The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  It was always in the interest of the George W. Bush administration to have al Qaeda seen as a global threat, since if it were not, the frustrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be hard to explain. So would the former Bush administration’s creation of its huge apparatus of international antiterrorism agencies, prisons, torture, and civilian surveillance as well as its massive domestic investment in “homeland defense”—which has seemed as ramshackle but profitable an undertaking as the American privatization of the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of them seeming monuments to an unregulated American capitalism in decline.

  The resemblances between modern Islamic radicalism and the efforts in earlier societies culturally threatened by the West to restore a golden age are obvious. An observer of the Taliban has called them not a revolutionary force themselves but the outcome of the revolutionary events of recent years. Such initiatives express the cultural frustrations of an elite and a people who feel themselves in a crucial way backward, unable to compete adequately with Western societies, victims of a political impotence responsible for the Arabs’ failure to establish a successful political successor to the Ottoman system—an “Arab Nation” to take its place. The violence and religious radicalism produced in recent years in the Islamic world may, as I have argued, prove a transient, if tragic, phenomenon, neither unprecedented nor specific to the present period, as we have seen.

  It is essential to distinguish between the radicalized and militant fundamentalist movements primarily of Arab origin, such as al Qaeda, and the Taliban—the fundamentalist “students of theology,” who are drawn from a Pashtun ethnic population of some forty million that dominates a Central Asian region centered on northern Pakistan and Afghanistan (where Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, and other ethnic groups from neighboring states are also important presences).

  The Obama administration chose, when it assumed office in 2009, to make the Taliban its primary enemy, identifying the crucial battlefield as no longer Iraq (possibly a rash assumption) but Afghanistan—and increasingly Pakistan as well. Bruce Riedel, an Afghanistan-Pakistan policy adviser to the Obama government, has described Pakistan as potentially posing “the most serious threat to the United States since the Soviet Union.”15 The conflated whole now is seen in Washington as what Donald Rumsfeld, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, identified as “a global insurrection” that the United States must defeat . The London-based Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, an eyewitness to the Central Asian crisis, compares the U.S.-NATO effort in Afghanistan with Richard Nixon’s pursuit of “peace with honor” in Vietnam, which “primarily consisted of devastating Cambodia in addition to Vietnam.” He adds, “For some years now, maintaining honor in Afghanistan has amounted to little more than the Talibanization of nuclear-armed Pakistan.”16

  At the time of the Taliban’s rise, it was possible to understand Pakistan’s support for them as a strategic investment in creating a readily manipulated satellite state in Kabul, and the support they enjoyed among the Afghan people as a political and cultural reaction to the violence and civil struggles of Afghanistan before and after the creation of a pro-Soviet regime in 1978 and the subsequent Russian invasion. The Taliban-governed Afghanistan, as it existed before 2001, resembled a backward Wahhabi Saudi Arabia: It was a rigid and aggressively reactionary integrist society and theocratic government, much influenced by Pashtun tribal custom and less sophisticated than the Saudis after the latter’s long history of dealing with Americans and Westerners. Women were repressed and were denied education; the regime was ignorant and xenophobic and practiced intellectual oppression and a comprehensive iconoclasm extending to the destruction of the country’s pre-Muslim monuments from an earlier Buddhist civilization.

  A Pakistani observer, Rafia Zakaria, writing in the the Friday Times of Lahore,* has argued that the British colonial period amputated a portion of Pakistan’s history, cutting society off from its past . The Taliban are responding to this sentiment of a lost history by rejecting anything contemporary that is not authentically Pakistani and Muslim. Positioning themselves as the antithesis of modernity validates their integrity. “Their rejection of modernity has become a way to renew with our history, such as it might have occurred without the ignominy of British conquest .” This is not to be seen as a return to the past but as a positive creation. Their leaders make no secret of their formal ignorance and they mock legal procedures and classical Islamic jurisprudence: they have no scruples about choosing that Qur’anic law they think suits the case being judged. “Notions of grace and equity, much more frequent in the sacred texts, are conveniently ignored. Knowledge of religious and political formalities is overtly suspect, and power is sought in visible and visceral bodily submission. They are not a medieval survival but an entirely postmodern creation of rebellion against both modernity and rationality.”

  The Taliban’s support by Pakistan places a strategically important border area under Pakistan’s influence and weakens India’s influence in Central Asia and, indirectly, in Kashmir. After al Qaeda’s expulsion from its original installation in Sudan, under U.S. pressures, it had been afforded protection by the Taliban government in Afghanistan, with the approval of Pakistan, which saw the presence of foreign Islamists among the Taliban as providing a potential source of recruits for the underground struggle in Kashmir against India—always the principal preoccupation of Pakistan governments. This of course explains Pakistan’s persistent resistance to American demands that the Pakistan army give priority to the American interest in destroying al Qaeda; Pakistan’s own interest lies in manipulating both Taliban and foreign Islamist elements—as well as the United States, when feasible—in its own defense against its permanent enemy, India. The last motive became even more pressing when the George W. Bush administration chose to establish a special alliance and cooperative nuclear relationship with India without, it would seem, appreciating the complexities of the situation into which it was blundering. Nor, it would seem, does the Obama administration understand.

