There has been an argument, going on and on, a pointless argument about a First World axiom. Namely: that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. The argument is pointless. It is not an argument at all. It is designed to make the young of the world feel that there is no cause worth fighting for, and any cause worth fighting for, necessarily degenerates into the barbarism, which is terrorism.
Let me put it very simply. Terrorism is but barbarism by another name. Terrorism is the deliberate and conscious targeting of innocent civilians. As such, terrorism is a complete abomination which has never, and will not ever help the just struggle of oppressed peoples the world over.
Sending anthrax through the mail, killing innocent postal workers, is an abomination. Piloting a commercial airline with innocent passengers on board into a huge building with thousands of innocent people in the Twin Towers, and killing some 5,000 is barbarism unlimited. It certainly does not benefit the terrorists, whatever cause they are espousing. In fact, it does the very opposite. It gives the pernicious elite, oppressing people at home and around the world, the opportunity to clothe itself in mass suffering and greater mass fear. Then it can go out and plunder the world, to achieve as yet unachieved aims of total world domination, under the cloak of uprooting terrorism.
Whoever was behind the commercial planes bombing of the World Trade Centre on New York on September 11 unleashed a monster on the world at large. Terrorism throughout history, always unleashes a counter-reaction, so nasty, that the nastiest end-results occur. To be brief, kill the Arch-Duke of Sarajevo, and by that act one unleashes the forces that were building up, and led to World War I. That is history, stark and clear.
If for example in apartheid South Africa, those fighting apartheid had at any time, blown up a school, with say 500 white children, killing all, it would have given temporary but near total justification for the racist South Africans to impose the most draconian state of emergency, as self-defence. The cause of freedom would have been set back for years.
If, on the other hand, those fighting apartheid, in racist South Africa, had no access to means of expression and they blew up radio and television stations to check apartheid’s ceaseless dissemination of racist propaganda the means would have justified end – liberation.
OK you might say, but you are not persuaded. Give an example closer home. If for example, one decided that Antigua and Barbuda was horribly misgoverned by the government of the day, who were engaged in endless corruption and patronage, and these twin monsters, were ruining the economy and the future of the children. On that basis one proceeded to kill the children of government ministers. One would have ruined one’s cause, which by the choice of means, was not a seriously held cause. For the killing of the innocent children, however much they benefited from their fathers’ ill-gotten gains would provoke sympathy for the government, and would virtually give carte blanche to the government to clamp down on society at large, in pursuit of what they would call the evil-doers, Satan’s terrorists, or some such name. Terrorism always sets back the cause of freedom.
If a group of persons decided that Ministers were corrupt and decided to kill them by whatever means, in their beds, at church, in Parliament, or when they were engaged in orgies, such killings would be pure and simply murders, terrorism, barbarism. For it would solve nothing. The killers would have to form the government, and they would have to kill others, either avenging, seeking to avenge, or likely to avenge the death of their family members or party leaders. Mayhem would be let loose, through terror. So terrorism, though terrifying to oppressors is always senseless.
The regime that would necessarily result from the above would have guns or means of destruction, but they would be devoid of ideas by which to govern. Because they would not and could not have mobilised the people for a new order. They would, a at best, impose one. And the imposition of order, new or old, is by definition, suppressive and oppressive.
If, on the contrary, one laboured in the wilderness seeking to bring people to a view that things could be other than they are, that society could be organised in such a way where corruption in public service would be swiftly and justly dealt with; where government could be other than 17 men wielding power, even through a parliament; where people through councils would be involved in making decisions, and progressively learn to make bigger decisions, in the life of their communities.
If in the process of doing that the stage was reached where, electric power could be locked down, water supply disrupted, government corrupt propaganda interrupted, such acts would not constitute terrorism. They would be legitimate political struggle, to make a corrupt society ungovernable, by its corrupt leaders.
It should be clear now that the distinction between terrorism, the targeting and killing of innocent civilians and legitimate political struggle, the mobilisation to make a rotten corrupt order ungovernable are by no means close, and are, in fact, two vastly different things. It is a perversion of the worse kind, for anyone, however diseased of mind, however colonised to the marrow, to classify the late V.C. Bird’s disruption of oppressive government here by sinking barges or burning cane fields, as terrorism. They were acts of political struggle aimed at bringing an end to the rule of one people by another.
