THAT FATEFUL CHOICE
by
CHRIS TOENSING
______________________________________
Chris Toensing is an editor at MERIP
(Middle East Research and Information Project). He and the editors
wrote and published "That Fateful Choice" in the May
issue.
When
19 al-Qaeda hijackers attacked New York and Washington on September
11, 2001, the United States faced a strategic dilemma that was
unique in magnitude, but not in kind. Terrorists had killed
numerous civilians before, in the US and elsewhere, with and
without state sponsorship. Al-Qaeda was not the first non-state
actor to present no coherent demands alongside its propaganda
of the deed or to have no single fixed address. Nor were Americans
the first victims of unprovoked terrorist assault to set aside
political differences, at least for a time, in search of a unified
self-defense.
What
separated the spectacular horrors of September 11 from past
episodes was scale and symbolism: In the twin towers of the
World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the four hijacked airliners,
2,752 people died, employees at work or on their way, passengers
in transit, paramedics treating the wounded, firefighters trying
to save others from an inferno fueled by the full tanks of two
Boeing 767s. The intent to commit mass murder was unmistakable,
as was the meaning of the targets -- the tallest buildings in
the financial capital of the world and the military headquarters
of the world’s sole superpower. Al-Qaeda designed the
attacks to cast doubt on the American state’s ability
to protect not only its citizenry but also itself.
There
was no one, in the smoky, anguished aftermath of the attacks,
who did not want justice. This feeling was, in fact, shared
across the world where the attacks were commonly regarded as
abhorrent crimes against humanity; the expressions of schadenfreude
in some locales, though reported ad nauseam by some outlets,
were scattered and unrepresentative.
The
choice faced by the administration of President George W. Bush
was not whether to seek justice but how. Acts of terrorism,
perpetrated by state and non-state actors, had sometimes been
treated as crimes, to be investigated patiently, adjudicated
properly and then punished. Such an approach, directed only
at those who were complicit, was itself a repudiation of the
original acts, its narrowness and judiciousness intentionally
contrasting with the wholesale mayhem of terrorism. In the case
of the September 11 attacks, the political advantages of this
tack were even greater than usual, as the US was regarded warily
by Arabs and Muslims who had long felt collectively demonized
for the violence of a few. On this occasion, its severity notwithstanding,
the US would not overreact. The US would join its allies and
even erstwhile adversaries in marshaling a uniform rule of law
and universal moral sense to corral a handful of nihilistic,
literal-minded dunces at the outermost orbits of Islam.
There
is no evidence that the Bush administration considered this
option, for from the beginning it framed the September 11 attacks
as the opening salvo in a war. It was to be “a new kind
of war,” moreover, one in which the US would exempt itself
from existing rules and create its own as the battle proceeded.
The instinctive good will of the world sloughed away. As for
Arabs and Muslims, they may accept or reject the repeated assurances
that the post-September 11 war “is not a war against Islam,”
but they cannot help but notice that they are always in the
crossfire. Osama bin Laden, the late al-Qaeda leader, predicted
that he would die at the hands of the US, and that many more
innocent people would die as well, as the US flexed its muscles
in Afghanistan and then Iraq. “The Americans in both countries
are between two fires,” he said in a September 2004 audiotape.
“If they continue they bleed to death and if they withdraw
they lose everything.” The American media scoffed at bin
Laden’s pronouncements as the schoolyard taunts that they
were, but rarely paused to consider that they seemed to be succeeding
in provoking the White House into further and further extension
of the war.
Ironically,
and not terribly surprisingly, the Navy SEAL operation that
eventually snared bin Laden on May 1, 2011, not quite ten years
into the war, was not dissimilar from what might have happened
had the international justice approach been chosen. The raid
came about through years of examination of data and surveillance
of suspects, not exploitation of a battlefield breakthrough;
it carefully targeted bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan; it was aimed only at bin Laden’s capture or,
more likely, killing. And yet the moral victory that many Americans
are claiming is illusory, in the sense that few but Americans
feel it. President Barack Obama’s administration will
neither reap political advantage in the Islamic world nor renew
Americans’ claim on global sympathies. Nor will bin Laden’s
demise reduce the likelihood or perceived legitimacy of future
terrorist attacks, not because of the questions swirling around
the official accounts of the raid and disposal of remains, but
because of the havoc wrought by the US-led war on terrorism.
A further
and closely related irony is that all phases of the war, especially
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are likely to have postponed bin
Laden’s reckoning. First was the Bush administration’s
rapid decision to widen the war aims beyond apprehension of
the aiders and abettors of the September 11 attacks to “terrorists
and those that harbor them,” a vague formulation that
would expand to encompass several states, quasi-states and organizations,
but which at the time primarily referred to the Taliban. The
Pashtun Islamist militia might not have been serious in its
early (and unexplored) offer to turn over the al-Qaeda head
if shown evidence of his involvement in the September 11 atrocities,
but now there was no chance to find out. The war had morphed
into a project of regime change in Afghanistan; thus existentially
threatened, the Taliban (and their paymasters in Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence agency) henceforth did everything
they could to thwart the seizure of bin Laden and his lieutenants.
