25 - 31 October 2001
Issue No.557
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 - 31 October 2001 Issue No.557 |
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Time for a policy rethink
US punitive strikes on Afghanistan have yet to flush out the enemy, but manifold and unforeseen repercussions are already evident, writes Mohamed Hakki in Washington
More than two weeks into the US-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan, there are still no answers to the questions that the terrorist attacks on America evoked. Rather, America and its allies are coming to terms with the reality of this war: the air attacks will be neither swift nor surgical. After declaring that the military coalition was "running out of targets," US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is now saying "We are discovering new targets as we go along." This, in a country that has itself been "rubblised" -- a delicious new verb added to the cultural lexicon meaning "rendered into rubble", as was the case in Afghanistan in the course of the Russian occupation and the tribal warfare that followed.
BEST OF FRIENDS: From humour (top, stall holders in masks at a Hong Kong toy show) to demonstrations (above, women speak out in Pakistan), there are many ways of questioning the motives of the US attack on Afghanistan (photos: AFP & AP)Until they find prime suspect Osama Bin Laden, tackle the fighters of his Al- Qa'ida terrorist network or successfully uproot the Taliban regime, the US forces will continue to rain down bombs and missiles on battered Afghanistan. These explosives include the famous 5,000- pound "smart bombs" deployed to obliterate mountain caves. At daily news conferences, it is amazing how much is said when absolutely nothing is actually revealed. The American people are expected to be satisfied with a few nebulous infrared images and aerial photos of targets exploding that evoke nothing more than a computer-generated game.
Information from Afghanistan, as the London-based weekly magazine The Economist reminds us, is patchy at best, misleading at worst. For instance, all the American people see are those "humanitarian" food packages being dropped from some 10,000 or 12,000 feet. This is "spit in a bucket" compared to the food and medicine shipments of United Nations and NGO agencies that have been halted because of the war. The longer the war drags on, the more problems it will create for America. Forget about the domestic scare created by a few cases of anthrax. The devastating terrorist attacks, combined with the growing fear of more dangerous forms of bioterrorism, is turning America, in some respects, into a Third World country. Widespread sacrificing of civil liberties, telephone wire taps, snooping cameras, long delays due to security measures not only at airports, but in federal government offices and most major corporations are all part of the new face of terror-stricken America -- as is, it seems, a quarantined Congress.
A year ago, many people -- including then presidential candidate Bush -- were pushing for an easing of the tight security restrictions in and around the White House, including the re-opening of Pennsylvania Ave. Now, additional streets have been closed off around Congress. The American people have accepted these sacrifices with patriotism and patience. It has truly brought people together. Even the level of fear is still remarkably manageable despite the confusing and sometimes utterly foolish commentaries by everyone and his cousin on television.
If the war drags on, what is to be done if other forms of terrorism reach America. So far, it is not clear whether the anthrax scare is being spread by home- grown crazies, or members of Bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida. What is notable, however, is that all of those "Israel first-ers" and US politicians falling over themselves to blame Iraq have not succeeded so far in pushing the administration to expand the war to include Iraq. What if they succeed? What if civilian casualties begin to be intolerable?
Right now, the US is facing a number of serious questions all at once: the scope of the war in Afghanistan; when and how to end it; how to rebuild this ravished country and with whose help? More to the point, how will the US maintain such a fragile coalition and for how long? Right now, most Arab and Muslim countries are behind America, reasoning that it has the right to defend itself. If civilian casualties begin to grow out of proportion, however, and the thirst for revenge outweighs the justice served, then it is inevitable that some governments will begin to strain the tenuous bonds that hold them to an unlikely and cobbled-together coalition.
Current events have greatly altered the terms of the debate at home about US foreign policy. There is a vast undercurrent of ordinary Americans who are beginning to question US-Israeli relations. This new-found deliberation is beginning to challenge the dominance of writers and commentators who have always been in Israel's camp, right or wrong. It is noticeable that television networks are not flooding the airwaves with Israeli politicians or experts on Islam from Yeshiva University.
This is the first time ever that this debate is taking place. It does not mean that Israel is in danger of losing its unwavering US support anytime soon. We still have not heard one voice point out that the US has spent some $100 billion in aid to Israel in the last 50 years, but lost $1.3 trillion dollars in one day because of it. The only voices which are frantically repeating that Israel is not the problem are the card-carrying members of the Israeli apparatchik.
Mark Danner of the weekly New Yorker magazine put it this way: "This attack [11 September] created in an instant a sense of pervasive and unprecedented vulnerability among Americans, revivified by each new report of anthrax. It transformed American foreign policy, heretofore a matter of disregard among most Americans, into a vital question of their own security, a matter of their own life and death."
Most people in America do not know the facts about the Middle East. They are genuinely asking, "Why do people hate us?" Professor Peter Bechtold of the Foreign Service Institute told me that when he tells his students that there are two Americas, they simply don't understand. There is the America they live in: tolerant, multi-ethnic, generous and cosmopolitan. No one bothers if you are a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Muslim. Special interest groups, however, drive US foreign policy -- the face of America abroad. These groups tend to twist American policy to their respective ends, but this takes place largely away from public debate within the US. That is why Americans do not understand why they are not popular or why they are hated. Those who say, "They hate us because of what we are," or because we are "rich, democratic and successful" are simply misleading their people.