  Most authorities on Afghanistan and its history nevertheless would probably have judged that without United States involvement, the Taliban would have proven a transient political and social phenomenon in Afghanistan’s long history and would have likely sooner or later succumbed to the influence of more liberal versions of Islam and been weakened by the rival communal interests of the other major ethnic communities in the country, including Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and, of course, non-Taliban Pashtuns. This may yet prove the eventual outcome. The condition of Afghanistan at the time its Taliban leaders gave hospitality to Osama bin Laden and his associates, in flight from Sudan, was such that the decision seemed in Washington of relatively little significance (given that the Pakistani army was presumed to be in ultimate control of the situation). It might also have been thought that any risk presented by al Qaeda was under observation by Western intelligence agencies (it certainly was by the CIA) and could have been contained after 9/11 by sensibly limited Western policies, without an invasion of Afghanistan that destroyed a considerable part of such national infrastructure as had survived the Soviet period and killed thousands of hapless Afghan civilians and Taliban soldiers innocent of any acquaintance with the existence of either al Qaeda or the United States of America.

  Neither of the two American deployments in Afghanistan, that in 2001 and today’s renewed search for Osama bin Laden and his headquarters, seems even to have located him, or to have placed him at any risk of being attacked or seized. The vain pursuit of bin Laden has grossly inflated the reputation of al Qaeda and made him an international celebrity as seeming leader of all radical Islam’s resistance and counteroffensive to the “aggressions” of the “New Crusaders” and “Great Satan,” and of course of the Zionists.

  I seem to be one of the very few Americans who do not believe in the enormity of the Islamic radical threat . I think the violent cultural and religious radicalism of recent years in the Islamic world is a passing phenomenon, neither unprecedented n
or specific to the present period other than as an aspect of events connected to the strategic competition for the oil resources of Iran and the Middle East and the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

  There is little new in what is happening. Colonial and postcolonial history are filled with conflict between the expanding and expansive West and the societies they were attempting, usually successfully, to overrun. We have rediscovered all this since the Second World War because one of the most important—possibly the most important—results of the war was the destruction of the European empires. They were under attack on the left by the awakening and newly sophisticated nationalists of the imperial territories, many of whom had been called to Europe in 1914—the Indochinese laborers, Algerian and Moroccan ground troops, Chinese labor battalions—and again in the Second World War, when Charles De Gaulle’s “Free French” army was mostly composed of regular colonial troops from Central Africa whose leaders opted for De Gaulle rather than the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, and from French North Africa after the British and American invasion of Algeria and Morocco in 1942. The British desert war against Italian forces and Rommel’s Afrika Korps was fought in considerable part by regulars from the (colonial) Indian Army and by Australians and New Zealanders en route to Britain to fight in Europe. When Japan attacked in the Pacific, these colonial troops were sent home when transport allowed, but there were still some of them who landed in Normandy in 1944. The second “world” war was much more of a world war than we generally acknowledge. What Huntington has taken as a war between Islamic and Western civilizations is a matter of much deeper human forces.

  The American political philosopher Mark Lilla claims that theological ideas as such “still inflame the ideas of man, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruins.”17 I would think it obvious that it was not theological but secular utopian passions that were responsible for the Second World War and its totalitarian devastation, and that similar ideas, currently held in Washington and some other capitals, have already demonstrated, and continue to demonstrate, a similar capacity for the ruin of societies, not least their own.

  * This was generally true in the Arab and subsequent Ottoman empires, where non-Muslims were allowed to live peacefully in communities under their own leaders, so long as they conformed to the political and social order, paid their taxes, et cetera. Christians served in the Ottoman army both as conscripts (the Janissaries, who became an important political force when the empire fell into decline) and as volunteers. Christian Armenians had a large commercial role in the Ottoman Empire, as did Christian Greeks, and many Greek families held important appointments in the imperial administration. This tolerance did not prevent discriminatory fiscal measures with respect to the non-Muslim communities, as well as occasional outbreaks of sectarian violence.

  * Philosophy is defined here as the use of natural reason to reach autonomous conclusions about the ultimate nature and causes of things; theology as the application of reason to divine revelation.

  * Muslim students ordinarily learn the Qur’an by rote in a classical Arabic few actually speak or understand. The book itself is not considered a record or text but the living word of God, God’s Presence on earth, in some sense analogous to the consecrated communion Host of Catholicism. This is why the Qur’an’s abuse or desecration by American soldiers and interrogators in the Iraq war seemed to Muslims to validate the widespread conviction that Americans were not merely enemies of Islam but depraved. See Michael Peppard, “The Secret Weapon, Religious Abuse in the ‘War on Terror’” in Commonweal (December 5, 2008).

