The Americans were going to bomb Viet Nam back into the Stone Age;the very same threat is now being applied to Afghanistan,
because the
Taliban have given hospitality and protection to Osama Bin Laden.
An Afghan commentator last week reflected on this phrase and the
situation in Afghanistan: ‘Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Let’s now dwell on Bin Laden and his followers. One Palestinian quoted on the radio said he felt sadness at the loss of life last Tuesday but had gladness in his heart. An American commentator was furious at the charge that
America deserved it, pointing out that no other nation has been as
generous in sending aid, planes and supplies all over the world. It turns out that America supported the Taliban and
worked constructively with Bin Laden as part of their support for the
mujahideen in the closing years of the Soviet regime, since it suited
them to have lots of Soviet soldiers tied down in a bitter war on its
southern flank. In doing this, however, they
brought together Muslim fundamentalists from fifty
countries, trained
and armed them and gave them military experience in the field that they
would have been unlikely to get elsewhere. Then
they dispersed, and lo and behold there are people associated with Bin
Laden’s group, called al-Queda or The Base in 30 or 40 countries. Bin Laden himself grew up in Saudi Arabia, where his
father grew fabulously rich from beginning as a dock labourer by
getting contracts to rebuild the holiest places in Mecca and Medina.
The boy was the seventeenth of the more than fifty children of this
construction magnate and had a very strictly orthodox Muslim upbringing. He has never been anywhere outside Muslim countries. He moved back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan and was in exile for a time in Sudan. It was from this point that he set out to destroy the American empire.
For example, the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998,
in which 224 people died, occurred on the anniversary of the day
American troops landed in Saudi Arabia.
You might think this a particularly fastidious origin of the recent
atrocity, but you have to put it together with the disaffection of
millions of Arabs in the Middle East, whose grievances extend from
hating to see their natural resources and much of their wealth go to
the metropolitan countries, to seeing their culture sullied by the
world wide influence of American cinema, music, fashion and so on. Interviews with Bin Laden make it clear that these are felt as profound insults by Muslims. Americans just don’t ‘get it’. As I heard on the radio in recent days, ‘These are desperate, angry men’.
They are not mad, and plenty of them are willing to undertake any
attack on America, Britain and Israel, including suicide bombing, of
which seventy per cent of Palestinians approve.
Americans brag about being the cradle of democracy while they support
less than democratic regimes in the Middle East, not the least of which
is Saudi Arabia. It is the height of naiveté and false consciousness
for Americans to say, as many have in recent days, ‘The forces of evil
have chosen to destroy us, because we are good’ (CNN 13.9.01).
There were many references to ‘attacks on freedom and democracy’,something which few people in the Middle East have experienced much of,
for example the Palestinian refugees who have had no home for over
fifty years.There is no end to the list of justifications for hating the Americans.
They do not justify what was done last Tuesday, but they certainly help
to explain it and to make it clear that military acts against
terrorist and those who support them will not make the problem go away.