The al-Qaeda chieftain vanished in the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani
borderlands, a lanky six-footer with history’s most circulated
mug shot, an Arabic speaker in an ocean of Pashtu, Dari and
Baluchi, a walking $25 million bounty in one of the poorest
regions on earth.
For
all the talk of “a new kind of war,” the US had
launched a large conventional war to “liberate”
territory, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of the
task at hand. As Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives
wrote in his January 2002 assessment of the Afghanistan venture,
Strange Victory, “The essential importance of
Afghanistan to the extra-regional goals and activities of al-Qaeda
was not that it provided a sanctuary and training site for terrorists.
Instead, Afghanistan served the organization’s global
activities principally as a recruiting ground for future cadre.”
The recruits came from among the young strivers who had arrived
to fight the godless Soviet occupiers or, later, to combat the
Afghan militias excommunicated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
In Afghanistan, their attention was turned from these “near
enemies” to the “far enemy” in the West. By
moving into Afghanistan, the US had not robbed al-Qaeda of safe
haven -- their numbers were small enough and their finances
healthy enough to find that nearly anywhere -- but it had strengthened
al-Qaeda’s case for the innate belligerence of “Zionists
and Crusaders” and enhanced the attractiveness of southern
Central Asia as a theater of jihad. The Bush administration
would repeat this error on a grander scale with the invasion
of Iraq.
More
damaging still, the conduct of the war was anything but discriminating.
The CIA squads who infiltrated Afghanistan to assist the Taliban’s
domestic foes, the so-called Northern Alliance, were followed
into action by soldiers, Marines and B-52s, which hit the country
with purposely indiscriminate ordnance like “daisy cutters”
and cluster bombs, as well as the ballyhooed precision munitions.
The bombardment, supplemented later by Hellfire missiles fired
from the CIA’s prized Predator drones, smashed the Taliban’s
defensive lines and ushered the Northern Alliance’s warlords
into Kabul. The Taliban, bloodied but unbeaten, resorted to
guerrilla tactics; they and their brethren across the Pakistani
border saw the US intervention as another infidel occupation
of Muslim lands. Their ISI advisers, having abandoned the militia
to fate under the US barrage, were pleased to facilitate its
reestablishment. Many of the smaller bands of Afghan fighters
that had battled the Taliban on the CIA payroll in 2001-2002
were now happy to switch sides. Some Taliban affiliates took
US money to guard by day the supply routes they mined by night.
Worst of all, in both moral and strategic terms, the old kind
of war in Afghanistan killed civilians by the thousands. According
to UN and Human Rights Watch numbers, the civilian death toll
in 2007-2010 alone has been 9,759, with 2,723 of these deaths
coming at the hands of “pro-government forces,”
meaning the US, its NATO allies and the fledgling army of President
Hamid Karzai.
With
the Afghan Taliban crossing back and forth into Pakistan, and
eponymous Islamist militias sprouting among Pashtuns there,
Pakistan was increasingly dragged into the conflagration. That
country’s powerful army and spy services strove harder
at the double game they had been playing since soon after the
September 11 attacks: Desirous of both Pentagon boodle and a
client in Afghanistan, they hunted the Taliban and al-Qaeda
with one eye while supervising the Taliban’s reconstitution
with the other. Hated by many Pakistanis for enlisting in the
war on terror and by others for spurring the ‘Islamization’
of Pakistani society, they denounced the drone strikes out of
one side of their mouths while ordering incursions into Pashtun
tribal regions out of the other. The generals felt confident
in this gambit, risky as it seemed. For all the criticism that
streamed their way from Washington, the US had no alternative
partner, and when the White House eventually tired of the war,
the ISI would still have its “strategic depth” in
the 65-year conflict with India.
And,
just as the US presence inflamed Afghans who were otherwise
lukewarm toward the Taliban, so Washington’s recurrent
scolding of Pakistan won the generals points in public opinion.
After bin Laden’s shooting, according to a New York
Times reporter watching Pakistan’s Geo TV, the well-known
commentator Ansar Abbasi averred that “behind closed doors,”
the ISI and army “admit that the US is an enemy of Pakistan
and Muslims, but face to face we cannot communicate this to
the Americans.” The source of the much quoted number of
Pakistanis killed in the war on terror, 30,000, is Inter-Services
Public Relations, the media outreach arm of the Pakistani military.
Against
this backdrop, few were truly shocked when Osama bin Laden was
tracked down in Abbottabad, the scenic submontane burg where
the Pakistani army maintains its military academy. It is darkly
comical to hear the ISI plead “shortcomings” in
intelligence gathering that precluded them from seeing the most
wanted man in the world right under their noses. Only a week
before the May 1 raid, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army chief of
staff, had paid a visit to the Abbottabad school. White House
counterterrorism adviser John Brennan and CIA head Leon Panetta
have confirmed that Pakistan was not informed of the raid until
the Navy helicopters bearing bin Laden’s corpse had exited
Pakistani air space. The marriage of militaries that Washington
and Islamabad worked so hard to consummate, and that cost both
so much in political and material capital, counted for nothing
at the moment of truth. But the generals, thus far, have won
their bet: Despite the clamor in Congress, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton announced on May 5 that the US-Pakistani partnership
would perdure. “It is not always an easy relationship,
you know that,” she told journalists. “But, on the
other hand, it is a productive one for both our countries.”