I want now to come to the Taliban which ruled in Afghanistan until last week. The Taliban leadership was the most disabled leadership ever in the history of the world. As Ahmed Rahid pointed out in his book Taliban. The leader of the Taliban "Mullah Omar lost his right eye in 1989 when a rocket exploded close by. The Taliban’s Justice Minister Nurrudin Turahi and the former Foreign Minister, Mohammed Ghaus, are also one-eyed. The Mayor of Kabul Abdul Majid has one leg and two fingers missing. Other leaders, even military commanders, have similar disabilities." Ai Sag the Taliban Governor of Kandahar, Mullah Mohammed Hassan Kehami had one leg, and the other was a wooden peg.
I am not suggesting by any means that a government of men with physical disabilities, is by virtue of disabilities, bad. That would be sheer nonsense. Even drawing psychological conclusions about Taliban reactionary propensities, because of their disabilities, would be similar nonsense.
Rather, the Taliban’s wounds are the result of 20 years of unrelenting war. Wars which killed 1.5 million Afghans and for many a year, past and to come, ruined the place as a human habitat. It is known that the Soviet Union spent some US$5 billion a year, for a total of US$45 billion to subdue the Mujahedden of Afghanistan, who were financed by the United States. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia spent the same, and very likely more than the USSR in the same wars. The USSR vs. US Cold War, was Afghanistan’s Hot War. When two elephants fight, it is the grass between, that is ruined. That is what happened in Afghanistan, an abject lesson, of what great power conflict produces in poor backward countries.
The Afghan people were given by either cold War side some of the most lethal weaponry, and aided and abetted by tribal and religious zealotry, the simple agricultural people of Afghanistan, used these modern weapons with devastating brutality. In those wars too, tribes were not only set against tribes, but a tribe was set against itself.
As for example, the Durrani Pashtuns who inhabit the south and Kandahar – received less aid from the CIA and other western lackeys, than did the Ghilzai Pashtuns in the east of the country and around Kabul. Pakistan distributed most U.S. aid, and they treated the Durrani Pashtuns with suspicion and did so with the blessing of the U.S.
Everywhere there is such intervention by the U.S. there is this division of tribe against tribe and majority tribe against itself. Witness Guyana in our region, how African and Indian, were set against each other, after the Americans aided by the British, connived and contrived to remove from power the freely and fairly elected Dr Cheddi Jagan in the 50’s and 60’s. To this day the passion which produced violence and death from the U.S. and CIA intervention are still at work in Guyana, ruining the country and by extension, the English-speaking Caribbean. Dislocate Guyana, turn it against itself, and imperialism dislocates the best possibility of a viable English-speaking Caribbean unity. Few, if any, commentators have said that. Because, before the Cold War and its aftermath still holds us in imperialism’s mental shackles.
Afghanistan reached further than Guyana. It was in a state of near total disintegration before the Taliban took over in 1994. The country was in fact divvied up between warlords who presided over feudal fiefdoms. But with one difference: these feudal warlords had the most modern weaponry. The feudal warlords entered into a bewildering number of alliances and betrayals.
The historical make-up of Afghanistan is important to understand the disintegration which has taken place there.
Beginning in 654 A.D. Arab armies invaded Afghanistan to arrive at the Oxus river on the border with Central Asia. They brought Islam. Between 874 – 999 A.D. the Persian Sarmind dynasty ruled. Between 999 to 1186 the Ghamavid dynasty ruled capturing parts of the Indian Punjab and parts of Eastern Iran. In 1219 Genghis Khan and his all-conquering army of Moguls swept through Afghanistan. In the next century Taimur or Tamerlaine, a descendant of Genghis Khan, created a vast empire across Russia and Persia, including Afghanistan which he ruled from Samarkind in modern Uzbekistan. Taimur or Tamerlaine made Harat the capital of Afghanistan. The same Harat became the capital of the Timurid empire in 1405. The Timurids, a Turkic people brought the Turkic nomadic culture of Central Asia within the orbit of Persian civilisation, establishing in Harat what was reputed to be one of the most cultured and refined cities of the world.
