[Peace-discuss] Farmers' market flyer #1

[C. G. Estabrook]

_*Was War the Only Answer to 9/11?*_



This is the 10th anniversary of the horrendous atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, 
which, it is commonly held, changed the world.


The impact of the attacks is not in doubt. Just keeping to western and central 
Asia: *Afghanistan is barely surviving, Iraq has been devastated, and Pakistan 
is edging closer to a disaster that could be catastrophic.*


On May 1, 2011, the presumed mastermind of the crime, Osama bin Laden, was 
assassinated in Pakistan. The most immediate significant consequences have also 
occurred in Pakistan. There has been much discussion of Washington's anger that 
Pakistan didn't turn over bin Laden. Less has been said about the fury among 
Pakistanis that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political 
assassination. Anti-American fervor had already intensified in Pakistan, and 
these events have stoked it further.


One of the leading specialists on Pakistan, British military historian Anatol 
Lieven, wrote in /The National Interest/ in February that the war in Afghanistan 
is "destabilizing and radicalizing Pakistan, risking a geopolitical catastrophe 
for the United States -- and the world -- which would dwarf anything that could 
possibly occur in Afghanistan."


At every level of society, Lieven writes, Pakistanis overwhelmingly sympathize 
with the Afghan Taliban, not because they like them but because "the Taliban are 
seen as a legitimate force of resistance against an alien occupation of the 
country," much as the Afghan mujahedeen were perceived when they resisted the 
Russian occupation in the 1980s.


These feelings are shared by Pakistan's military leaders, who bitterly resent 
U.S. pressures to sacrifice themselves in Washington's war against the Taliban. 
Further bitterness comes from the terror attacks (drone warfare) by the U.S. 
within Pakistan, the frequency of which was sharply accelerated by President 
Obama; and from U.S. demands that the Pakistani army carry Washington's war into 
tribal areas of Pakistan that had been pretty much left on their own, even under 
British rule.


The military is the stable institution in Pakistan, holding the country 
together. U.S. actions might "provoke a mutiny of parts of the military," Lieven 
writes, in which case "the Pakistani state would collapse very quickly indeed, 
with all the disasters that this would entail."


The potential disasters are drastically heightened by Pakistan's huge, rapidly 
growing nuclear weapons arsenal, and by the country's substantial jihadi movement.


Both of these are legacies of the Reagan administration. Reagan officials 
pretended they did not know that Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of Pakistan's 
military dictators and a Washington favorite, was developing nuclear weapons and 
carrying out a program of radical Islamization of Pakistan with Saudi funding.


The catastrophe lurking in the background is that these two legacies might 
combine, with fissile materials leaking into the hands of jihadis. Thus we might 
see nuclear weapons, most likely "dirty bombs," exploding in London and New York.


Lieven summarizes: "U.S. and British soldiers are in effect dying in Afghanistan 
in order to make the world more dangerous for American and British peoples."


Surely Washington understands that U.S. operations in what has been christened 
"Afpak" -- Afghanistan-Pakistan -- might destabilize and radicalize Pakistan.


The most significant WikiLeaks documents to have been released so far are the 
cables from U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad, who supports U.S. 
actions in Afpak but warns that they "risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, 
alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a 
broader governance crisis in Pakistan."


Patterson writes of the possibility that "someone working in [Pakistani 
government] facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to 
eventually make a weapon," a danger enhanced by "the vulnerability of weapons in 
transit."


A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won some major successes in 
his war against the United States.


As Eric S. Margolis writes in /The American Conservative/ in May, "[bin Laden] 
repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world 
and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but 
expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them."


That Washington seemed bent on fulfilling bin Laden's wishes was evident 
immediately after the 9/11 attacks.


In his 2004 book "Imperial Hubris," Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA analyst who 
had tracked Osama bin Laden since 1996, explains: "Bin Laden has been precise in 
telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically 
alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world," and largely achieved 
his goal.


He continues: "U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the 
Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial 
but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to 
conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only 
indispensable ally." And arguably remains so, even after his death.


The succession of horrors across the past decade leads to the question: /Was 
there an alternative to the West's response to the 9/11 attacks?/


The jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been 
split and undermined after 9/11, if the "crime against humanity," as the attacks 
were rightly called, had been approached as a crime, with an international 
operation to apprehend the suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no 
such idea was even considered in the rush to war. It is worth adding that bin 
Laden was condemned in much of the Arab world for his part in the attacks.


By the time of his death, bin Laden had long been a fading presence, and in the 
previous months was eclipsed by the Arab Spring. His significance in the Arab 
world is captured by the headline in a /New York Times/ article by Middle East 
specialist Gilles Kepel: "Bin Laden Was Dead Already."


That headline might have been dated far earlier, had the U.S. not mobilized the 
jihadi movement with retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq.


Within the jihadi movement, bin Laden was doubtless a venerated symbol but 
apparently didn't play much more of a role for al-Qaida, this "network of 
networks," as analysts call it, which undertake mostly independent operations.


Even the most obvious and elementary facts about the decade lead to bleak 
reflections when we consider 9/11 and its consequences, and what they portend 
for the future.



--Noam Chomsky


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