The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  There was little that George Bush or Tony Blair would have disagreed with. Retaliation “should not extend to any but those who carried out those attacks [which] requires conclusive evidence against the culprits,” Sheikh Hamad pronounced. “The Islamic world was the first to call for the dialogue of civilisation.” This might have been scripted for the British prime minister. But the Qatari emir got off one quick biff at the Americans. The world should not, he said, fall “into conflicting sects, camps and clashing dichotomies based on the principle of ‘If you are not on my side, then you are against me.’”

  Wasn’t Israel the real problem? the delegates tried to ask. Principal among them, of course, was our old friend Y. Arafat, Esq. Of course he condemned the attacks in America. Of course he felt “solidarity” with the American people—the old socialist “solidarity” put to an original new use. Money was to be had in a good cause. Qatar opened a fund for the Afghans and the Saudis put in $10 million, the United Arab Emirates $3 million, Oman $1 million. But what the delegates wanted was evidence—“conclusive evidence,” according to Sheikh Hamad—that Washington had identified the culprits of September 11th. This at least allowed him to avoid the fatal words “bin Laden.” Indeed, it allowed everyone to duck this annoying, dangerous, frightening man who was calling for the overthrow of almost every single one of the Islamic delegates. We’re sorry about September 11th, they said. Please don’t bomb Afghanistan more than you have to. Please don’t kill the innocent. And please don’t bomb us.

  For journalists, it was a frustrating war to cover. Around the Taliban’s embassy in Islamabad and its consulate in Peshawar, we gathered in our hundreds. Names were scribbled onto visa applications and scooped up at the end of the morning by a scowling man with a long, pointed beard—and, I had no doubt, deposited in a large rubbish bin. In Quetta, I arrived at the consulate with a letter from a prominent supporter of the Taliban, insisting that I should be given a visa. I handed it to a Taliban “diplomat” in a dirty white robe. “Get out,” he screamed at me. Once outside, I saw the letter—screwed up into a ball—sail over the consulate wall onto the pavement in front of me. Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist, managed to enter Afghanistan and interview bin Laden and emerged to tell me that bin Laden himself had asked why I was not in the country to see him. Months later, I learned that the Taliban had sought to find me, that I could have travelled to Afghanistan and talked to bin Laden—but that the message never reached me. The Scoop that never was.

  Unaware of all this, I went on vainly pestering the Taliban’s men for a visa. I settled into a villa in Peshawar, working my contacts in Islamabad for that all-important, hopeless document. I would take tea on the lawn. Perhaps only in the old British empire do they make black tea and milk in the same scalding pot, poured with lashings of sugar into fragile cups. The bougainvillea blasted crimson and purple down the brick wall beside me while big, aggressive black birds pursued one another over the cut grass. At the end of my road lay the British cemetery I had first explored twenty-one years earlier wherein memorials recorded the assassination of the Raj’s good men from Surrey and Yorkshire, murdered by what were called ghazis, the Afghan fundamentalists of their age, who were often accompanied into battle—and I quote Captain Mainwaring who was in the Second Afghan War—“by religious men called talibs.” In those days, we made promises. We promised Afghan governments our support if they kept out the Russians. We promised our Indian empire wealth, communications and education in return for its loyalty. Little had changed.

  As day turned into sweaty evening, fighter-bombers pulsed through the yellow sky above my lawn, grey supersonic streaks that rose like hawks from Peshawar’s mighty runway and headed west towards the mountains of Afghanistan. Their jet engines must have vibrated among the English bones in the cemetery at the end of the road, as Hardy’s Channel firing once disturbed Parson Thirdly’s remains. And on the big black television in my bedroom, the broken, veined screen proved that imperial history did indeed repeat itself. General Colin Powell stood at the right hand of General Pervez Musharraf after promising a serious look at the problems of Kashmir and Pashtun representation in a future Afghan government. The U.S. secretary of state and the general spent much of their time on 15 October chatting about the overnight artillery bombardment by that other old empire relic, the Indian army. General Musharraf wanted a “short” campaign against Afghanistan, General Powell a promise of continued Pakistani support in the United States’s “war on terror.” Musharraf wanted a solution to the problem of Kashmir. Powell, promising that the United States was now a close friend of Pakistan, headed off to India to oblige.

