Falsa vittoria nella guerra al terrorismo

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

The Mirror (London)

16 November 2001, pp. 6,7 WAR ON TERROR: FALSE VICTORY

By John Pilger

THERE is no victory in Afghanistan's tribal war, only the exchange of one
group of killers for another. The difference is that President Bush calls
the latest occupiers of Kabul "our friends".

However welcome the scenes of people playing music and shaving off their
beards, the so-called Northern Alliance are no bringers of freedom. They are
the same people welcomed by similar scenes of jubilation in 1992, who then
killed an estimated 50,000 in four years of internecine feuding. The new
heroes so far have tortured and executed at least 100 prisoners of war, and
countless others, as well as looted food supplies and re-established their
monopoly on the heroin trade. This week, Amnesty International made an
unusually blunt statement that was buried in the news. It ought to be
emblazoned across every front page and television screen. "By failing to
appreciate the gravity of the human rights concerns in relation to Northern
Alliance leaders," said Amnesty, "UK ministers at best perpetuate a culture
of impunity for past crimes; at worst they risk being complicit in human
rights abuse." The truth is that the latest crop of criminals to "liberate"
Kabul have been given a second chance by the most powerful country on earth
pounding into dust one of the poorest, where people's life expectancy is
just over 40.
And for what?
Not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has yet to be
caught or killed. Osama bin Laden and his network have almost certainly
slipped into the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier of Pakistan. Will
Pakistan now be bombed? And Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, where Islamic extremism
and its military network took root? Of course not. The Saudi sheikhs, many
of them as extreme as the Taliban, control America's greatest source of oil.
The Egyptian regime, bribed with billions of US dollars, is an important
American proxy. No daisy cutters for them.
There was, and still is, no "war on terrorism". Instead, we have watched a
variation of the great imperial game of swapping "bad" terrorists for "good"
terrorists, while untold numbers of innocent people have paid with their
lives: most of one village, whole families, a hospital, as well as teenage
conscripts suitably dehumanised by the word "Taliban".
It is perfectly understandable that those in the West who supported this
latest American terror from the air, or hedged their bets, should now seek
to cover the blood on their reputations with absurd claims that "bombing
works". Tell that to grieving parents at fresh graves in impoverished places
of whom the sofa bomb-aimers know nothing.
The contortion of intellect and morality that this triumphalism requires is
not a new phenomenon. Putting aside the terminally naive, it mostly comes
from those who like to play at war: who have seen nothing of bombing, as I
have experienced it: cluster bombs, daisy cutters: the lot. How appropriate
that the last American missile to hit Kabul before the "liberators" arrived
should destroy the satellite transmitter of the Al-Jazeera television
station, virtually the only reliable source of news in the region.
For weeks, American officials have been pressuring the government of Qatar,
the Gulf state where Al-Jazeera is based, to silence its broadcasters, who
have given a view of the "war against terrorism" other than that based on
the false premises of the Bush and Blair "crusade". The guilty secret is
that the attack on Afghanistan was unnecessary. The "smoking gun" of this
entire episode is evidence of the British Government's lies about the basis
for the war. According to Tony Blair, it was impossible to secure Osama bin
Laden's extradition from Afghanistan by means other than bombing. Yet in
late September and early October, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties
negotiated bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the
September 11 attacks. The deal was that he would be held under house arrest
in Peshawar. According to reports in Pakistan (and the Daily Telegraph),
this had both bin Laden's approval and that of Mullah Omah, the Taliban
leader.
The offer was that he would face an international tribunal, which would
decide whether to try him or hand him over to America. Either way, he would
have been out of Afghanistan, and a tentative justice would be seen to be in
progress. It was vetoed by Pakistan's president Musharraf who said he "could
not guarantee bin Laden's safety".
But who really killed the deal?
The US Ambassador to Pakistan was notified in advance of the proposal and
the mission to put it to the Taliban. Later, a US official said that
"casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the
international effort if by some luck chance Mr bin Laden was captured". And
yet the US and British governments insisted there was no alternative to
bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban had "refused" to hand over Osama bin
Laden. What the Afghani people got instead was "American justice" - imposed
by a president who, as well as denouncing international agreements on
nuclear weapons, biological weapons, torture, and global warming, has
refused to sign up for an international court to try war criminals: the one
place where bin Laden might be put on trial.
When Tony Blair said this war was not an attack on Islam as such, he was
correct. Its aim, in the short term, was to satisfy a domestic audience then
to accelerate American influence in a vital region where there has been a
power vacuum since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of
China, whose oil needs are expected eventually to surpass even those of the
US. That is why control of Central Asia and the Caspian basin oilfields is
important as exploration gets under way.
There was, until the cluster bombing of innocents, a broad-based recognition
that there had to be international action to combat the kind of terrorism
that took thousands of lives in New York. But these humane responses to
September 11 were appropriated by an American administration, whose
subsequent actions ought to have left all but the complicit and the
politically blind in no doubt that it intended to reinforce its post-cold
war assertion of global supremacy - an assertion that has a long, documented
history.
The "war on terrorism" gave Bush the pretext to pressure Congress into
pushing through laws that erode much of the basis of American justice and
democracy. Blair has followed behind with anti-terrorism laws of the very
kind that failed to catch a single terrorist during the Irish war.
In this atmosphere of draconian controls and fear, in the US and Britain,
mere explanation of the root causes of the attacks on America invites
ludicrous accusations of "treachery." Above all, what this false victory has
demonstrated is that, to those in power in Washington and London and those
who speak for them, certain human lives have greater worth than others and
that the killing of only one set of civilians is a crime. If we accept that,
we beckon the repetition of atrocities on all sides, again and again.

Nello

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