These political objectives were certainly uppermost in Bin Laden’s mind too in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, although he would also invoke the divine will. In the videotape released on October 7, 2001, he crowed: “Here is America struck by God in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed,”72 buildings that had been carefully selected as “America’s icons of military and economic power.”73 Five times Bin Laden applied the word kafir (“infidel”) to the United States, though each time it referred not to the religious beliefs of America but to its violation of Muslim sovereignty in Arabia and Palestine:74 on the same day, President George W. Bush announced Operation Enduring Freedom, a U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Like the First Crusade against Islam, this military offensive was couched in the language of liberty: “We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere.”75 He assured the people of Afghanistan that the United States had no quarrel with them, would strike only at military targets, and promised airdrops of food, medicine, and supplies. Also, just a week following the attacks, Bush had made clear that America’s quarrel was not with Islam: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”76 Like Bin Laden, Bush, in this carefully secular presentation, also saw the world starkly divided into two camps, one good, the other evil: “In this conflict there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves.”77
Bush’s Manichean worldview reflected the thinking of the neoconservatives prominent in his administration, who had a semimystical belief that nothing must impede America’s unique historical mission in the twenty-first century. The “War on Terror” would be waged against any forces that threatened America’s global leadership. Indeed, neoconservatism has been described as “a faith-based system” because it required absolute fidelity to its doctrine, permitting no deviation from its beliefs.78 And so the politics of the secular nation was imbued with a quasi-religious fervor and conviction. The United States had a mission to promote the global free market, the One True Economy, everywhere. It was not a religious message but one that nevertheless resonated strongly as such with Bush’s base of 100 million American evangelical Christians, who still subscribed to the vision of America as a “city on a hill.”
The first three months of the war against Afghanistan, where Taliban gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda, seemed remarkably successful. The Taliban were defeated, al-Qaeda personnel scattered, and the United States established two large military bases, at Bagram and Kandahar. But there were two ominous developments. Even though Bush had given instructions that prisoners be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, it seems that in practice troops were told that they could “deviate slightly from the rules” since terrorists were not covered by the laws relating to prisoners of war. Bush had been careful to insist that this was not a war against Islam, but that was not how it appeared on the ground, where there was little punctiliousness about religious sensibilities. On September 26, 2002, a convoy of mujahidin were captured in Takhar. According to one Muslim account, U.S. troops “hung one mujahid by his arms for six days, questioning him about Usama bin Laden.” Eventually they gave up and asked him about his faith: he replied that
he trusted in Allah, the Prophet Muhammad and the holy Qur’an. Upon receiving this answer, the U.S. troops replied that “Your Allah and Muhammad are not here, but the Qur’an is, so let’s see what it will do to us.” After this, one U.S. soldier brought a Holy Qur’an and began urinating over it, only to be joined by other U.S. and Northern Alliance troops who did the same.79
Despite their manifest contempt for Islam, this does not mean that U.S. troops saw themselves as fighting a war that was specifically directed against Islam. Rather, the unconventional nature of the campaign, defined as a “War on Terror,” a “different kind of war,” had changed the rules of engagement. With this terminology the United States had liberated itself from the rules of conventional conflict.80 Ground troops seem to have absorbed the view that terrorists were not entitled to the same protection as regular combatants.
Since 9/11, the United States, which still regards itself as a uniquely benign hegemon, has, with the support of its allies, indefinitely retained people who deny any involvement in any conflict, conducted violent and humiliating interrogations, or else sent prisoners to countries known to practice torture. As early as December 2001, hundreds of prisoners—by means of “extraordinary rendition”—were being detained in Guantánamo Bay and Diego Garcia without due process and were subjected to “stress and duress” (i.e., torture).81 The frequent—almost routine—reports of abuse in these U.S. prisons suggest that military and political authorities may have condoned a policy of systematic brutality.82 The second disturbing development in the War on Terror was the large number of civilian casualties. About three thousand civilians were killed in the first three months—roughly the same number as had died in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington on September 11. Thousands more displaced Afghans would die later in refugee camps.83 As the war dragged on, the casualties became catastrophic: it has been estimated that 16,179 Afghan civilians perished between 2006 and 2012.84
There was a second wave of terrorist incidents, directed by the “second generation” of al-Qaeda, which included the failed plot of British “shoe bomber” Richard Reid (December 2001), the Djerba bombing in Tunisia (April 2002), and the Bali nightclub attack (October 2002), which killed over two hundred people. After Iyman Faris’s foiled plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, however, most of the al-Qaeda central command had either been killed or captured, and there were no more major incidents.85 But just as the situation seemed to be improving, in March 2003, the United States, Britain, and their allies invaded Iraq, despite considerable opposition from the international community and strong protests throughout the Muslim world. The reasons for this invasion were allegations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had furnished support for al-Qaeda, both of which eventually proved to be groundless.
