💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › noam-chomsky-the-war-in-afghanistan.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:00:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The War In Afghanistan
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: February 1, 2002
Language: en
Topics: Afghanistan, US foreign interventions
Source: Retrieved on 2nd July 2021 from https://chomsky.info/20020201/

Noam Chomsky

The War In Afghanistan

The threat of international terrorism is surely severe. The horrendous

events of September 11 had perhaps the most devastating instant human

toll on record, outside of war. The word “instant” should not be

overlooked; regrettably, the crime is far from unusual in the annals of

violence that falls short of war. The death toll may easily have doubled

or more within a few weeks, as miserable Afghans fled—to nowhere—under

the threat of bombing, and desperately-needed food supplies were

disrupted; and there were credible warnings of much worse to come.

The costs to Afghan civilians can only be guessed, but we do know the

projections on which policy decisions and commentary were based, a

matter of utmost significance. As a matter of simple logic, it is these

projections that provide the grounds for any moral evaluation of

planning and commentary, or any judgment of appeals to “just war”

arguments; and crucially, for any rational assessment of what may lie

ahead.

Even before September 11, the UN estimated that millions were being

sustained, barely, by international food aid. On September 16, the

national press reported that Washington had “demanded [from Pakistan]

the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other

supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population.” There was no detectable

reaction in the U.S. or Europe to this demand to impose massive

starvation; the plain meaning of the words. In subsequent weeks, the

world’s leading newspaper reported that “The threat of military strikes

forced the removal of international aid workers, crippling assistance

programs”; refugees reaching Pakistan “after arduous journeys from

Afghanistan are describing scenes of desperation and fear at home as the

threat of American-led military attacks turns their long-running misery

into a potential catastrophe.” “The country was on a lifeline,” one

evacuated aid worker reported, “and we just cut the line.” “It’s as if a

mass grave has been dug behind millions of people,” an evacuated

emergency officer for Christian Aid informed the press: “We can drag

them back from it or push them in. We could be looking at millions of

deaths.”

The UN World Food Program and others were able to resume some food

shipments in early October, but were forced to suspend deliveries and

distribution when the bombing began on October 7, resuming them later at

a much lower pace. A spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for

Refugees warned that “We are facing a humanitarian crisis of epic

proportions in Afghanistan with 7.5 million short of food and at risk of

starvation,” while aid agencies leveled “scathing” condemnations of U.S.

air drops that are barely concealed “propaganda tools” and may cause

more harm than benefit, they warned.

A very careful reader of the national press could discover the estimate

by the UN that “7.5 million Afghans will need food over the winter—2.5

million more than on September 11,” a 50 percent increase as a result of

the threat of bombing, then the actuality. In other words, Western

civilization was basing its plans on the assumption that they might lead

to the death of several million innocent civilians—not Taliban, whatever

one thinks of the legitimacy of slaughtering Taliban recruits and

supporters, but their victims. Meanwhile its leader, on the same day,

once again dismissed with contempt offers of negotiation for extradition

of the suspected culprit and the request for some credible evidence to

substantiate the demands for capitulation. The UN Special Rapporteur on

the Right to Food pleaded with the U.S. to end the bombing that was

putting “the lives of millions of civilians at risk,” renewing the

appeal of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who

warned of a Rwanda-style catastrophe. Both appeals were rejected, as

were those of the major aid and relief agencies. And virtually

unreported.

In late September, the UN Food And Agricultural Organization warned that

over 7 million people were facing a crisis that could lead to widespread

starvation if military action were initiated, with a likely

“humanitarian catastrophe” unless aid were immediately resumed and the

threat of military action terminated. After bombing began, the FAO

advised that it had disrupted planting that provides 80 percent of the

country’s grain supplies, so that the effects next year are expected to

be even more severe. All ignored.

These unreported appeals happened to coincide with World Food Day, which

was also ignored, along with the charge by the UN Special Rapporteur

that the rich and powerful easily have the means, though not the will,

to overcome the “silent genocide” of mass starvation in much of the

world.

