It is important to listen to what the Indians say, when we speak about the Mumbai (former Bombay) outrage on December 10, 2008. What they are living is a September 11: a dismaying crossroads all the same.
The discovery of having an utmost power and at the same time an utmost vulnerability. So it is for writers like Amit Chaudhuri or Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City. So it is for Amartya Sen. Less peremptory than the Westerners, they see the internal ills and at the same time the external ills. Internal ills because modernization (the incredible India of the beautiful advertisements appearing at regular intervals on BBC) causes legitimate grudges in the Muslim minorities and arrogant extremism in the Hindu. External ills because terrorists are often trained in Pakistan, feeding themselves off a conflict between India and Pakistan that is still going on. According to Sen, it is absolutely necessary to face both causes, however not with the instruments of 2001: the winner of the Nobel prize in Economics does not speak of wars and civilizations. He declares that: “the priority is to restore order and peace, in order to avoid negative effects on the economic development” of India.
The challenge looks like September 11, but the doubts about the answer are growing. The American and European way did not cure the ills but increased them. It did not bring order to Central and Southern Asia but aggravated local strife. Above all it made war banal, everywhere: when the superpower uses it as an option like any other and not as the last one, everybody falls into mimetic rivalry. This is what Pakistan does in order to protect itself from India and its influence on Afghanistan. So does Iran, in order to avoid American attacks from Kabul. So does India, suspecting connivances between Pakistan and the terrorists. In the English secret services, the idea is making its way that the word itself – war – has been ruinous. It ennobled common criminals turning them into belligerents. It blurred the conflicts’ roots, reducing them to a planetary clash between the societies of terror and consent, a clash theorized by Philip Bobbit and criticized by David Cole in the New York Review of Books: as if terror were an attractive value, comparable to Communism in the 20th century.
Last October in the Guardian, Stella Rimington, former director of the English internal services, wrote: “I hope the future US President will stop speaking about war on Terror”. The reaction to September 11 was out of proportion, the erosion of civil freedom “unnecessary, counterproductive”: war “was a mistake because it made believe that terrorism could be defeated with weapons”.
The worst defeats are those that happen when you fight wars with yesterday’s manuals: the historian Marc Bloch thought so when Hitler put France to flight and in 1940 spoke about Strange Defeat. The Western one is a strange defeat too. Two wars have been waged as if the problem were all in Al Qaeda’s ideology. As if at the origin of evil there were not unstable modernizations in Asia, loathed inequalities, deep-rooted regional conflicts.
War can be necessary but it is blind to geography and history, wrapped as it is in ideology.
It puts little flags on the maps without looking at them. If Pakistan has become the terrorist training field, it is because some diseases are systematically neglected in that country. Simplifying categories like war and terrorism prevent us from seeing the slow becoming of a country, urging to use the journalist’s lenses, who just sees the tail of history. The wars on terror are also bubbles, similar to the financial ones: reality is ignored, and in its place a new, imaginary one is built, useful for unmet purposes.
It does not make any sense to keep on fighting in Afghanistan if we do not learn to look at the geography of the players. At the Afghan borders: Central Asia to the North, Iran to the West, Pakistan to the South-East, China and Myanmar to the East. At the Pakistani borders: Iran and Afghanistan to the West, China to the North, India to the East. The harsh disputes date back to the British colonial times, when tribes and peoples were used as buffers, pawns. In the 19th Century, this was the great Anglo-Russian game to Afghan and Indian detriment.
The mortifying game goes on
For decades, Pakistan has been a crucial and embittered nation. The Afghan war has just shifted terrorism, pushing it into the dens of Pakistan, where it had started from during the Soviet occupation, helped by the USA. A whole region in Pakistan is governed by the Taliban, at the Afghan border (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Fata). Rebels and terrorists prosper, supported by a part of the Pakistani services, and Islamabad is hardly able to monopolize violence since it is expecting to eventually need those mafias. It needs the Tribal Areas in order to control Afghanistan and it needs the Taliban in order to stop what it perceives as an Indian threat.
We should not forget that Musharraf did not support Bush to fight the Taliban, but to fight India: he said so on September 19, 2001. Zardari, his successor, is bravely trying a rapprochement with India and to control the services. It would be disastrous to consider him already vanquished.
Pakistan feels to be in dire straits, threatened with dismemberment, and that explains its many weaknesses. The Afghan-Indian alliance, the new Indo-American connivance (which is also nuclear): these are inauspicious signs for a nuclear power still treated like a pariah.
Then there is China, which increasingly invests in Afghanistan. Seven years have passed since the war and the Pakistan issue, still decisive, has not been faced yet. This issue concerns the borders, both with Afghanistan and with India: today still scandalously undefined. Kabul contests the Durand line at the Pakistani border, perpetuating the Pakistani need, along that line, to have there an armed, even though rebel, Pashtun area. With India the border is vague, without an agreement on Kashmir. Order and peace presuppose definite and precise borders: Europe shows that. Their vanishing is a progress, when former enemies make a union. When the union is absent, undefined borders move to the minds, becoming deadly.
The strange defeat in the wars on terrorism will maybe revalue the experts, to the ideologists’ detriment. In an essay on Foreign Affairs, two outstanding experts like Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid point out very practical avenues, consisting in multiple diplomatic negotiations and initiatives, against the mainstream. The fact that they do not start, strengthens the doubt that the West does want endless wars in order to both control the resources in Central Asia and oppose China. The real fight on terrorism, according to Rubin and Rashid, will start on the day when they will accept to distinguish between short and long term, and between fighters and terrorists. Al-Qaeda is not almighty: it is alive because the rebels do not have any way out (Al Qaeda “is an inspiration, not an organization” writes Bernardo Valli in La Repubblica). With the Taliban, it is time to negotiate in order to separate them from terrorism. Some of their leaders made it clear that if NATO troops go away, they will commit themselves not to attack the West.
An increased war commitment in Afghanistan is dangerous, without this diplomatic revolution. So is dangerous the idea expressed by Robert Gates, Defense Secretary, according to whom Kabul needs to have an army 204 thousand strong – soldiers and policemen – before an American disengagement. Not only could not Afghanistan pay for it (Rubin and Rashid explain how the cost of such a force, 3,5 billion dollars, would be prohibitive even if Kabul had an annual growth of 9 per cent) but war will still be its only resource, and the only resource of the whole region. It is this spiral that generates terrorism, both at local and global level. Failing to see this is suicidal on the Indian, Afghan and Western side. It generates the worst suspicions on their and our intentions.