Pankaj Mishra: In search of monsters to destroy
[Pankaj Mishra is an Indian author and writer of literary and political essays.]
We are winning in Iraq, John McCain declared in the presidential debate last week, "and we will come home with victory and with honour." This may sound like some perfunctory keep-the-pecker-up stuff from a former military man. But the Republican candidate, who believes that the "surge" has succeeded in Iraq, also possesses the fanatical conviction that heavier bombing and more ground troops could have saved the United States from disgrace in Vietnam.
On the same occasion, Barack Obama, who seems more aware of the costs of American honour to the American economy, claimed he would divert troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and, if necessary, order them to assault "safe havens" for terrorists in Pakistan's wild west. Both candidates sought the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, the co-alchemist, with Richard Nixon, of the "peace with honour" formula in Vietnam, which turned out to include the destruction of neighbouring Cambodia.
An ominously similar escalation of the "war on terror" has ensured that the next American president will receive a septic chalice from George Bush in January 2009. In July, Bush sanctioned raids into Pakistan, pre-empting Obama's tough-sounding strategy of widening the war in Afghanistan, where resurgent Taliban this year account for Nato's highest death toll since 2001. Pakistan's army chief vowed to defend his country "at all costs", and his soldiers now clash with US troops almost daily. Obscured by the American economy's slow-motion train wreck, the war on terror has already stumbled into its most treacherous phase with the invasion of fiercely nationalistic and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Most of the recent disasters of geopolitical machismo could have been foretold. In late 2003, when the occupation of Iraq was beginning to go badly wrong, the American journalist Dexter Filkins came across a village called Abu Hishma in the Sunni triangle. Rubble-strewn and "encased in razor wire", Abu Hishma resembled, Filkins writes in The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (Bodley Head), "a town in the West Bank". Its terrified residents told him about the local American commander Nathan Sassaman, who bulldozed homes and called in air strikes, and who was fond of proclaiming that "there is no God - I am god here".
Sassaman sounds like something out of Conrad, the white man in the tropics driven to lunacy by absolute power and extreme isolation. But, according to Filkins, he is a bright man, even the "embodiment of the best that America could offer" in his desire to bring democracy to Iraqis. A serious reader of history and anthropology, Sassaman, along with fellow officers, is very impressed by a book entitled The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai, a Hungarian-Israeli-American academic. Apparently, it makes clear that the "only thing" the denizens of the Middle East "understand is force - force, pride and saving face", and Sassaman believes that, "with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects ... we can convince these people that we are here to help them".
Filkins doesn't mention that The Arab Mind, originally published in 1973, was the bible of neocon commentators in Washington and New York cheerleading the Bush administration's audacious venture: what Condoleezza Rice in the new book by Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 (Simon & Schuster), describes as shifting the "epicentre of American power" from Europe, where it had rested since the second world war, to the Middle East. Widely read in the US military, The Arab Mind later inspired the modus operandi of the jailers of Abu Ghraib.
More surprisingly, respectable intellectuals, journalists and academics echoed its generalisations. Among these people was the historian Bernard Lewis, who assured Dick Cheney, one of his most devoted readers, that "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force". The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (who is on Sassaman's reading list) exhorted the US to act "just a little bit crazy", since "the more frightened our enemies are today, the fewer we will have to fight tomorrow". Accordingly, Richard Armitage, assistant secretary of state and a relative moderate among the Bush administration's hawks, told Pakistani diplomats that the US would bomb their country "back to the stone age" if it did not withdraw its support for the Taliban.
The idea that the natives would recognise superior firepower when they saw it seemed to be validated by Pakistani acquiescence, followed by the Taliban's swift capitulation. Iraq was logically the next setting for shock-and-awe tactics - Donald Rumsfeld was complaining even before the aerial bombing of the Taliban had finished that Afghanistan had run out of targets. The Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein had to be disarmed to make the Middle East safe for democracy. But invading Iraq was also an image-making exercise - what Hannah Arendt, commenting on the absence of clear military goals in America's previous war of choice in Vietnam, described as the attempt by "a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth'".
Busy unleashing his awesome firepower on Iraq, Rumsfeld had no idea what to do after his streamlined army reached Baghdad, apart from letting stuff happen. Wiser in Battle, the memoir of the US lieutenant general Ricardo Sanchez (HarperCollins), reveals that, as the Iraqi resistance unexpectedly intensified, the defeat in Vietnam began to prey on Bush's mind, unravelling his syntax as he harangued his commanders in Iraq:
Kick ass! ... We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal ... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!
Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, describes in his book Fiasco (Penguin) how, after a mob ambushed and killed four American military contractors in Falluja, the commanders were ordered to "go in and clobber". Citing strategic and logistical reasons, the military chiefs pleaded for restraint, but they were overruled by the White House: the destruction of Falluja was as essential to the image-making exercise as the carpet-bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia.
The geopolitical consequences as well as the "collateral" damage of the exhibition of US might are succinctly outlined by the titles of recent books - The Forever War, Fiasco and Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos (Allen Lane). Rashid is clearly the most despairing among the journalists accompanying the march of folly, even though, as a Pakistani long accustomed to the pretensions and limits of US power in south Asia, he didn't start off with many illusions. His previous book described how a combination of selfish motives and reckless actions by the US facilitated the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Outsiders like me," he writes in Descent into Chaos, "found it remarkable that a US president could live in such an unreal world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning - all of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public."
The habitual deceivers are often, in the end, the most deceived. According to Rashid, Pervez Musharraf's regime in Pakistan may have pulled off one of the biggest swindles in recent history by persuading the Bush administration to part with $10bn in exchange for mostly empty promises of support for its "war on terror". Most Pakistanis feel a mix of contempt and distrust for the US, which abandoned their country after enlisting it in a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Confronted with a choice between regressing to the stone age and meeting crazy Uncle Sam's demands, Musharraf's regime adopted a policy of dissembling that the then foreign minister outlined as "First say yes, and later say but". Since 9/11, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's rogue spy agency, which has long considered Afghanistan as its backyard, has continued to provide sanctuary and military support for the Taliban while occasionally arresting some al-Qaida militants to appease Washington. Mullah Omar and the original Afghan Taliban Shura, Rashid claims, are serenely resident in Pakistan's borderlands, along with "a plethora of Asian and Arab terrorist groups who are now expanding their reach into Europe and the United States".
"I'm not," Bush said soon after 9/11, "going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." Hitting camels in the butt may have been more useful than disbursing $70m in bribes to warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom Rashid revealed in his previous book to be fond of driving tanks over his opponents. The US coaxed many of Afghanistan's old villains out of retirement to defeat the Taliban with minimum use of US troops, and then lost interest in the country.
Rashid believes that the US could have done more to help "nation-building" in Afghanistan or at least prop up Hamid Karzai, who last week was reduced to plaintively asking Mullah Omar to return to Afghanistan for the sake of "peace". But as Tariq Ali bluntly clarifies in his new book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Simon & Schuster), the post-9/11 project of "nation-building" in Afghanistan, which prioritised western interests over all others, was always doomed. It was "a top-down process", trying to create "an army constituted not to defend the nation but to impose order on its own people, on behalf of outside powers; a civil administration that will have no control over planning, health, education etc, all of which will be run by NGOs, whose employees will be far better paid than the locals, and answerable not to the population but to their overseas sponsors; and a government whose foreign policy is identical to Washington's."
American bombing raids, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, further unite fractious Afghans against foreign usurpers. Tariq Ali correctly prescribes scepticism against strategists and journalists who blame Pakistan for increasing attacks on western forces in Afghanistan while disregarding the fact that "many Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of Nato and the behaviour of its troops that they will support any opposition."
In Pakistan, too, public anger against the US is fuelled largely by the "knowledge that Washington has backed every military dictator who has squatted on top of the country". Contemptuously dismissing the alarmist cliché that jihadis are very close to getting their grubby fingers on the country's nuclear button, Ali points to the deep and persistent unpopularity of religious parties in Pakistan. The jihadis would only get that far, he asserts, if "the army wanted them to", which is virtually impossible unless, as may be beginning to happen now, American assaults on the country's hard-won sovereignty causes deep ideological ruptures within the country's strongest institution.
Filkins doesn't set out any future trajectory for the venture in Iraq. He reported from the country for the New York Times, but the first-person narrator of The Forever War is less a journalist than an existential hero, eloquent with the pathos of Sisyphean striving, impotence and failure. Composed in short, often lyrical, sections, Filkins's book often seems aimed at literary posterity, where it would join such modern classics of war literature as Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine and Michael Herr's Dispatches
Unlike the war in Vietnam, which exercised some of the keenest literary sensibilities in America (Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag), the entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced, so far at least, a meagre crop of quality journalism...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
We are winning in Iraq, John McCain declared in the presidential debate last week, "and we will come home with victory and with honour." This may sound like some perfunctory keep-the-pecker-up stuff from a former military man. But the Republican candidate, who believes that the "surge" has succeeded in Iraq, also possesses the fanatical conviction that heavier bombing and more ground troops could have saved the United States from disgrace in Vietnam.
