do anything hasty (7).

While Afghanistan comes apart again, the West stands revealed as a society that stands for little or nothing, infected by fear and depression, fighting destructive wars by proxy as a form of therapy. As a former UK prime minister said of victory in a another foreign war, don't ask questions, 'Just rejoice'.

_______________________
Mick Hume is editor of spiked.

reply by
liz beech
11/18/2001 (11:12)

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Thanks for these two postings. They reflect exactly what concerns me.

The only 'good' that could come out of this lies in the old proverb 'Act in haste, repent at leisure'.

Repentance of western folly may be the only possible response.

reply by
Relic Wanderlost
11/25/2001 (18:52)

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It will not be a failure if the USA can get a oil pipeline through the new Afghanistan. Once more people die for oil.