  * The Turkish army has exercised this responsibility in recent years by overturning governments under clerical influence in 1960, 1980, and most recently in 1997; however, a reformed version of the pro-Islamist party forced from office that year was reelected in 2002 and governs today.

  * Dervishes were members of Muslim religious (and military) orders who had taken vows of poverty and lived as mendicants, like Christian friars.

  * The past scope and character of non-Western responses to the imperialist and colonialist West is discussed at length in Stillman and Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of Twentieth-Century Conflict (New York and London: Harper & Row and Victor Gollancz, 1964).

  * Ali A. Allawi, a former Iraqi minister, writes in The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) that while Saudi Arabia has “demolished 95 per cent of historical buildings in the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina,” the Gulf city-states are characterized by “rampant commercialism, brand worship, gigantism, strict class segregation and a calendar of ‘festivals’ and ‘events’ designed by marketers.” Quoted in Prospect (London), September 2009.

  * Much of the movement’s success among Muslim students is due to the fact that membership is free of obvious cost . The movement rejects any form of armed action, and in Israel and Palestine it refuses to participate in elections. Hence membership runs no risk of reprisal from either Israel or the Palestinian authorities—or even of an election failure. As Filiu says, in his 2008 article, HT’s popularity is due to its “refusal to engage in concrete politics and [to] an extraordinary accumulation of despair [on the part of young Muslims at the seeming impotence of their society].” The movement provides a fantasy that compensates for the failure of Palestinian and Arab resistance to Israel and the United States.

  * New York Times International Supplement, October 3, 2008.

  * Reprinted in Courrier International (Paris) No. 965, April 10–May 6, 2009.

  VI

  How It Ends

  The Second World War and the Cold War were the final struggles among the surviving great powers of that era of revolution that began in Philadelphia in 1776 and Paris in 1789 and was closed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision two centuries later that Russians must speak the truth to one another about the society in which they had lived for the preceding seven decades.

  Another era had begun, in which the United States would be the dominant power, the nation that emerged from the great war of nations in 1914–1918 and the greater war of ideologies in 1939–1945 with its nationalism and ideology triumphant. President Jimmy Carter made two decisions that both precipitated and confirmed the collapse of the Soviet Union, while inadvertently preparing the conflicts between Islam and the United States that were to follow. He agreed to the proposal of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to deliberately provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, intended to create Moscow’s “own Vietnam war”; and the president authorized a program by which Saudi Arabia and Pakistan recruited an international force of Muslim fighting men, motivated by religion, to fight that Soviet invasion. The unforeseen consequences remain with us today.1

  During the Carter and Reagan administrations there was a third development of great importance to the future. The Pentagon was authorized to develop an international system of American regional military commands and bases, implicitly the organizational infrastructure for American world military domination. The George W. Bush presidency further expanded and extended the scope of U.S. military deployment following the 9/11 attacks, with the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It issued the first in a series of National Security Strategy documents mandating U.S. military superiority over the combined forces of all possible challengers to the United States, the latest of which is expected to be published in 2010.

  President Ronald Reagan, the most naive and genial imaginable representative of American nationalism and ideology, ordered large-scale rearmament and preparation for space wars, while simultaneously affirming to Mikhail Gorbachev the ideal of complete nuclear disarmament .

  President George H. W. Bush intelligently and successfully negotiated the termination of the Cold War. He also inaugurated a new series of American Middle Eastern military engagements with the Gulf War against Iraq, a superficially comprehensible decision, at the same time one whose deep sources remain today without a satisfactory explanation. He als
o insisted upon the creation of an American base complex in Saudi Arabia, the location of Islam’s holiest places. The existence of this permanent installation of infidels in the Muslim Holy Land was avowedly what provoked Osama bin Laden to organize his attacks on New York City and Washington in 2001.

  The eminent Austrian economist and political philosopher Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his 1951 book Imperialism and Social Classes, that imperialism

  necessarily carries the implication of an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the aims which are temporarily being pursued; of an aggressiveness that is only kindled anew by each success; of an aggressiveness for its own sake, as reflected in such terms as “hegemony,” “world dominion,” and so forth. And history, in truth, shows us nations and classes—most nations furnish an example at one time or another—that seek expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, victory for the sake of winning, dominion for the sake of ruling. This determination cannot be explained by any of the pretexts that bring it into action, by any of the aims for which it seems to be struggling at the time. … Expansion for its own sake always requires, among other things, concrete objects if it is to reach the action stage and maintain itself, but this does not constitute its meaning. Such expansion is in a sense its own “object” … 2

  Fifty years ago, in connection with American postwar policy, it was possible to write of a “denatured imperialism” which invoked the phrase “world security” instead of “world dominion”—“dominion” indicating international responsibility without the concomitant obsession with war. This cannot be said today, as American foreign policy, economy, and society seem all to have become dominated by the assumptions of permanent or serial wars against American enemies, identified by Washington as the enemies as well of democracy and Western civilization. American officials have spoken of a generalized “insurrection” in the non-Western world against institutions and assumptions that reflect the influence of the United States.