Waging war on Afghanistan or Iraq will not stamp out terrorism Seumas Milne
Thursday September 27, 2001
<A HREF="http://www.guardian.co.uk/">The Guardian</A> As US and British forces prepare to strike against the
humanitarian disaster that is Afghanistan, the problems confronting George
Bush's latter-day crusade against terror are mounting. For all the firepower
and military muscle now being assembled, American options have if anything
narrowed since the carnage in New York and Washington two weeks ago. Early
expectations of a huge televisual fireworks display over the Hindu Kush and a
shootout in Osama bin Laden's mountain lair are being hurriedly played down -
even by US administration superhawks like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
The more cautious Colin Powell seems, for the moment, to have prevailed.
While grand declarations of anti-terrorist virtue collide with the real world
of stitching together an international coalition, the dilemmas for the
wounded US giant are multiplying. The prospect of "surgical strikes" against
a disparate and well-hidden force is now increasingly recognised as
implausible. Bush has dismissed the idea of "sending a $2m missile to hit a
$10 tent", and although raids on empty training camps will presumably be
staged for CNN, that is unlikely to satisfy domestic demand for revenge. The
embarrassing failure to produce convincing evidence of Bin Laden's
responsibility for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the difficulties
of tracking him down have left the US administration falling back on a more
visible enemy in the form of the Taliban.  That has its own dangers.
Overthrowing such a shaky regime, at least in what is left of Afghanistan's
cities, should prove straightforward enough, particularly with the help of
the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. But the alliance is a ragbag army, based
on minority ethnic groups, with its own history of massacres and large-scale
human rights abuses when it ruled the country in the early 90s. A government
based on it, the long-discredited king and more pliant fragments of the
Taliban - the lineup currently being canvassed as the basis of a new order in
Kabul - would be a pretty grim legacy for such an avowedly high-minded
venture. No wonder Bush says he's "not into nation-building".  Then there is
the threat to the survival of the pro- western military dictatorship and
nuclear-armed Taliban-sponsor in Pakistan, now offering logistical backup to
the western war effort. Even more incendiary is the demand for a full-scale
assault on Iraq, which has triggered an open split in the Bush
administration. War on Saddam would at least provide the US with a target
serious enough to appear to match the scale of the slaughter of the innocents
in New York. But, with no evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks,
any such move would rupture the coalition at its heart and destroy any hope
of maintaining Arab support.  The fragility of that support was highlighted
by the refusal of the Saudi regime, most dependent of all American client
states in the region, to allow US forces to use their Saudi bases for
operations against Afghanistan out of fear of a domestic backlash. A taste of
the mood in Bin Laden's homeland was given this week by Mai Yamani,
anthropologist daughter of the former Saudi oil minister, who was startled to
find young people "very pleased about Osama because they think he is the only
one who stands against the hegemony of the US".  Failure to read these signs
would be the grossest irresponsibility. Those who insist that the attacks in
New York and Washington had nothing to do with the US role in the Middle East
- but were instead the product of existential angst about western freedom and
identity - not only demonstrate their ignorance of the area. They also weaken
the pressure to address the longstanding grievances fuelling this rage: not
only western indulgence of Israeli military occupation, but decades of
oil-lubricated support for despots from Iran to Oman, Egypt to Saudi Arabia
and routine military interventions to maintain US control. Moral relativism
does not lie in acknowledging that link, but in making excuses for this
insupportable record.  Few can seriously hope that waging war on Afghanistan
or Iraq - or the death of Bin Laden, for that matter - will stamp out
terrorism any more effectively than the alternative of legal, security and
diplomatic action. But an end to the siege of Iraq, the use of western clout
to accelerate the creation of a viable Palestinian state and the withdrawal
of US troops from the Arabian peninsula would begin to relieve the political
pressure cooker by tackling the most inflammatory sources of tension in the
region. Conservative politicians in the US are becoming impatient for the
sound of gunfire. The Bush administration has a choice: it can go further in
the direction it has begun tentatively to explore while assembling its
coalition, for example over the Israel-Palestinian conflict - or it can cave
in to the siren voices on its right and pour an ocean of petrol on the flames

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