The Pakistani Spectator

“You’re never beaten until you admit it.” Gen. George S. Patton.

The myth of American omnipotence has fallen in the deserts and cities of Iraq. What was remotely left, seems in death throes in the harsh lands of Afghanistan. Britain’s most senior military commander in Afghanistan Brigadier Mark Carleton Smith and the UN special envoy Kai Eide have both said that a military victory in Afghanistan is not possible. They both have advised to engage the Taliban politically. To sum it up we have Hamid Karzai bemoaning his ‘brother’ Mullah Omar to help him in his ‘municipal duties’.

Transition from conventional to asymmetrical warfare have always nagged fatally. The armies of Sherman and Grant crushed nearly half a million Confederate soldiers from the summer of 1864 to the spring of 1865. However they could not secure ‘Reconstruction’ in 12 miserable years of failure. This, when facing a few thousand Klansmen and assorted night riders.

The lesson history provides us is that in contrast to the standards by which the world at large judges a war, concepts like morality, proportionality or harming civilians are utterly irrelevant when great powers are involved. The so called ‘war on terror’ by America may not be the first, though it is undoubtedly the most callous and brazen in recent years.

When President Bush declared a “War on Terror”, he followed the patented move of Nixon’s “War on Drugs”. Forty years and hundreds of billions of dollars after the war on drugs was launched, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and traffickers are making fatter profits than ever before. One of the reported recent beneficiaries is none other than Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Mayor of Kabul. Drugs was and is a menace though declaring war, by military means alone, on an intangible like terrorism was and will always be a no win war.

‘Terrorists’ are everywhere, but to expend human life without following a proven trail of evidence and an attainable goal of victory and peace are ridiculous and counter to every principle of justice and human rights. The occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has been the greatest recruiting tool the extremists have ever had. Combine that with the thousands who will never forget that America and its allies killed their loved ones; virtually a whole new army of detractors has been created.

If the threat to America was so pressing as to leave no choice of means; even in an act of anticipatory self-defense the use of force should have been proportionate to the threat on which it acted. A war was initiated to redress a wrong suffered. The motives, dubious as they were from the very start, have become totally hackneyed as the super power sees itself facing an economic melt down at home and military defeats across the seas. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG and HBOS, to name a few, is a simple indicator of the nearing collapse of the American financial system and its fatal domino effect that now threatens the global financial world.

Armed with a license to kill we have seen the unipolar world’s leader on a rampage. Is it though simply coincidental that Iraq’s invasion was recommended in a letter addressed to President Clinton by the Project for a New American Century and signed by several prominent members of Bush’s cabinet including Dick Cheney in 1999?

The battlegrounds in Afghanistan and Iraq are wars where military might was sought to effect economic, political and ideological change. This in a region where the neoconservatives felt it necessary to foster American access to resources and supply chains beneficial to their interests, as well as establish a strong foothold in this part of the world.

To achieve these ends, they had to sell the American people an unnecessary war by playing up their deepest fears. In their rush to sound the call to arms, they overlooked sound but contrary intelligence and built their case on shaky and unsubstantiated intelligence. These occupations have also illustrated the readiness of the U.S. to use violence to impose the social arrangements of its choice and to destroy those who attempt to achieve popular control over their affairs.

Cooler heads, that which read and tend to learn from history would have paid heed to what Rudyard Kipling said and offered sound advice on the best time to visit Afghanistan: “Don’t go.” But nothing is more certain than this: A foreign force can no more control the Afghans than it can help them. A French soldier described the Taliban with brutal frankness. “They are good soldiers but pitiless enemies.”

The great Roman orator Cicero said: “There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our heart; a law that comes to us not by training or custom or reading but from nature itself, if our lives are endangered, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.” This could not have been truer than for the Pashtuns and the dilemma and paradox that is our country of today.

The latest attack in Walibagh saw a ‘determined’ Asfandyar Wali extolling a fight to his last breath. What followed was a blatant display of self survival that saw him and his family boarding a waiting chopper, destination being the President House in Islamabad. Millions saw, as it dawned on them that security of lives was the privilege of but only a few. The mercifully retired Musharraf, architect of our bondage, still has the security apparatus he always had.

In midwifing a war the state has continued, more vigorously so, to own an unjust war that never was ours, resulting in making each citizen a target for retaliation. The security of each single citizen is the government’s responsibility. Can the state shift a hundred and sixty million people to the palatial fortresses that are the President and Prime Minister Houses or the buttressed enclaves that house the political and bureaucratic elite?

Seeking to avoid conflict and confrontation is neither a weakness, appeasement nor an abdication of morality. Spain, one of America’s most active and trusted allies, proved this by reversing its policy after the Madrid train bombings. It brought back its troops from Iraq while the ousted premier Jose Maria Anzar had to end up buffing his academic skills with a teaching job at the George Washington University.

This war, using brute military force as the only template from which to draw comprehensive solutions, has created nothing but insecurity, complexity and anarchy. The ultimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought. Both wisdom and humility suggest that political solutions to conflict are ultimately required.

At this extremely critical juncture a new and more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the will of the Pentagon and the State Department but around the people of this land has to be adopted. Our sovereignty and lives are fatally evolving in ways we can control only if we recognize the threats this war has created. It is time to take an unblinking and long hard look and let sanity prevail.

By Mir Adnan Aziz

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