Let us return briefly to the point of logic: ethical judgments and

rational evaluation of what may lie ahead are grounded in the

presuppositions of planning and commentary. An entirely separate matter,

with no bearing on such judgments, is the accuracy of the projections on

which planning and commentary were based. By year’s end, there were

hopes that unprecedented deliveries of food in December might

“dramatically” revise the expectations at the time when planning was

undertaken and implemented, and evaluated in commentary: that these

actions were likely to drive millions over the edge of starvation. Very

likely, the facts will never be known, by virtue of a guiding principle

of intellectual culture: We must devote enormous energy to exposing the

crimes of official enemies, properly counting not only those literally

killed but also those who die as a consequence of policy choices; but we

must take scrupulous care to avoid this practice in the case of our own

crimes, on the rare occasions when they are investigated at all.

Observance of the principle is all too well documented. It will be a

welcome surprise if the current case turns out differently.

Another elementary point might also be mentioned. The success of

violence evidently has no bearing on moral judgment with regard to its

goals. In the present case, it seemed clear from the outset that the

reigning superpower could easily demolish any Afghan resistance. My own

view, for what it is worth, was that U.S. campaigns should not be too

casually compared to the failed Russian invasion of the 1980s. The

Russians were facing a major army of perhaps 100,000 people or more,

organized, trained, and heavily armed by the CIA and its associates. The

U.S. is facing a ragtag force in a country that has already been

virtually destroyed by 20 years of horror, for which we bear no slight

share of responsibility. The Taliban forces, such as they are, might

quickly collapse except for a small hardened core.

To my surprise, the dominant judgment—even after weeks of carpet bombing

and resort to virtually every available device short of nuclear weapons

(“daisy cutters,” cluster bombs, etc.)—was confidence that the lessons

of the Russian failure should be heeded, that airstrikes would be

ineffective, and that a ground invasion would be necessary to achieve

the U.S. war aims of eliminating bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Removing the

Taliban regime was an afterthought. There had been no interest in this

before September 11, or even in the month that followed. A week after

the bombing began, the president reiterated that U.S. forces “would

attack Afghanistan ‘for as long as it takes’ to destroy the Qaeda

terrorist network of Osama bin Laden, but he offered to reconsider the

military assault on Afghanistan if the country’s ruling Taliban would

surrender Mr. bin Laden”; “If you cough him up and his people today,

then we’ll reconsider what we are doing to your country,” the president

declared: “You still have a second chance.”

When Taliban forces did finally succumb, after astonishing endurance,

opinions shifted to triumphalist proclamations and exultation over the

justice of our cause, now demonstrated by the success of overwhelming

force against defenseless opponents. Without researching the topic, I

suppose that Japanese and German commentary was similar after early

victories during World War II, and despite obvious dis-analogies, one

crucial conclusion carries over to the present case: the victory of arms

leaves the issues where they were, though the triumphalist cries of

vindication should serve as a warning for those who care about the

future.

Returning to the war, the airstrikes quickly turned cities into “ghost

towns,” the press reported, with electrical power and water supplies

destroyed, a form of biological warfare. The UN reported that 70 percent

of the population had fled Kandahar and Herat within two weeks, mostly

to the countryside, where in ordinary times 10–20 people, many of them

children, are killed or crippled daily by land mines. Those conditions

became much worse as a result of the bombing. UN mine-clearing

operations were halted, and unexploded U.S. ordnance, particularly the

lethal bomblets scattered by cluster bombs, add to the torture, and are

much harder to clear.

By late October, aid officials estimated that over a million had fled

their homes, including 80 percent of the population of Jalalabad, only a

“tiny fraction” able to cross the border, most scattering to the

countryside where there was little food or shelter or possibility of

delivering aid; appeals from aid agencies to suspend attacks to allow

delivery of supplies were again rejected by Blair, ignored by the U.S.

Months later, hundreds of thousands were reported to be starving in such

“forgotten camps” as Maslakh in the North, having fled from “mountainous

places to which the World Food Program was giving food aid but stopped

because of the bombing and now cannot be reached because the passes are

cut off”—and who knows how many in places that no journalists

found—though supplies were by then available and the primary factor

hampering delivery was lack of interest and will.