Again, the United States presented itself as the bearer of freedom. “If we must use force,” Bush had promised the American people, “the United States and our coalition stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq.”86 “We don’t seek an empire,” he insisted on another occasion. “Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.”87 Cheered on by such neoimperialist intellectuals as Niall Ferguson, the Bush regime believed that it could use the colonial methods of invasion and occupation for purposes of liberation.88 America would force Iraq into the free global economy and change the politics of the Middle East by creating a liberal, democratic, and pro-Western Arab state, one that would also support Israel, embrace market capitalism, and at the same time provide the United States with a military base and access to vast oil reserves.
On May 1, 2003, Bush’s Viking jet swooped onto the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, where the president announced a victorious end to the Iraq War.89 “We have fought for the cause of liberty and for the peace of the world,” he told the assembled troops. “Because of you, the tyrant is fallen and Iraq is free.” In this political message too were the overtones of a holy war. This war of the American nation was directed by God himself. “All of you—all in this generation of our military—have taken up the highest calling of history,” he proclaimed, quoting the Prophet Isaiah: “And wherever you go, you carry a message of hope—a message that is ancient and ever new. To the captives, ‘come out’—and to those in darkness ‘be free.’ ”90 Use of this biblical verse, which Jesus had quoted to describe his own mission,91 revealed the messianic streak of the Bush administration.
It was ironic that Bush announced the liberation of captives. In October 2003, the media published photographs of U.S. military police abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Saddam’s notorious pris
on; later, almost identical cruelty was shown to have taken place in British-run prisons. These photographs were a cruder vision of the official U.S. media presentation of the Iraq War. Hooded, naked, writhing on the ground, the Iraqis were depicted as dehumanized, craven, bestial, and utterly dominated by America’s superior power. The cocky stance of the low-ranking GIs implied: “We are high, they are low; we are clean, they are dirty; we are strong and brave, they are weak and cowardly; we are lordly, they are virtually animals; we are God’s chosen, they are estranged from everything divine.”92 “The photos are us,” the late Susan Sontag declared. Nazis were not the only people to commit atrocities; Americans do so too, “when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion.”93 Clearly the GIs saw nothing untoward in their behavior and had no fear of punishment. “It was just for fun,” said Private Lynndie England, who had appeared in the photographs walking a prisoner on a leash like a dog. They behaved in this way, the official investigation concluded, “simply because they could.”94
Within a month of Bush’s carrier speech, Iraq had descended into chaos. Most Iraqis gave no credence to Bush’s exalted rhetoric; instead they were convinced that the United States simply wanted their oil and intended to use their country as a military base from which to defend Israel. They may have been glad to get rid of Saddam, but they did not regard the American and British troops as liberators. “They’re walking over my heart,” said one Baghdad resident. “Liberate us from what?” demanded another. “We have [our own] traditions, morals, customs.”95 The Iraqi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Bashir complained that if the Americans had brought freedom to the country, it was not for the Iraqis:
It is the freedom of occupying soldiers in doing what they like.… No one can ask them what they are doing, because they are protected by their freedom.… No one can punish them, whether in our country or in their country. They expressed the freedom of rape, the freedom of nudity, and the freedom of humiliation.96
The overwhelming 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, the iconic “city of mosques,” has been called the Arab 9/11: hundreds of civilians were killed and 200,000 made homeless. By the following year 24,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq and 70,000 injured.97 Instead of bringing peace to the region, the occupation inspired an insurgency of Iraqis and mujahidin from Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan, who responded to this foreign invasion with the heretofore unusual technique of suicide bombing, eventually breaking the long-standing record of the Tamil Tigers.98
As to global terrorism, the situation has become only more dangerous than it was before the Iraq War.99 Following the assassination of Bin Laden in 2011, al-Qaeda still thrives. Its strength was always more conceptual than organizational—global revolutionary fervor combining an intense political militancy with dubious claims to divine sanction. Its branch affiliates, including the one founded in Iraq (as of this writing increasingly active there and also in the Syrian civil war) as well as those in Somalia and Yemen, continue to promote a restoration of the caliphate as the ultimate objective of their interventions in local politics. Elsewhere, in the absence of any tightly organized cadre, there are thousands of freelance aspirants to terrorism worldwide—radicalized in Internet chat rooms, self-trained, poorly educated, and lacking any clear practical objective. Such was the case with Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebolawe, two British-born converts to Islam, who murdered the British soldier Lee Rigby in 2013 in southeastern London, claiming to avenge the deaths of Muslim innocents by British troops. Like Muhammad Bouyeri, who assassinated the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004, and the Madrid train bombers, who killed 191 people in the same year, they were not directly linked to al-Qaeda.100 Some self-starters do seek out the al-Qaeda leadership for credentialing and in hope of being sent to some important operational theater, but it seems that trainers in Pakistan prefer to send them home to destabilize Western countries instead—as happened with the 7/7 London bombings (July 2005), the Australian bombing plan (November 2005), the Toronto plot (June 2006), and the foiled British project of blowing up several planes over the Atlantic (August 2006).