Why did it take so long for the US to locate bin Laden, who
had apparently been holed up in his Abbottabad chateau since
2006? Doubtless, Pakistani military skullduggery played a role,
as did the alienation of countless ordinary Afghans and Pakistanis
from US prerogatives by the escalating civilian casualties.
But there is a third culprit -- the systematic torture practiced
by the CIA and private contractors as part of the “enhanced
interrogation techniques” authorized by the Bush administration.
There
is nothing new about torture in warfare, even as waged by democracies.
What is new (at least in the modern era) is the brazenness with
which torture’s proponents have asserted its compatibility
with democracy and the rule of law. The Bush administration’s
tangle of poor legal argumentation in support of its torture
policy need not be rehearsed; the Obama administration was right
to rubbish the lot. It has been disgusting, therefore, to see
Bush officials emerge from the woodwork to suggest that finding
bin Laden came about through torture. Former Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, told FOX News that “anyone
who suggests that the enhanced techniques, let’s be blunt,
waterboarding, did not produce an enormous amount of valuable
intelligence, just isn’t facing the truth.” His
fellow Republican, Rep. Peter King of New York, went one step
further: “Osama bin Laden would not have been captured
and killed if it were not for the initial information we got
from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he was waterboarded.”
A former
top military interrogator in Iraq, who goes by the pseudonym
Matthew Alexander, has corrected the record by insisting that
torturing detainees produces “limited information, false
information or no information.” As Alexander and others
note, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational planner of the
September 11 attacks (who, incidentally, was captured at home
in a commando raid, not on a battlefield, with a nudge from
another $25 million bounty), blurted out nothing of value despite
being waterboarded 183 times. He was confronted with the nom
de guerre of a courier -- the one whose trail eventually
led to bin Laden -- and claimed he had “retired”
from al-Qaeda. The nom de guerre and all subsequent
actionable leads were obtained from other sources through old-fashioned
detective work. These facts have led Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)
to contradict Rumsfeld and King, saying: “So far, I know
of no information that was obtained, that would have been useful,
by ‘advanced interrogation.’” And when the
CIA tortured Abu Faraj al-Libbi, another al-Qaeda courier who
would have known others, he proffered a fake name that sent
the manhunt on a wild goose chase. Torture is thus likely to
have delayed the apprehension of al-Qaeda’s master terrorist.
The
utility of torture is beside the point, in any case; torture
is repellent and degrading of those who practice it as well
as those subjected to it. It is also manifestly illegal under
both US and international law. As anyone who pays attention
knows, the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere
swept away what remained of the post-September 11 wars’
moral credibility in the eyes of the world. Along with the Bush
administration’s deceptions, arrogant doctrines of US
dominance and disdainful asides to the effect that “we
don’t do body counts,” torture poisoned all of the
wars’ fruits, even turning bin Laden and Saddam Hussein,
the ugliest caricatures of Arab anti-imperialism, into heroes
to some.
With
Osama bin Laden eliminated, the Obama administration has a golden
opportunity to discontinue the Bush administrations’ wars.
It is time for the US to leave both Afghanistan and Pakistan,
neither of which countries supplied a September 11 hijacker,
to sort out their internal messes undisturbed. But President
Obama made clear, in the same speech that proclaimed bin Laden’s
death, that these wars will not end.
When
the rhetoric is stripped away, the reasons return to the fateful
decision to treat the September 11 attacks as an act of war
rather than a monstrous crime. That choice, though it will probably
forever be portrayed as an unavoidable bow to the righteous
fury of American citizens, emanated at least equally from raison
d’état. Not only had 19 men with box cutters
destroyed iconic buildings and sown panic in the two most strategic
US cities, they had breached the walls of the mightiest military
power the world has ever known, catching its watchmen unawares.
The hijackers hailed, moreover, from the region of the globe
where US interests most require the projection of invincibility.
To secure its guardianship of Persian Gulf oil reserves, such
a crucial component of its superpower status, the US felt compelled
to stage as dramatic a show of force as it could muster. It
so happened that the Bush administration was staffed with men
and women who had been waiting for the occasion to make sure
the world knew who was boss. The Obama administration, having
inherited the aggressive forward deployments, is loath to rein
them in without first demonstrating US dominion conclusively.
Osama bin Laden surely knew what was he was doing in picking
his targets, but the US national security state has chosen to
fulfill his foul prophecy.
Related
articles:
Hijackers,
Hookers and Paradise Now
Fear
and Trembling in the Age of Terror, pt. I
Fear
and Trembling in the Age of Terror, pt. II