As a result of these invasions and Afghan invasions of India, Afghanistan became a bewildering and complex mix of ethnic, religious and cultural ingredients, making nation-building near impossible. In consequence Western Afghanistan is dominated by Persian or Dari speaking people. Dari, or the Afghan dialect, was also spoken by the Hazaras in central Afghanistan. In northern Afghanistan the Uzbeks, Tucomans Kyrgyz speak the Turkic languages of Central Asia, while in the south and east, the Pastun tribes, speak their own language Pashto, a mixture of Indo-Persian languages. It was not too difficult to set these ethnic groups and tribes one against the other by fanning old rivalries into red hot heat. Alliances and betrayals became the order of the day in Afghanistan.
(If you look closely at Antigua’s history you see the same pattern of political alliances and betrayals. ALP and APP merging in 1970 and the subordination and liquidation of APP together with the death of Reuben Harris. His wife as Speaker is but the epitaph of APP. Or the PLM merger of 1968, of AWU, ABDM & APM – the AWU swallowed both in purges and betrayals. Or the UNDP, ACLM, PLM merger to form UPP in 1993. There has been the steady eviction of ACLM, beginning as early as 1993 with the jettisoning of Jerome Bleau as General Secretary, followed by George Goodwin of Bolans, followed by Conrod Luke, a founder, and so on and on. Any UNDP figure like Nat Moses who drew close to ACLM figures, was singled out in the same process of purge and betrayal. One party, UNDP, under the pretence of unity, sought to eliminate or suppress all others, producing disunity in the end, there being no ideological glue, no unity about a set of specific and clear programmes and policy for change. Just an amalgam of persons spouting anti-Birdism, and employing the very same techniques of manipulation, purge and betrayal as did Birdism for its 58 year existence now from 1943 – 2001. The tendency to alliance and betrayal, making for volatile politics, is only more evident in Afghanistan because of its ethnic and religious mix, than Antigua and Barbuda. But back to Afghanistan.)
Within 24 hours of taking the capital of Kabul, in August 1996, the Taliban introduced the most fundamentalist (read: primitive) Islamic system anywhere. It murdered the former Afghan President, Najibullah, without even a sham trial, and without a Muslim funeral. All women were banned from work, be they doctors or maids. "Even though" as Ahmed Rashid noted "one quarter of Kabul’s civil service, the entire elementary education system and much of the health system were run by women." Girls school and colleges were closed down, leaving 700,000 students in the Dark Ages. A strict regime of head to toe veils was imposed.
TV, videos, satellite dishes, music and all games – even football the universal game – and kite-flying were banned. It is the kind of assininity of which mere moralists or fundamentalists in politics are capable of. It was so with The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. So in Algeria with the fundamentalists. So in Afghanistan. The Taliban were really young people who were trained in Pakistan in religious fundamentalism, and as soldiers. They were financed by the U.S. They simply saw TV, radio, satellite dishes, music of all sorts, sports and games, not to speak of women with their knees or faces or ankles exposed, as instruments of the great Satan – the West. All such had to be banned. Some say, they were resisting western cultural imperialism. But they were doing so with the political equivalent of terrorism in culture – banning. Not transforming the uses and purposes of TV. Educated women were a no – no. Men without beards were arrested.
The Taliban set up a six-man Shura to rule Kabul, which did not have a single citizen of Kabul in it. A religious student movement had taken charge returning Afghanistan to the days of the prophet. Falling in love was adultery, with, of course, only the woman stoned to death, as in the Bible. So too in the United States, fundamentalists Christian leaders claimed that the terrorist attacks of September 11 were the work of God, punishing Americans for their liberated sex, homosexual and lesbian ways, their drug usage, and other perceived social evils. In both Islam and Christian civilisation, the same barbarism exists, and close to the seat of power or sometimes in power.
The civil war in Afghanistan divided tribes and religious sects, producing Masud’s massacres of the Hazaras in Kabul in 1995, the Hazaras massacre of the Taliban in Magar in 1997 and the Taliban massacres of Hazaras and Uzbeks in 1998.
In the while, while barbarism of one kind was taking place, Capital schemed and used these conflicts for its own advantage – more Capital at the expense of humanity.
Let me elaborate. The energy resources of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia includes Kazakstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan – ‘Stan’ meaning people of, so Kazakstan, means people of Kazak etc.)
Turkmenistan alone has 32 billion barrels possible oil reserves and has the 11th largest gas reserves in the world.
Some estimates claim that this Caspian region has the second largest oil reserves in the world. Other estimates place it first.
