War, Peace and Myth-Making

By Rupam Sindhu Kalita (St. Stephen's College)


The one-eyed cleric Mohammed Omar, currently the chief of the Taliban Shura, the highest decision making body of the Taliban, justified the decision to blow up the Bamiyan Buddhas on the pretext that God had made holes on the feet/pedestal of the giant statues so that dynamite could be planted on them. He was referring to the pockmarked surface of the base of the statues resulting from physical wear and tear. Mullah Omar is himself surrounded by legends. Many believe that he had gouged out his eye with his own hands without using an anesthetic. The account is of course disputed. But the dubious distinction of the man has gone a long way in propelling him to a position of strength vis-à-vis the awe that surrounds his personality.

After the Soviets were thrown out of Afghanistan by the Mujahedeen backed militarily by the US, the civil war that broke out in Afghanistan proved to be a pointer to the events that were to unfold in the socio-politics of the country. The US dumped the Mujahedeen after their purpose to halt a Communist offensive was fulfilled in the wake of the Soviet defeat. The collapse of the pro-Communist Najibullah regime in 1992 gave way to the bloody civil war until the arrival of the Northern Alliance in 1996 led by Ahmad Shah Masood which united a number of political-military organizations and brought a semblance of government in Afghanistan. The subsequent rise of the Taliban and the US War on Terror that deposed the Talban is well-known.

The tendency to convert perceived threats to actual/real threats is very strong in today’s political narrative and hence the rise of terrorism and its concomitant of counter-terrorism. The Marxist critic Raymond Williams talks about the dangers of a tradition being seen in fragments, that is, the move from a tradition to a select tradition. The peril of a select tradition is that while it foregrounds certain aspects of history it completely ignores the rest. Mullah Omar didn’t know or didn’t bother to know that the Bamiyan Buddhas was the point where the Buddhist faith met the art of Greece and that the colossal statues of the Buddhas were the expression of the encounter between Buddhism and Gandharan art. Bamiyan was the place where the portrait of the Buddha in human form was innovated. The homogenization of a faith into a single cultural, sociological entity can be grossly misleading and the US committed the same mistake when after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 they thought that the Muslims in Afghanistan composed a single homogenous group who should be treated as such. But the Taliban, essentially a Sunni movement, was the near-perfect enemy of the many Shia groups who lived in the country. So much so that the Shia groups like the Ahmadas, Hazaras heaved a sigh of relief when the Taliban fell and the US military started taking control of the country.

Post Second World War, the United States appropriated global dominance to itself and unfurled the concept of the “Grand Area”, which referred to the region subordinated to the needs of the US economy. This region would include, besides Latin America, Asia Minor and the Far East, the former British Empire, and the exercise of ‘annexing’ the former British colonies would be called an exercise in “anti-imperialism” in the subsequent period. The memoranda of the US National Security Council in 1948 states that “ While scrupulously avoiding assumption of responsibility for raising Asiatic living standards, it is to the US interest to promote the ability of these countries to maintain…the economic conditions prerequisite to political stability.”

The concern boils down to “stability”, which is ubiquitous in US terminology aimed at the third world. Noam Chomsky points out that “stability” is a code word for obedience. James Chance, editor of Foreign Affairs, cites “our efforts to destabilize a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” illuminates the US Realpolitik “to seek stability.” The State Department believes in the policy of destabilization in the interest of stability. The reason for the State Department’s keen desire for “stability” is the US will to build a geographic-ideological space which secures its economic needs. The fear of a perceived enemy who would over run the country was accompanied by a similar fanatic, jingoistic lingua on self-defence. President Lyndon Johnson stated, during the height of the US aggression in Vietnam; “There are 3 billion people in the world and we have only 200 million of them. We are outnumbered 15 to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.” This sounds like a timid child whining that he/she needs a pistol to keep away the monsters that figure in his/her mother’s stories.

The ‘Rotten Apple Theory’ (a version of the Domino theory) was eloquently outlined by Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under President Truman, “Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east.” He fabricated a remarkable set of myths regarding Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey and succeeded in convincing the Congress to support the Truman Doctrine. The alleged communist “infection” and its spread toward Western Europe were succinctly articulated by Acheson and it improvised the grounds for the Cold War. Under the rotten apple theory, the tinier and weaker the country, the less endowed it is with resources, the more dangerous it is. The ‘fear’ of the United States concerning alleged Soviet influence in Eastern Europe not only led the US government to set up anti-aircraft missiles in East European countries but also turned  many small island nations into navy bases with a massive military presence and virtually won them over and used them as launch pads to thwart any possible/probable threat. US military bases are scattered across the world with countries geographically as diverse as Grenada, Bahrain and Japan playing host to the world’s largest peace time war exercises carried out by the US military. “Benefits” of hosting a US military base was evident most recently in Bahrain where the killing of pro-democracy demonstrators by the monarchy was totally ignored and the focus of attention shifted to Libya. The brutal suppression of the majority Shia population by the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain received no currency and instead armed contingents were drawn in to Bahrain from Saudi Arabia across the border in a resolute effort to put down the uprising while the West went berserk with claims to oust the Libyan dictator through military intervention.

President Clinton propounded a doctrine in which he stated: “If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it’s within our power to stop it, we will stop it.” This was announced in the days leading up to the Kosovo war in 1999. Analyzing the unfolding events after the US intervention in Kosovo, political scientist John Mearscheimer observed that the Gulf War of 1991 and the Kosovo War of 1999 “hardened India’s determination to possess nuclear weapons” as a deterrent to US violence. A British diplomat wrote, “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States,” while “everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism.” The security cover that the US threw over Turkey because of the perceived Soviet threat was extended to determined support for the Turkish government when it launched an all-out offensive against the Turkish Workers’ Party (KPP), a militant group representing the Kurds and fighting to secure a separate nation-state for them. The massive transfer of arms from the US to Turkey since the end of Second World War continued and increased during the Kurdish insurgency when virtually all US-imported weapons ended up being used against the Kurdish population. Journalist Jonathan Randal observed that the year 1994 was “the year of the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces” and the year when Turkey became “the biggest single importer of American military hardware and thus the world’s largest arms purchaser…”

However in 1999, Turkey lost the dubious distinction of being the largest recipient of US arms to Colombia. The pretext under which arms supply to Colombia was escalated was the drug war that was being fought in Colombia. But the more pressing concern for the US was the left-wing extremist groups such as the Revolutionary armed Forces of Colombia (FRCC-EP) that had been engaged in a protracted guerrilla war with the government of Colombia. The possible nexus between left-wing groups of Colombia and the government of neighbouring Venezuela was a more pressing concern for the US than the illegal trafficking of drugs that the extremist groups had been accused of. Hence the need for more US military hardware to the Colombian government. The “intentional ignorance” that the US puts on and its brilliant manoeuvring of that “ignorance” to fit policy into different circumstances has been a cornerstone of US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.

From Mullah Omar’s avowal that the holes at the base of the Bamiyan Buddhas had been drilled by God just to enable the Taliban to plant dynamite therein to the US interventions in Vietnam, Kosovo, East Timor, apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, runs a common thread that has done violence to humanity. The long-standing US assertion that Iran has been purifying uranium to an extent that could be used for nuclear weapons might transform into a full-fledged US attack on Iran. We only need to wait till the US Presidential elections get over.