By early January, the reported death toll in Maslakh alone—near Herat,

therefore accessible to journalists—had risen to 100 a day, and aid

officials warned that the camp is “on the on the brink of an

Ethiopian-style humanitarian disaster” as the flight of refugees to the

camp continues to increase, an estimated three-fourths of its population

since September.

The destruction of lives is silent and mostly invisible, by choice; and

can easily remain forgotten, also by choice. An even sorrier sight is

denial—or worse, even ridicule—of the efforts to bring these tragedies

to light so that pressures can be mounted to relieve them, which should

be a very high priority whatever one thinks about what has happened.

By the year’s end, long after fighting ended, the occasional report

noted that “the delivery of food remains blocked or woefully

inadequate,” “a system for distributing food is still not in place,” and

even the main route to Uzbekistan “remains effectively closed to food

trucks” over two weeks after it was officially opened with much fanfare;

the same was true of the crucial artery from Pakistan to Kandahar, and

others were so harassed by armed militias that the World Food Program,

now with supplies available, still could not make deliveries, and had no

place for storage because “most warehouses were destroyed or looted

during the U.S. bombardment.”

A detailed year-end review found that the U.S. war “has returned to

power nearly all the same warlords who had misruled the country in the

days before the Taliban”; some Afghans see the resulting situation as

even “worse than it was before the Taliban came to power.” The Taliban

takeover of most of the country, with little combat, brought to an end a

period described by Afghan and international human rights activists as

“the blackest in the history of Afghanistan,” “the worst time in

Afghanistan’s history,” with vast destruction, mass rapes and other

atrocities, and tens of thousands killed. These were the years of rule

by warlords of the Northern Alliance and other Western favorites, such

as the murderous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the few who has not

reclaimed his fiefdom. There are indications that lessons have been

learned both in Afghanistan and the world beyond, and that the worst

will not recur, as everyone fervently hopes.

Signs were mixed, at year’s end. As anticipated, most of the population

was greatly relieved to see the end of the Taliban, one of the most

retrograde regimes in the world; and relieved that there was no quick

return to the atrocities of a decade earlier, as had been feared. The

new government in Kabul showed considerably more promise than most had

expected. The return of warlordism is a dangerous sign, as was the

announcement by the new justice minister that the basic structure of

sharia law as instituted by the Taliban would remain in force, though

“there will be some changes from the time of the Taliban. For example,

the Taliban used to hang the victim’s body in public for four days. We

will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes.” Judge Ahamat

Ullha Zarif added that some new location would be found for the regular

public executions, not the Sports Stadium. “Adulterers, both male and

female, would still be stoned to death, Zarif said, ‘but we will use

only small stones’,” so that those who confess might be able to run

away; others will be “stoned to death,” as before. The international

reaction will doubtless have a significant effect on the balance of

conflicting forces.

As the year ended, desperate peasants, mostly women, were returning to

the miserable labor of growing opium poppies so that their families can

survive, reversing the Taliban ban. The UN had reported in October that

poppy production had already “increased threefold in areas controlled by

the Northern Alliance,” whose warlords “have long been reputed to

control much of the processing and smuggling of opium” to Russia and the

West, an estimated 75 percent of the world’s heroin. The result of some

poor woman’s back-breaking labor is that “countless others thousands of

miles away from her home in eastern Afghanistan will suffer and die.”

Such consequences, and the devastating legacy of 20 years of brutal war

and atrocities, could be alleviated by an appropriate international

presence and well-designed programs of aid and reconstruction; were

honesty to prevail, they would be called “reparations,” at least from

Russia and the U.S., which share primary responsibility for the

disaster. The issue was addressed in a conference of the UN Development

Program, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank in Islamabad in late

November. Some guidelines were offered in a World Bank study that

focused on Afghanistan’s potential role in the development of the energy

resources of the region. The study concluded that Afghanistan has a

positive pre-war history of cost recovery for key infrastructure

services like electric power, and “green field” investment opportunities

in sectors like telecommunications, energy, and oil/gas pipelines. It is

extremely important that such services start out on the right track

during reconstruction. Options for private investment in infrastructure

should be actively pursued.

One may reasonably ask just whose needs are served by these priorities,

and what status they should have in reconstruction from the horrors of

the past two decades.