  Scarcely three days before Powell acquired his sudden interest in the problems of Kashmir, Yassir Arafat, the discredited old man of Gaza—“our bin Laden,” as ex-General Ariel Sharon indecently called him—was invited to Downing Street, where Tony Blair, hitherto a cautious supporter of Palestinian independence, declared the need for a “viable Palestinian state,” including Jerusalem—“viable” being a gloss for a less mangled version of the Bantustan originally proposed for Arafat. Blair had no need to fear American wrath since President Bush Junior had already discovered that even before September 11th—or so he told us—he had a “vision” of a Palestinian state that accepted the existence of Israel. Arafat—speaking English at length for the first time in years—instantly supported the air bombardment of Afghanistan. The Afghans were not on hand to remind the world that the same Yassir Arafat had once enthusiastically supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Why did we always make quick-fix promises to vulnerable allies of convenience after years of accepting, even creating, the injustices of the Middle East and South-West Asia?

  It was intriguing, that sweltering autumn in Pakistan, to read the full text of what bin Laden demanded in his first post–World Trade Center attack videotape. He said in Arabic, in a section largely excised in English translations, that “our [Muslim] nation has undergone more than eighty years of this humiliation . . .” and referred to “when the sword reached America after eighty years.” Bin Laden might be cruel, wicked, ruthless or evil personified, but he was intelligent. He was obviously referring to the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, written by the victorious allied powers, which broke the Ottoman empire and did away—after 600 years of sultanates and caliphates—with the last dream of Arab unity. Bin Laden’s lieutenant, Ayman Zawahri—shouting into the video recorder from his Afghan cave on 6 October 2001—stated that the al-Qaeda movement “will not tolerate a recurrence of the Andalusia tragedy in Palestine.” Andalusia? Yes, the debacle of Andalusia marked the end of Muslim rule in Spain in the fifteenth century. We may sprinkle quick-fix promises around, but the people of the Middle East have longer memories.

  However one approaches this Arab sense of humiliation—whether we regard it as a form of self-pity or a fully justified response to injustice—it is nonetheless real. The Arabs were among the first scientists at the start of the second millennium, while the Crusaders—another of bin Laden’s fixations—were riding in technological ignorance into the Muslim world. So while in the past few decades our popular conception of the Arabs vaguely embraced an oil-rich, venal and largely backward people, awaiting our annual handouts and their virgins in heaven, many of them were asking pertinent questions about their past and future, about religion and science, about—so I suspect—how God and technology might be part of the same universe. No such long-term questions for us. We just went on supporting our Muslim dictators around the world—especially in the Middle East—in return for their friendship and our false promises to rectify injustice.

  We allowed our dictators to snuff out their socialist and communist parties; we left their population little place to exercise their political opposition except through religion. We went in for demonisation—Messrs. Khomeini, Abu Nidal, Ghadafi, Arafat, Saddam, bin Laden—rather than historical questioning. And we made more promises. Presidents Carter and Reagan made pledges to the Afghan mujahedin: fight the Russians and we will
help you. We would assist the recovery of the Afghan economy. A rebuilding of the country, even—this from innocent Jimmy Carter—“democracy,” not a concept to be sure that we would now be bequeathing to the Pakistanis, Uzbeks or Saudis. Of course, once the Russians were gone in 1989, there was no economic assistance.

  The problem, it seemed, was that without any sense of history, we failed to understand injustice. Instead we compounded it, after years of indolence, when we wanted to bribe our would-be allies with promises of vast historical importance— a resolution to Palestine, Kashmir, an arms-free Middle East, Arab independence, an economic Nirvana—because we were at war. Tell Muslims what they want to hear, promise them what they want—anything, so long as we can get our armadas into the air in our latest “war against evil.” And up they flew. In the sand-blasted mud villages along the border of Afghanistan, we could watch their contrails, white gashes cut into the deep blue skies that would suddenly turn into circles and—from far away across the Kandahar desert—we would hear a distant, imperial thunder. With binoculars, we could even make out the sleek, four-engined bombers, the sunlight flashing off their wings. Then the planes would turn southwest and begin their long haul back to Diego Garcia.