The big oil companies have been scheming to establish oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan and Pakistan to Karachi on the Arabian Sea – the best and cheapest route for transporting those fuels to the world market. The big Corporations see the bonanza of cash to be made, by these US multinationals seizing hold of these reserves of oil for a ready market in energy-hungry South and South-east Asia. Not least, to reduce U.S. dependence on Venezuelan oil which satisfies 20 per cent of U.S. oil guzzling thirst, while Africa, still dirt poor, provides 15 per cent of U.S. oil greed. Both Africa and Venezuela, though are mired in poverty. A barrel of oil costs less than a barrel of water or milk! The so-called world market, but really the iron fist of imperialism in the velvet glove of the market, determined the unreal price of oil.
Just as oil resources are dominated by U.S. Capital, so is tourism. American and European tourists come to the Caribbean on American or European planes or vessels, eat American food and drink, in American owned hotels and we call that "Antiguan tourism". And claim tourism "is in our hands" or is "our business". It is not the tourism which is bad and should be banned as the Taliban would do. It is to transform tourism in ownership and management which is as big in the Caribbean, as is Oil in Middle East, which is crucial. Tourism must become a means of national accumulation for national development or else both tourism and national development are severally compromised. But back to the Afghan wars and oil.
Writing on the war, Frank Viviano wrote in his San Francisco Chronicle in an article headlined: Energy Future rolls on U.S. War". Said Viviano apart from "current issues and strategies the hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in the single word: OIL".
Continued Viviano "It is inevitable that the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a war on behalf of America’s Chevron, Exxon and Arco; France’s TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and other multinational giants, which have hundreds of billions of dollars in the Caspian region. There is no avoiding such a linkage or the rising tide of anger it will produce in developing nations already convinced they are victims of a conspiratorial collaboration between Capital and U.S. military might." Note the dominant power in the world subordinating all else to its hegemony: U.S. multinational capital allied to U.S. military might.
I disagree with only one thing. There is no "conspiratorial collaboration between Capital and U.S. military might". Each is part of one piece, piece of one whole.
Only political babes in the woods like Baldwin Spencer and Lester Bird, Ron Sanders and the Observer Derricks are blissfully unaware that U.S. Foreign policy is aimed at promoting and backing up corporate investments and globalisation through military, covert and overt interventions around the world. These reactionary babes in the woods will repeat after Bush, the American bushman’s notion that America’s foreign policy is in pursuit of freedom and human rights around the world. If you are not with Them then your are with the terrorists, and marked down for state terror.
The U.S. Space Command in its "Vision for 2020" leaves no doubt that its major intent is dominating "the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investments". Capital and the military, working hand in glove on land as in space. In the same US Command Vision for 2020, the report goes on to say: "The globalisation of the world economy will also continue with a widening gap between "haves" and "have-nots". The U.S., they say, will be "challenged regionally and needs to "dominate future battlefields". So that the U.S. 4 per cent of the world’s population which already controls 44 per cent of the world wealth, will control even more, and those who have little, will have less, and those who have not, will have more or not. Innocent civilians in the Have and Have Not nations in particular will be targeted and reduced to poverty and ruin and death by poverty. Is this not terrorism by other means? But this is known in Lester’s, Baldwin’s and the Observer Derricks lexicon as "our traditional friends spreading freedom and democracy around the world."
Thomas Friedman writing recently in the New York Times dissolved another myth held by these political nabobs of political backwardness. "The hidden hand of the market" wrote Friedman "will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15 bomber.
"And the hidden fist that keep the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force and Marine Corps."
Let me end unusually with the testimony of the Vice President of the U.S. Oil Company UNOCOL, which is the U.S. oil company already in Afghanistan, seeking to seize and hold oil resources in Afghanistan and the Caspian region. This testimony was given before the U.S. House of Representatives. Said UNOCAL’s John J. Maresca:
"The Caspian region contains tremendous hydrocarbon reserves, much of them located in the Caspian Sea Basin itself … The region’s total oil reserves may reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels.
The goal has to be to build a pipeline south from Asia to the Indian Ocean the only other possible route option is across Afghanistan which has its challenges. The territory across which the pipeline would extend is controlled by the Taliban."
Therefore get rid of the Taliban, which the world will applaud, and then proceed with the pipeline to possession of the 60 – 200 billion barrels of oil, and in the process, impoverish the people of the Caspian region, and enrich the multinationals.
There then is the so-called U.S. War on Terrorism.