U.S. and British intellectual opinion, across the political spectrum,

assured us that only radical extremists can doubt that “this is

basically a just war.” Those who disagree can therefore be dismissed,

among them, for example, the 1,000 Afghan leaders who met in Peshawar in

late October in a U.S.-backed effort to lay the groundwork for a

post-Taliban regime led by the exiled King. They bitterly condemned the

U.S. war, which is “beating the donkey rather than the rider,” one

speaker said to unanimous agreement.

The extent to which anti-Taliban Afghan opinion was ignored is rather

striking—and not at all unusual; during the Gulf war, for example, Iraqi

dissidents were excluded from press and journals, apart from

“alternative media,” though they were readily accessible. Without

eliciting comment, Washington maintained its long- standing official

refusal to have any dealings with the Iraqi opposition even well after

the war ended. In the present case, Afghan opinion is not as easily

assessed, but the task would not have been impossible, and the issue is

of such evident significance that it merits at least a few comments.

We might begin with the gathering of Afghan leaders in Peshawar, some

exiles, some who trekked across the border from within Afghanistan, all

committed to overthrowing the Taliban regime. It was “a rare display of

unity among tribal elders, Islamic scholars, fractious politicians, and

former guerrilla commanders,” the New York Times reported. They

unanimously “urged the U.S. to stop the air raids,” appealed to the

international media to call for an end to the “bombing of innocent

people,” and “demanded an end to the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.” They

urged that other means be adopted to overthrow the hated Taliban regime,

a goal they believed could be achieved without slaughter and

destruction.

Reported, but dismissed without further comment.

A similar message was conveyed by Afghan opposition leader Abdul Haq,

who condemned the air attacks as a “terrible mistake.” Highly regarded

in Washington, Abdul Haq was considered to be “perhaps the most

important leader of anti-Taliban opposition among Afghans of Pashtun

nationality based in Pakistan.” His advice was to “avoid bloodshed as

much as possible”; instead of bombing, “we should undermine the central

leadership, which is a very small and closed group and which is also the

only thing which holds them all together. If they are destroyed, every

Taliban fighter will pick up his gun and his blanket and disappear back

home, and that will be the end of the Taliban,” an assessment that seems

rather plausible in the light of subsequent events.

Several weeks later, Abdul Haq entered Afghanistan, apparently without

U.S. support, and was captured and killed. As he was undertaking this

mission “to create a revolt within the Taliban,” he criticized the U.S.

for refusing to aid him and others in such endeavors, and condemned the

bombing as “a big setback for these efforts.” He reported contacts with

second-level Taliban commanders and ex-Mujahidin tribal elders, and

discussed how further efforts could proceed, calling on the U.S. to

assist them with funding and other support instead of undermining them

with bombs.

The U.S., Abdul Haq said, “is trying to show its muscle, score a victory

and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of

the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don’t like that.

Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics,

but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the 1980s,

armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and the CIA. And

the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all

these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now,

when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did

this, it punishes the Afghans.”

We can also look elsewhere for enlightenment about Afghan opinions. A

beneficial consequence of the latest Afghan war is that it elicited some

belated concern about the fate of women in Afghanistan, even reaching

the First Lady. Perhaps it will be followed some day by concern for the

plight of women elsewhere in Central and South Asia, which,

unfortunately, is often not very different from life under the Taliban,

including the most vibrant democracies. Of course, no sane person

advocates foreign military intervention to rectify these and other

injustices. The problems are severe, but should be dealt with from

within, with assistance from outsiders if it is constructive and honest.

Since the harsh treatment of women in Afghanistan has at last gained

some well-deserved attention, one might expect that attitudes of Afghan

women towards policy options should be a primary concern. A natural

starting point for an inquiry is Afghanistan’s “oldest political and

humanitarian organisation,” RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women

of Afghanistan), which has been “foremost in the struggle” for women’s

rights since its formation in 1977. RAWA’s leader was assassinated by

Afghan collaborators with the Russians in 1987, but they continued their

work within Afghanistan at risk of death, and in exile nearby.

