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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And now, the American fast food experience -- fast-forwarded all the way. Sharif Elmusa* drives through meta-McDonald's
Future historians may mark the American food drop over Afghanistan as the event that booted that country into modernity. Fast food is a symbol of Americana: mass culture, post-modern capitalism and globalisation.
We haven't seen many pictures of food drops. We can assume that the US air force and satellites follow up and photograph the sites, but that the Pentagon does not feel this is something we need to know much about. Available fragments draw the outlines of a bizarre encounter between American technology and Afghanistan's pre-industrial reality, between the nonchalance of power and the desperation of an impoverished refugee population.
The cartons that carry the food cargo, according to recent reports in the New York Times, are designed not to collapse on take off, burst at high altitudes, or explode like bombs upon hitting the ground -- smart cartons, if you will. For the Afghans, whose diet in good times consists mainly of rice, meat and bread, the packets include crackers, peanut butter, jelly and other American snack food, complete with plastic knives and forks. The Afghan earth thus will not only hide land mines, it will also be polluted with plastics. Nor have the designers neglected to add handling and use instructions; they scripted them in three languages, English, French and Spanish, for a largely illiterate population.
The BBC played footage of food drops showing yellow boxes blanketing a lunar landscape. A young boy and then Northern Alliance fighters packed the containers in bags and vanished from view. They seemed like the hunters and gatherers of Oceania or Africa depicted in anthropology texts, except that instead of gathering fruits and nuts and roots, they were collecting high-tech manna. Surely, the home of multiculturalism can figure out a more sensitive method of rendering help to Afghanistan's subalterns.
It may be retorted that these are academic and aesthetic concerns and that many Afghans are in distress and need the food promptly. Yes, a hungry man may find the snacks filling, if not delicious, and a poor person may be thankful for the unexpected bounty. But are these the people who are getting the food? It seems not.
Spokesmen of international relief organisation have been on record as saying that the dropped food does not go mainly to the poor villagers and refugees, but is captured by the fighters of the Northern Alliance and perhaps those of the Taliban. They have asked the US to suspend its air strikes because these have disrupted conventional relief operations. They also have stressed that they were concerned about the Afghans associating food aid with bombs, an impression that in the long run could hurt the image of relief work in general. Humanitarian aid, they add, must stay entirely separate from the air strikes. The military cannot be the Red Cross.
The US government seems to think otherwise. It is after "hearts and minds," as it was in Vietnam. Its war on terrorism, at least in its present phase, must yield swift results. Fast food dropped from the sky is appropriate for the limited time at hand. Robert McNamara, the Pentagon chief during the Vietnam War, described the bombing raids that eventually led to the death of two million Vietnamese as a "means of communication," according to Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's magazine (November 2001). Bombs were metaphors intended to compel the Vietnamese to acknowledge the inevitable victory of US forces. The addition of the food packets to the bombs in Afghanistan thus could be construed as a way of speeding up Taliban's recognition of their eventual defeat, by persuading the Afghan masses of America's benevolence and inducing them to defect. The combination of lethal and nourishing metaphors, American decision- makers seem to believe, is more potent than either one alone.
When power invents needs for the powerless it constructs at the same time self-images or fictions of itself. Through the juxtaposition of missiles and food, the US leadership wants to think of itself as a wounded party, which it is, compelled against its will to respond to outlaws. It wants to perpetuate the myth of American innocence and of America as the good Samaritan. It wants to bolster the dichotomy of the forces of good arrayed against those of evil, it being the leader of goodness. This is the duality with which President Bush characterised the "war against terrorism," and it is beginning to acquire a halo as the "Bush doctrine." Yet, the world that US and Western intelligentsia have described for the last two decades or so as complex and interdependent cannot be reduced, even in an understandably traumatic moment, to such a stark white and black polarity without threatening its very foundations.
There is more to America's unwillingness to heed the advice of international relief organisations. American conservatives, abundantly represented in the current administration, have never been particularly interested in rubbing shoulders with these activists. They view many of them as radicals and environmentalists beyond the pale. Nor are they particularly fond of the UN, even under its present secretary-general, the mild, pro-American Kofi Annan. One would think that while the US government is trying to maintain international backing for the war in Afghanistan it would be a good opportunity to make a meaningful gesture and pay the debt it owes to the world organisation.
US behaviour so far suggests that it intends to call the shots and write the rules of the game, despite all the obligatory rhetoric about the international coalition. The UN or Oxfam can be brought into the picture, if that suits its purpose. To acknowledge it has erred might open Pandora's box and make the US leadership vulnerable to further criticism at this critical point in the campaign.
We should expect, at least for the duration of the air strikes, thousands of tons of food to land every day on Afghanistan's soil in smart cartons -- fast food at its fastest and cheapest. The Afghan "beneficiaries" don't have to order or pay; they can just pick up and go. They can enjoy a meta-McDonald's experience. Latecomers, modernisation experts have always assured us, have an advantage in that they can leapfrog the technological gap and tap the latest technologies.
* The writer is director of the Middle East Studies Program and associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo
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