These freelance terrorists have very little knowledge of the Quran, and so it is pointless to attempt a debate about their interpretation of scripture or to blame “Islam” for their crimes.101 Indeed, Marc Sageman, who has talked with several of them, believes that a regular religious education might have deterred them from lawless violence. They are, he has found, chiefly motivated by the desire to escape a stifling sense of insignificance and pointlessness in secular nation-states that struggle to absorb foreign minorities. They seek to fulfill the age-old dream of military glory and believe that by dying a heroic death, they will give their lives meaning as local heroes.102 In these cases, suffice it to say, what we call “Islamic terrorism” has been transformed from a political cause—inflamed with pious exhortations contrary to Islamic teachings—into a violent expression out of youthful rage. They may claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but when an untalented beginner claims to be playing a Beethoven sonata, we hear only cacophony.
One of Bin Laden’s objectives had been to draw Muslims all over the world to his vision of jihad. Though he did become a charismatic folk hero to some—a kind of Saudi Che—in this central mission he ultimately failed. Between 2001 and 2007, a Gallup poll conducted in thirty-five predominantly Muslim countries found that only 7 percent of respondents thought the 9/11 attacks were “completely justified”; for these people, the reasons were entirely political. As for the 93 percent who condemned the attacks, they quoted Quranic verses to show that the killing of innocent people could have no place in Islam.103 One might well wonder how much more unanimously opposed to terror the Muslim world might have become, but for the course the United States and its allies took in the wake of 9/11. At a time when even in Tehran there were demonstrations of solidarity with America, the Bush and Blair coalition lashed out with its own violent rejoinder, a drive that would culminate in the tragically misbegotten Iraq invasion of 2003. Its most decisive result was to present the world with a new set of images of Muslim suffering in which the West was not only implicated but for which it was, this time, directly responsible. When considering the tenacity of al-Qaeda, it is well to remember that such images of Muslim suffering, more than any expansive theory of jihad, were what had drawn so many young Muslims to the camps of Peshawar in the first instance.
We routinely and rightly condemn the terrorism that kills civilians in the name of God, but we cannot claim the high moral ground if we dismiss the suffering and death of the many thousands of civilians who die in our wars as “collateral damage.” Ancient religious mythologies helped people to face up to the dilemma of state violence, but our current nationalist ideologies seem by contrast to promote a retreat into denial or hardening of our hearts. Nothing shows this more clearly than a remark of Madeleine Albright’s when she was still Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations. She later retracted it, but among people all around the world, it has never been forgotten. In 1996, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl asked her whether the cost of international sanctions against Iraq was justified: “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more than died in Hiroshima.… Is the price worth it?” “I think this is a very hard choice,” Albright replied, “but the price, we think the price is worth it.”104
On October 24, 2012, Mamana Bibi, a sixty-five-year-old woman picking vegetables in her family’s large open land in northern Waziristan, Pakistan, was killed by a U.S. drone aircraft. She was not a terrorist but a midwife married to a retired schoolteacher, yet she was blown to pieces in front of her nine young grandchildren. Some of the children have had multiple surgeries that the family could ill afford because they lost all their livestock; the smaller children still scream in terror all night long. We do not know who the real targets were. Yet even though the U.S. government claims to carry out thorough poststrike assessments, it has never apologized, never offe
red compensation to the family, nor even admitted what happened to the American people. CIA director John O. Brennan had previously claimed that drone strikes caused absolutely no civilian casualties; more recently he has admitted otherwise while maintaining that such deaths are extremely rare. Since then, Amnesty International reviewed some forty-five strikes in the region, finding evidence of unlawful civilian deaths, and has reported several strikes that appear to have killed civilians outside the bounds of law.105 “Bombs create only hatred in the hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breed more terrorism,” said Bibi’s son. “No one ever asked us who was killed or injured that day. Not the United States or my own government. Nobody has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.”106
“Am I my brother’s guardian?” Cain asked after he had killed his brother, Abel. We are now living in such an interconnected world that we are all implicated in one another’s history and one another’s tragedies. As we—quite rightly—condemn those terrorists who kill innocent people, we also have to find a way to acknowledge our relationship with and responsibility for Mamana Bibi, her family, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died or been mutilated in our modern wars simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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