If you tell anyone in America that all Middle East peace process negotiators for the last 12 years have been Jewish, he would be incredulous. Most would say, "I didn't know that." Only the Arabs accepted this state of affairs, figuring that a negotiating team does not represent the individuals that constitute it, but US policy as a whole. Yet, I have not heard any Arab leader saying that accepting Israel among us -- which we all do -- is an act of magnanimity. The US should acknowledge this. The fact is that all Arabs accepted Israel in its pre-1967 borders. If you tell any American that the only two countries in the world that recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel are Micronesia and Costa Rica, they will be quite surprised.
It is really tiring to constantly refer back to Camp David and the settlement problem. At Camp David, US President Jimmy Carter promised Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat that he would explain to the other "moderate Arabs" that he had received personal assurances from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Begin would freeze all settlement-building in the West Bank and Gaza for five years -- the duration of the self-determination talks. Former Assistant Secretary of State Nicholas Veliotis told me that when Secretary of State Cyrus Vance went to Amman to do just that, he was literally banging on the table, saying, "By God, we will see to it that Israel fulfils its side of the bargain!" Carter also dispatched Ambassador Roy Atherton, then assistant secretary of state, to the Gulf countries to assure them of this fact. Later, even good old Carter lost out in the 1980 general election.
During the Blair House talks, and I was there, Moshe Dayan said that Egypt was making a mountain out of this settlement "mole hill". He told us that "these settlements are bedroom communities for people working in Israel proper, and we cannot fill them." He said no Israeli Sabra (born in Palestine) or Sephardic Jew (Arab Jew) ever goes to live there, implying that only the crazies went to live there. The rest, as they say, is history.
The US must not go back to the status quo ante. This will not solve anything. They must realise that US relations with the Arab world also need rebuilding -- they, too, have been "rubblised". The US needs a new, vast Marshall plan. Maybe Bin Laden is just using the Palestinian cause. The fact, however, is that America's policies are at the root of all Arab anger. Terrorism proved it has no borders. The irony is that the US hired an Israeli security expert to advise them on how to secure Logan Airport. The same week, a Palestinian walks into a fashionable hotel in Tel Aviv, shoots an Israeli cabinet minister and walks away. This happened in the heart of Israel in broad daylight and means that Israeli security is either a sieve, a myth or a joke.
A friend of mine told me once: "I stopped listening to political pundits. I tried to find my answers in literature." One enjoyable modern writer is John Le Carré, who used the Middle East as a setting in one of his novels. In a recent article, he laments the fact that the West has wasted its Cold War victory and is now assisting the enemy.
Le Carré says: "It's not a new world order, not yet, and it's not God's war. It's a horrible, necessary, humiliating police action to redress the failure of our intelligence services and our blind political stupidity in arming and exploiting Islamic fanatics to fight the Soviet invader, then abandoning them to a devastated leaderless country. As a result, it's our miserable duty to seek out and punish a bunch of modern medieval religious zealots who will gain mythic stature from the death we propose to dish out to them." He continues to say: "We are invited to believe that the conscience of the West has been awakened to the dilemma of the poor and homeless of the Earth. And, possibly out of fear, necessity and rhetoric, a new sort of political morality has indeed been born."
By the same token, we in the Muslim world have our own set of dilemmas to overcome. We have to ask ourselves how we can achieve religious renewal. We may be able to quell terrorism in one country or another with police measures, but the problem of fanaticism will remain. Reform and rebirth has to come from within; from intelligent and enlightened introspection by Muslims, not governments. We have to ask ourselves what turns an educated doctor and scion of one of Egypt's most reputable families into Bin Laden's right-hand man. How and why did the middle class vanish? What is replacing it? How did we allow one hard-line sect of Islam to grow so powerful?
One of the more recent converts to Islam is a Englishman who is twice as jealous about Islam's pure teachings. He is Abdel-Hakim Mourad, who was born in London, and educated both at Cambridge and Al-Azhar. In his essay, "The Poverty of Fanaticism", Mourad reminds us: "There was a time, not long ago, when the 'ultras' were few, forming only a tiny wart on the face of the worldwide attempt to revivify Islam. Sadly, we can no longer enjoy the luxury of ignoring them. The extreme has broadened, and the middle ground, giving way, is everywhere dislocated and confused."
He goes on to say: "If these things go on, the Islamic movement will cease to form an authentic summons to cultural and spiritual renewal and will exist as little more than a splintered array of extremist factions. The prospect of such an appalling development in the story of a religion which once surpassed all others in its capacity for tolerating debate and dissent is now a real possibility." A little strong, perhaps, but nevertheless true.
We should be the first to condemn all terrorist practices around the Arab world instead of finding apologies and pretexts for them. Self-renewal never comes from without, only from within. We had it, and we lost it. We need to rediscover, rebuild and revivify this minaret of faith, science and learning for all times.
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