13 - 19 December 2001
Issue No.564
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 December 2001 Issue No.564 |
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America's guinea pigs
The Taliban saga lasted no longer than seven years, yet it will have ramifications that are difficult to assess now. These will be even graver than the effects of the Gulf War, which threw many stable situations off kilter.
The Taliban had the support of Bin Laden's Al- Qa'eda and numerous other extremist groups, which had drawn thousands of young Arab and Muslim men seeking the mirage of "true Muslim rule," fleeing stifling conditions in their countries, or attempting self-realisation, having abandoned hope that anything would change at home. All these are powerful reasons that can channel young men's ambitions and move them to action. They were exploited by domestic or foreign forces in the service of political ends.
If the Taliban emerged in response to the chaos and insecurity that prevailed in Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal -- the senseless conflicts among the mujahidin -- it nonetheless failed to establish a regime serving the Afghan people in any credible sense. In a very brief period, the Taliban managed to establish their hegemony by means of brutality and corruption. Soon, at their hands, what remained of the state's institutions collapsed: education, hospitals, roads and public amenities crumbled and were gone. The firmer the Taliban's grip, the more isolated Afghanistan became. Life deteriorated to a very primitive stage, with ignorance, poverty, starvation and drought spreading. The country became a refuge for bandits, and survived on the food and humanitarian aid its enemies agreed to dole out.
Was it possible for an effective Islamist regime to emerge in such conditions, however pious Mullah Omar and devoted the leaders of the Taliban? Even Bin Laden's revolutionary ideas, Al- Zawahiri's experience and Al-Qa'eda's military organisation could not suffice to hold up a tattered regime built on such weak foundations in the first place.
This is why the Taliban could not withstand a single blow from the tyrannical military might of the greatest country in the world. Empirical reasoning had confirmed this from the first. What was surprising, rather, was how well America prepared itself for the first strike, using the latest technologies. The world's sense of astonishment faded only once it became clear that the 11 September attacks were a golden opportunity not only for crushing the Taliban, Bin Laden and their ilk -- mere guinea pigs in a military experiment (the "new war," in which battles are conducted from afar without direct confrontation with American forces) -- but also for establishing absolute US sovereignty over the world at large. That is why Washington refused to let anybody, even its allies, in on the secret of its new war.
It matters little, in this light, whether America has legal evidence to incriminate Bin Laden and Al-Qa'eda; nor does it have to submit an official record of the thousands of suspects it has arrested and is detaining without trial. The circle of war may widen, giving America the chance to take revenge on Somalia, Iraq, Korea, Yemen and Lebanon, and making it possible for Israel to crush the Palestinian resistance and get rid of Arafat. Strategic analysts will spend the rest of their lives working out the consequences of the war in Afghanistan. The real roots of the problem, which affect the existence and the future of the Arab world, however, are to be sought in a different question altogether: what drove thousands of Arab young men to go and die in this mouse trap of their own free will?
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