  There was a children’s doctor I met in Peshawar, who provided considerable insight into the Taliban’s mentality at war. “After the Taliban radio went off the air . . . the next day I saw them assembling a new antenna. The Taliban always did this. Every time something was destroyed, they replaced it at once. They would go round and collect up all the wrecked equipment. This was very fast action. The Taliban were very relaxed about this. I’m trying to describe the Taliban reaction to the bombing. You know? They weren’t interested in the attacks. It was very intriguing—and strange—for me to see this.” But the doctor was no disinterested observer. “Most people, neutral people who’re not connected with political groups, they hate the American policy—and if the Taliban would change just 20 per cent of their policy against the people, then the people would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them. We are waiting for an end to the Taliban policy against women and against education. People will never forget what Pakistan has done to undermine Afghanistan—they see Pakistan as the eternal enemy. Among educated people, September 11th created a new situation. We knew that America helped to create the Taliban and Osama and we call them the ‘kids’ of America and Pakistan.” And, he might have added, Saudi Arabia.

  On 22 October, the Americans killed Saifullah of Turungzai, MA in Arabic and MA in Islamic Studies (Peshawar University), BSc. (Islamia College), B.Ed. and Certificate of Teaching, M. Phil. student and scholarship winner to Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest university in the Arab world. He spoke fluent English as well as Persian and his native Pushtu and loved poetry and history and was, so his family said, preparing a little reluctantly to get married. His father, Hedayatullah, was a medical doctor, his younger brother a student of chartered accountancy. No one outside Pakistan—and few inside—had ever heard of Saifullah. In these Pashtun villages of the North West Frontier, many families do not even have proper names. Saifullah was not a political leader; his fifty-year-old father said that his son was a humanitarian, not a warrior. His brother Mahazullah said the same. “He was always a peaceful person, quiet and calm, he just wanted to protect people in Afghanistan who he believed were the victims of terrorism.” But everyone agreed how Saifullah died. He was killed when five American cruise missiles detonated against the walls of a building in the Darulaman suburb of Kabul where he and thirty-five other men were meeting.

  His family now called him a “martyr.” Hedayatullah embraced each visitor to their home of cement and mud walls—including me—and offered roast chicken and mitha sweets and pots of milk and tea and insisted that he be “congratulated” on being the proud father of a man who died for his beliefs. I dutifully ate the vast mounds of chicken that Hedayatullah tugged from the braziers of food on the floor. Hens clucked in the yard outside; an old coloured poster, depicting a Kalashnikov rifle with the word “jihad” above it, was pasted on the wall. But “peace” is the word the family uttered most. Saifullah had only gone to take money to Kabul for the suffering Afghans, said Mahazullah, perhaps no more than 20,000 rupees—a mere $350—which he had raised among his student friends.

  That wasn’t the way the Americans told the story. Blundering through their target maps and killing innocent civilians by the day, the Pentagon boasted that the Darulaman killings targeted the Taliban’s “foreign” fighters, of whom a few were Pakistanis, Saifullah among them. In Pushtu, his name means “Sword of God.” Mahazullah dismissed the American claims. Only when I suggest that it might not be unusual for a young Muslim with Saifullah’s views to have taken a weapon to defend Afghanistan does Mahazullah say, very quickly, that his brother “may have been a fighter.” He never imagined his brother’s death. A phone call prepared the family for the news, a friend with information that some Pakistanis had been killed in Kabul. “It has left a terrible vacuum in our life,” Mahazullah said. “You cannot imagine what it is like without him. He was a person who respected life, who was a reformer. There was no justification for the war in Afghanistan. These people are poor. There is no evidence, no proof. Every human being has the right to the basic necessities of life. The family—all of us, including Saifullah—were appalled by the carnage in New York and Washington on September 11th. Saifullah was very regretful about this—we all watched it on television.” At no point did the family mention the name of Osama bin Laden.

