Blasting Our Way to Peace The West's "victory" is a defeat for civilisation
November 16, 2001
By George Monbiot

The armchair warriors have proved no more merciful in victory than the
Northern Alliance. Yesterday's Sun turned over two pages to an editorial
titled "Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong ... the fools who said
Allies faced disaster".

Christopher Hitchens raised the moral and intellectual tone of the debate in
the Guardian yesterday with this lofty sentiment: "Well ha, ha, ha and yah,
boo. It was ... obvious that defeat was impossible". Such magnanimity
suggests to me that it is not Afghanistan which we have bombed into the
Stone Age, but ourselves.

But almost everyone now agrees that this is the end of history, all over
again. The sceptics have been routed as swiftly as the Taliban. George Bush
and Tony Blair, with the help of their "daisy cutters" and cluster bombs,
have ushered in a new, new world order, the long awaited golden age of
democracy. But have the warriors of the West, both actual and virtual,
really won? And if so, what precisely is the prize?

There's no question that the advance of the Northern Alliance is a
remarkable turnaround, which took the hawks as well as the doves by
surprise. All of us -- warriors and sceptics -- overestimated the military
difficulties of capturing Kabul. But the Telegraph's repetition of Mrs
Thatcher's injunction -- "just rejoice, rejoice" -- may prove to be a little
premature.

It would be rather easier to measure the success of the West's war aims if
those aims had not shifted with every presidential announcement. But a few
key questions may help us to determine how much the B52s have achieved. The
first and most obvious is: will the advance of the Northern Alliance lead to
the overthrow of the barbarous Taliban? The answer is, almost certainly,
yes; though they may persist as a guerilla force.

The question this then begs is will it improve the lives of the Afghan
people? Almost everyone appears to believe that it will. But we should be
foolish to forget that just five years ago both Afghans and western
diplomats welcomed the Taliban's capture of Kabul, as it relieved the
inhabitants of the murderous dominion of the men who now run the Northern
Alliance.

Yesterday the Telegraph claimed that the NA's "fearful violence" towards
Arab and Pakistani soldiers "is a shocking reminder of the fact that bin
Laden's zealots have been a hated army of occupation." Well, perhaps. But it
is also a shocking reminder of the fact that the Northern Alliance can be
just as brutal as the hated regime it has displaced. To the claim Polly
Toynbee made on these pages yesterday that "nothing could be worse" than the
Taliban, one can only respond: don't tempt fate.

The Alliance's willingness to cooperate with western plans for Afghanistan
is also questionable. Four days ago, we were told that its soldiers had been
persuaded not to advance on Kabul, and this was judged a victory for the
West. Now they have taken Kabul, and this too is hailed as a victory for the
West. That the military action has not gone according to plan, in other
words, is now presented as a vindication of the plan.

Given that the Northern Alliance has so far shown little interest in doing
as the West requests, why should we assume it would be prepared to abandon
its military gains for a "broad-based" political settlement? Countless
comparisons to the outcome in Serbia have been made, as if this somehow
offers proof that armed intervention leads inexorably to democracy.

But Serbia, unlike Afghanistan, already possessed a mature democracy
movement. Where is the Afghan equivalent? Where are the moderate leaders
with which the West wants to replace the Taliban? Who among all the named
credible candidates does not have blood on his hands? And will the fiercely
independent Afghans accept the writ of the United Nations? Or, given that
both Russia and the West have strategic and energy interests in central
Asia, will it come to be seen in the same light as the Soviet occupation?

Will the advance of the Northern Alliance save people who are at risk of
famine in Afghanistan? It will almost certainly save some of them. Much more
aid is now entering the areas which have come under Northern Alliance
control, though, like the retreating Taliban, the alliance fighters have
been looting supplies and commandeering UN vehicles.

But for thousands the help is likely to have arrived too late. The
interruption of supplies during the eight weeks in which they should have
been stockpiled for the winter means that many of those living in the
valleys made inaccessible by snow will die before they can be reached.

Will it lead to the capture or killing of Osama Bin Laden? Possibly. Will it
free the world from terrorism? No. Will it deliver regional or global
security? Probably not. The Northern Alliance's gains represented a bounty
for Russia and a blow for Pakistan, whose government is now facing a far
graver test in victory than it would have faced in defeat. Even in Britain,
a new poll by the Today programme shows, 80% of Muslims are opposed to the
West's war.

But, as well as asking what this war has done to Asia, we must also ask what
it has done to us. And here, it seems to me, the bugles sounding victory for
civilised values are also sounding retreat.

The first and most obvious loss is our willing repudiation of the very basis
of civilisation: human rights. The new terrorism bills in America and
Britain have required the suspension of both the US constitution and the
UK's human rights act. Perhaps it's because I'm writing this from inside a
police cell in North Wales, but it seems to me that in trying to shut the
terrorists out, we have merely imprisoned ourselves.

One of the last smart bombs deployed in Kabul destroyed the offices of Al
Jazeera, the only truly independent major television station in the Arab
world.

Al Jazeera has consistently provided a voice for Muslims opposed to US
military intervention in Afghanistan, as well as airing Bin Laden's
inflammatory videos. A few weeks ago Colin Powell sought to persuade the
emir of Qatar to close it down, without success. Its destruction suggests
that free speech and dissent have now joined terrorism as the business of
"evil-doers".

The second loss to the West is the triumph of war-war over jaw-jaw. The
partial victory in Afghanistan appears to have convinced both governments
and commentators that we can blast our way to world peace. No serious
attempt was made, before the bombing began, to differentiate between just
and unjust war.

Justice in war, as almost every philosopher since Thomas Aquinas agrees,
requires that the peaceful alternatives should first have been exhausted.
There is plenty to suggest that the initial aim -- to capture Bin Laden --
could have been achieved without recourse to arms. The Taliban twice offered
to hand him over on receipt of evidence pointing to his guilt: a much lower
barrier to extradition than western governments would have raised.

We appear to have made no attempt to discover whether or not they could have
been taken at their word. Neither was a serious attempt made to remove the
Taliban by diplomatic pressure exercised through Pakistan. Now justice
appears to have been redefined as success, and war as the only route to
peace.

This new triumphalism is sliding effortlessly into a new imperialism. It
conflates armed and ethical success, mastery and morality. If this is a
victory for civilisation, I would hate to see what defeat looks like.