RAWA has been quite outspoken. Thus, a week after the bombing began,

RAWA issued a public statement entitled: “Taliban should be overthrown

by the uprising of Afghan nation.” It continued as follows: “Again, due

to the treason of fundamentalist hangmen, our people have been caught in

the claws of the monster of a vast war and destruction. America, by

forming an international coalition against Osama and his

Taliban-collaborators and in retaliation for the 11^(th) September

terrorist attacks, has launched a vast aggression on our country… what

we have witnessed for the past seven days leaves no doubt that this

invasion will shed the blood of numerous women, men, children, young and

old of our country.”

The statement called for “the eradication of the plague of Taliban and

Al Qaeda” by “an overall uprising” of the Afghan people themselves,

which alone “can prevent the repetition and recurrence of the

catastrophe that has befallen our country….”

In another declaration on November 25, at a demonstration of women’s

organizations in Islamabad on the International Day for the Elimination

of Violence against Women, RAWA condemned the U.S./Russian-backed

Northern Alliance for a “record of human rights violations as bad as

that of the Taliban’s,” and called on the UN to “help Afghanistan, not

the Northern Alliance.” RAWA issued similar warnings at the national

conference of the All India Democratic Women’s Association on the same

days.

Also ignored.

One might note that this is hardly the first time that the concerns of

advocates of women’s rights in Afghanistan have been dismissed. Thus, in

1988 the UNDP senior adviser on women’s rights in Afghanistan warned

that the “great advances” in women’s rights she had witnessed there were

being imperilled by the “ascendant fundamentalism” of the U.S.-backed

radical Islamists. Her report was submitted to the New York Times and

Washington Post, but not published; and her account of how the U.S.

“contributed handsomely to the suffering of Afghan women” remains

unknown.

Perhaps it is right to ignore Afghans who have been struggling for

freedom and women’s rights for many years, and to assign responsibility

for their country’s future to foreigners whose record in this regard is

less than distinguished. Perhaps, but it does not seem entirely obvious.

The issue of “just war” should not be confused with a wholly different

question: Should the perpetrators of the atrocities of September 11 be

punished for their crimes—“crimes against humanity,” as they were called

by Robert Fisk, Mary Robinson, and others. On this there is virtually

unanimous agreement—though, notoriously, the principles do not extend to

the agents of even far worse crimes who are protected by power and

wealth. The question is how to proceed.

The approach favored by Afghans who were ignored had considerable

support in much of the world. Many in the South would surely have

endorsed the recommendations of the UN representative of the Arab

Women’s Solidarity Association: “providing the Taliban with evidence (as

it has requested) that links bin Laden to the September 11 attacks,

employing diplomatic pressures to extradite him, and prosecuting

terrorists through international tribunals,” and generally adhering to

international law, following precedents that exist even in much more

severe cases of international terrorism. Adherence to international law

had scattered support in the West as well, including the preeminent

Anglo-American military historian Michael Howard, who delivered a

“scathing attack” on the bombardment, calling instead for an

international “police operation” and international court rather than

“trying to eradicate cancer cells with a blow torch.”

Washington’s refusal to call for extradition of the suspected criminals,

or to provide the evidence that was requested, was entirely open, and

generally approved. Its own refusal to extradite criminals remains

effectively secret, however. There has been debate over whether U.S.

military actions in Afghanistan were authorized under ambiguous Security

Council resolutions, but it avoids the central issue: Washington plainly

did not want Security Council authorization, which it surely could have

obtained, clearly and unambiguously. Since it lost its virtual monopoly

over UN decisions, the U.S. has been far in the lead in vetoes, Britain

second, France a distant third, but none of these powers would have

opposed a U.S.-sponsored resolution. Nor would Russia or China, eager to

gain U.S. authorization for their own atrocities and repression (in

Chechnya and western China, particularly). But Washington insisted on

not obtaining Security Council authorization, which would entail that

there is some higher authority to which it should defer. Systems of

power resist that principle if they are strong enough to do so. There is

even a name for that stance in the literature of diplomacy and

international affairs scholarship: establishing “credibility,” a

justification commonly offered for the threat or use of force. While

understandable, and conventional, that stance also has lessons

concerning the likely future, even more so because of the elite support

that it receives, openly or indirectly.