  Turungzai was a village of resistance. During the Third Afghan War in 1919, the British hunted down Hadji Turungzai, one of the leaders of the revolt, and burned the village bazaar in revenge for its insurgency. Disconcertingly, a young man entered Saifullah’s home, greeted me with a large smile and introduced himself as the grandson of the Hadji, scourge of the English. But this was no centre of Muslim extremism. Though the family prayed five times a day, they intended their daughters to be educated at university. Saifullah spent hours on his personal computer and apparently loved the poetry of the secular Pakistani national poet Allama Mohamed Iqbal of Sialkot (Sir Mohamed Iqbal after he had accepted a British knighthood), and, according to Mahazullah, was interested in the world’s religions. When Saifullah left for Afghanistan, “Trust me” were the last words he spoke to his father. Perhaps he was remembering one of Iqbal’s most famous verses:

  Of God’s command, the inner meaning do you know?

  To live in constant anger is a life indeed.

  To children, death also came. Mullah Mohamed Omar’s ten-year-old son died in the third week of October. He was, according to Afghan refugees fleeing Kandahar, taken to one of the city’s broken hospitals by his father, the Taliban leader and “Emir of the Faithful,” but the boy—apparently travelling in Omar’s car when it was attacked by U.S. aircraft—died of his wounds. No regrets, of course. Back in 1986, when American aircraft bombed Libya, they also destroyed the life of Colonel Muammar Ghadafi’s six-year-old adopted daughter. No regrets on our part then, either. In 1992, when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made Apache helicopter fired an American-made missile into the car of Said Abbas Moussawi, head of the Hizballah guerrilla army in Lebanon, the Israeli pilot also killed Moussawi’s ten-year-old. Again, no regrets.

  And so the casualties in Afghanistan began to mount. From Kandahar came ever more frightful stories of civilians buried under ruins, of children torn to pieces by American bombs. When a few television crews were able to find eighteen fresh graves in the devastated village of Khorum outside Jalalabad, the U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld ridiculed the deaths as “ridiculous.” If each of our wars for infinite justice and eternal freedom had a familiar trademark—the military claptrap about air superiority, suppression of “command and control centres,” radar capabilities—each had an awkward, highly exclusive little twist to it. For the Afghan refugees who were turning up in their thousands at the border, it was palpably evident that they were fleeing not the Taliban
but our bombs and missiles. The refugees spoke vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fell on their cities. These people were terrified of our “war on terror,” victims as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Center on September 11th.

  Despite the slavish use of the phrase on the BBC and CNN, this was not a “war on terror.” We were not planning to attack Tamil Tiger suicide bombers or ETA killers or Real IRA murderers or Kurdish PKK guerrillas. Indeed, the United States had spent a lot of time supporting “terrorists” in Latin America—the Contras sprang to mind—not to mention the very same Taliban whom we were now bombing in Afghanistan. This was a war on America’s enemies. Increasingly, as the date of September 11th acquired epic status, we were retaliating for the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington. But we were not setting up any tribunals to try those responsible.

  And what was going to happen when the deaths for which we were responsible in Afghanistan approached the same figure as September 11th? Once the UN agencies gave us details of the starving and the destitute who were dying in their flight from our bombs, it wouldn’t take long to reach 3,000. Would that be enough? Would 12,000 dead Afghans appease us, albeit that they had nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden? Or 24,000? Sure, we would blame the Taliban for future tragedies, just as we had been blaming them for drug exports from Afghanistan. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the Taliban–drug linkage. And all we had to do to believe this was to forget the UN Drug Control Programme’s announcement in October 2001 that opium production in Afghanistan had fallen by 94 per cent, chiefly due to Mullah Omar’s prohibition of drug production in Taliban-controlled areas of the country. Most of Afghanistan’s current output came from our allies in the Northern Alliance.