On the same occasion, Barack Obama, who seems more aware of the costs of American honour to the American economy, claimed he would divert troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and, if necessary, order them to assault "safe havens" for terrorists in Pakistan's wild west. Both candidates sought the imprimatur of Henry Kissinger, the co-alchemist, with Richard Nixon, of the "peace with honour" formula in Vietnam, which turned out to include the destruction of neighbouring Cambodia.
An ominously similar escalation of the "war on terror" has ensured that the next American president will receive a septic chalice from George Bush in January 2009. In July, Bush sanctioned raids into Pakistan, pre-empting Obama's tough-sounding strategy of widening the war in Afghanistan, where resurgent Taliban this year account for Nato's highest death toll since 2001. Pakistan's army chief vowed to defend his country "at all costs", and his soldiers now clash with US troops almost daily. Obscured by the American economy's slow-motion train wreck, the war on terror has already stumbled into its most treacherous phase with the invasion of fiercely nationalistic and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Most of the recent disasters of geopolitical machismo could have been foretold. In late 2003, when the occupation of Iraq was beginning to go badly wrong, the American journalist Dexter Filkins came across a village called Abu Hishma in the Sunni triangle. Rubble-strewn and "encased in razor wire", Abu Hishma resembled, Filkins writes in The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (Bodley Head), "a town in the West Bank". Its terrified residents told him about the local American commander Nathan Sassaman, who bulldozed homes and called in air strikes, and who was fond of proclaiming that "there is no God - I am god here".
Sassaman sounds like something out of Conrad, the white man in the tropics driven to lunacy by absolute power and extreme isolation. But, according to Filkins, he is a bright man, even the "embodiment of the best that America could offer" in his desire to bring democracy to Iraqis. A serious reader of history and anthropology, Sassaman, along with fellow officers, is very impressed by a book entitled The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai, a Hungarian-Israeli-American academic. Apparently, it makes clear that the "only thing" the denizens of the Middle East "understand is force - force, pride and saving face", and Sassaman believes that, "with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects ... we can convince these people that we are here to help them".
Filkins doesn't mention that The Arab Mind, originally published in 1973, was the bible of neocon commentators in Washington and New York cheerleading the Bush administration's audacious venture: what Condoleezza Rice in the new book by Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 (Simon & Schuster), describes as shifting the "epicentre of American power" from Europe, where it had rested since the second world war, to the Middle East. Widely read in the US military, The Arab Mind later inspired the modus operandi of the jailers of Abu Ghraib.
More surprisingly, respectable intellectuals, journalists and academics echoed its generalisations. Among these people was the historian Bernard Lewis, who assured Dick Cheney, one of his most devoted readers, that "in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force". The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (who is on Sassaman's reading list) exhorted the US to act "just a little bit crazy", since "the more frightened our enemies are today, the fewer we will have to fight tomorrow". Accordingly, Richard Armitage, assistant secretary of state and a relative moderate among the Bush administration's hawks, told Pakistani diplomats that the US would bomb their country "back to the stone age" if it did not withdraw its support for the Taliban.
The idea that the natives would recognise superior firepower when they saw it seemed to be validated by Pakistani acquiescence, followed by the Taliban's swift capitulation. Iraq was logically the next setting for shock-and-awe tactics - Donald Rumsfeld was complaining even before the aerial bombing of the Taliban had finished that Afghanistan had run out of targets. The Bush administration claimed that Saddam Hussein had to be disarmed to make the Middle East safe for democracy. But invading Iraq was also an image-making exercise - what Hannah Arendt, commenting on the absence of clear military goals in America's previous war of choice in Vietnam, described as the attempt by "a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed 'the mightiest power on earth'".
Busy unleashing his awesome firepower on Iraq, Rumsfeld had no idea what to do after his streamlined army reached Baghdad, apart from letting stuff happen. Wiser in Battle, the memoir of the US lieutenant general Ricardo Sanchez (HarperCollins), reveals that, as the Iraqi resistance unexpectedly intensified, the defeat in Vietnam began to prey on Bush's mind, unravelling his syntax as he harangued his commanders in Iraq:
Kick ass! ... We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal ... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!
Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent, describes in his book Fiasco (Penguin) how, after a mob ambushed and killed four American military contractors in Falluja, the commanders were ordered to "go in and clobber". Citing strategic and logistical reasons, the military chiefs pleaded for restraint, but they were overruled by the White House: the destruction of Falluja was as essential to the image-making exercise as the carpet-bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia.
The geopolitical consequences as well as the "collateral" damage of the exhibition of US might are succinctly outlined by the titles of recent books - The Forever War, Fiasco and Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos (Allen Lane). Rashid is clearly the most despairing among the journalists accompanying the march of folly, even though, as a Pakistani long accustomed to the pretensions and limits of US power in south Asia, he didn't start off with many illusions. His previous book described how a combination of selfish motives and reckless actions by the US facilitated the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Outsiders like me," he writes in Descent into Chaos, "found it remarkable that a US president could live in such an unreal world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning - all of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public."
The habitual deceivers are often, in the end, the most deceived. According to Rashid, Pervez Musharraf's regime in Pakistan may have pulled off one of the biggest swindles in recent history by persuading the Bush administration to part with $10bn in exchange for mostly empty promises of support for its "war on terror". Most Pakistanis feel a mix of contempt and distrust for the US, which abandoned their country after enlisting it in a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Confronted with a choice between regressing to the stone age and meeting crazy Uncle Sam's demands, Musharraf's regime adopted a policy of dissembling that the then foreign minister outlined as "First say yes, and later say but". Since 9/11, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's rogue spy agency, which has long considered Afghanistan as its backyard, has continued to provide sanctuary and military support for the Taliban while occasionally arresting some al-Qaida militants to appease Washington. Mullah Omar and the original Afghan Taliban Shura, Rashid claims, are serenely resident in Pakistan's borderlands, along with "a plethora of Asian and Arab terrorist groups who are now expanding their reach into Europe and the United States".
"I'm not," Bush said soon after 9/11, "going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." Hitting camels in the butt may have been more useful than disbursing $70m in bribes to warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, whom Rashid revealed in his previous book to be fond of driving tanks over his opponents. The US coaxed many of Afghanistan's old villains out of retirement to defeat the Taliban with minimum use of US troops, and then lost interest in the country.
Rashid believes that the US could have done more to help "nation-building" in Afghanistan or at least prop up Hamid Karzai, who last week was reduced to plaintively asking Mullah Omar to return to Afghanistan for the sake of "peace". But as Tariq Ali bluntly clarifies in his new book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Simon & Schuster), the post-9/11 project of "nation-building" in Afghanistan, which prioritised western interests over all others, was always doomed. It was "a top-down process", trying to create "an army constituted not to defend the nation but to impose order on its own people, on behalf of outside powers; a civil administration that will have no control over planning, health, education etc, all of which will be run by NGOs, whose employees will be far better paid than the locals, and answerable not to the population but to their overseas sponsors; and a government whose foreign policy is identical to Washington's."
American bombing raids, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, further unite fractious Afghans against foreign usurpers. Tariq Ali correctly prescribes scepticism against strategists and journalists who blame Pakistan for increasing attacks on western forces in Afghanistan while disregarding the fact that "many Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of Nato and the behaviour of its troops that they will support any opposition."
In Pakistan, too, public anger against the US is fuelled largely by the "knowledge that Washington has backed every military dictator who has squatted on top of the country". Contemptuously dismissing the alarmist cliché that jihadis are very close to getting their grubby fingers on the country's nuclear button, Ali points to the deep and persistent unpopularity of religious parties in Pakistan. The jihadis would only get that far, he asserts, if "the army wanted them to", which is virtually impossible unless, as may be beginning to happen now, American assaults on the country's hard-won sovereignty causes deep ideological ruptures within the country's strongest institution.
Filkins doesn't set out any future trajectory for the venture in Iraq. He reported from the country for the New York Times, but the first-person narrator of The Forever War is less a journalist than an existential hero, eloquent with the pathos of Sisyphean striving, impotence and failure. Composed in short, often lyrical, sections, Filkins's book often seems aimed at literary posterity, where it would join such modern classics of war literature as Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine and Michael Herr's Dispatches
Unlike the war in Vietnam, which exercised some of the keenest literary sensibilities in America (Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag), the entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced, so far at least, a meagre crop of quality journalism...