Essay by Martha Quillen
War – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
In February, I wrote that we needed to figure out how to talk about America’s war in Afghanistan. That letter got a lot of responses, some favorable — and some vociferously angry. Then, for months after encouraging everyone else to talk about the war, I avoided it assiduously. The war is still a touchy subject, rife with emotions, and I figured I’d said enough already.
But fool that I am, I just keep thinking that people need to be encouraged to talk about this war because there are still a lot of issues that our government hasn’t addressed. It seems like our leaders have gotten us into a war without a clue about what they want to accomplish. Do they want to vanquish bin Laden, Al Quaeda and the Taliban? Or all terrorists everywhere? Or all terrorists and drug dealers? Or all terrorists and drug dealers and criminals? There’s a considerable difference, and I think Americans should know who they’re fighting against (or at the very least, congress should know).
So here I go again.
Last time, I wrote a letter about why I thought there should be more in-depth political discussion about this war. In my first draft of that letter, however, I didn’t say whether I believed we should have gone to war or not.
At the time, I didn’t really think that it made much difference what I thought about going to war. I’m not a foreign correspondent, or a world traveler; I’ve never been to Afghanistan or the Middle East or Europe; and I have no special experiences or credentials regarding Islamic tradition or Afghani politics.
But on the other hand, I think the opinions of everyday, ordinary Coloradans are important. Local perspectives on national issues are crucial because we’re the people who live with the consequences of congressional decisions on health care, education, crime, transportation, defense, and budgets. We know the GIs, the working poor, the uninsured, the struggling single mothers, and the families living at the poverty level. If our nieces or brothers are arrested, they probably won’t go straight into rehab or have a dream team to defend them. If we have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for health care or legal fees, we probably won’t recover — because most of us aren’t cushioned by the wealth and power (and great benefit packages) that many of our leaders take for granted.
Participating isn’t always easy, though — probably because participants are usually hoping to find people who agree with them, but for the most part they remember the people who don’t.
After deciding that I couldn’t properly encourage conversation about the war without saying something about my own thoughts on going to war, I added several paragraphs to my February letter. Basically, those additions said that I didn’t like the war at first, but I’d come to accept it and hoped that things would turn out well for us and the Afghanis.
This, I found, was not a particularly popular attitude. People against the war seemed to look upon it as a betrayal. If I didn’t like the war, how could I accept it?
Pretty easily, actually.
For me, whether we sent troops into Afghanistan wasn’t the important question. Even if we didn’t send troops, we’d undoubtedly assist the anti-Taliban forces. How could we not? We had done that before. According to Newsweek (May 27), Bush’s new terrorism bill was — ironically enough — ready to sign on September 10, 2001 but: “The new strategy called for little more aggressive action than Clinton had adopted: arming and financing anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan.”
After September 11, our assistance was sure to increase, and the way I see it, if you send funds, arms, military advisors, CIA operatives, and supplies to a war, you’re in it.
When I wrote the February Letter From the Editors, I’d heard almost no local anti-war commentary, but in the first month after the Trade Tower attacks, at least a dozen people told me that they hoped we could avoid war by sending in CIA agents to dispose of bin Laden.
I was shocked. Hit men? It’s illegal; it’s immoral; and it violates numerous treaties and agreements the U.S. has signed. To be fair, though, my first thought was actually, “But that’s what Kennedy tried to do to Castro, and it didn’t work; Castro is still going strong.”
At this point, I wish I could claim that the idea of government assassins held no appeal, but legal or illegal, moral or immoral, the idea doesn’t sound any worse than war — except that we would really look stupid if we got caught committing a major, bona fide, terrorist act while our President was blathering about terrorism.
Of course, the U.N. would probably merely chastise us; France would mock us; Britain would support us; and most Americans would feel that we had done nothing wrong. But such an incident would probably send another thousand frustrated Muslims flocking over to Al Quaeda.
Personally, I think the U.S. should only “declare” war against countries or regimes that have committed violent acts of aggression against us. And I believe that war should always be a last resort — only utilized after compromise, remediation and negotiations fail.
And even though it might be expedient, I don’t think the United States should ever send secret commandos or assassin squads into foreign countries — for I see no difference between that and terrorism. Nor do I support surprise attacks. After all, that’s how the attack on Pearl Harbor became known as the Day of Infamy.
But I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. I’m not the Secretary of Defense, and I could be wrong. Maybe it would be better to get rid of our armed forces and employ only secret commandos. But at this point, I’m only prepared to accept war, not hit men.
For the most part, I accepted the war in Afghanistan because I favor public wars over covert, underhanded, backed-into police actions. As I see it, we would have engaged in a war in Afghanistan, one way or the other. But this way we are also sending doctors, reporters and humanitarian aid, and the world’s news organization are watching the proceedings.
Of course, we could have engaged in a more secretive non-war — as we did in Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador…. (And yes, I know that we didn’t declare war this time, either, but at least congress had a little get-together to discuss the matter.)
In my view, it’s more honorable to fight openly rather than covertly, and to send troops rather than weapons, assassins, commandos, and CIA operatives. But even so, I would have preferred letting the factions in Afghanistan fight their own wars — if the Afghani people weren’t caught in the middle of this mess. Afghanistan seems to have become the international headquarters of anti-American terrorists, and the situation for ordinary Afghanis has gotten almost unimaginably bad.
By September 11, 2001 the citizens of Afghanistan were already starving. After two decades of war, families were devastated; fields lay fallow; livestock was sparse; and children were hungry. In 2000, an estimated 3,600,000 refuges had already fled Afghanistan (population 26 million). By 2001, much of the male population was dead or off to war — and restricted and veiled women had no way to support their children.
With our troops in the field, there’s at least a small chance that Afghanistan’s double-decade war might end. But it’s not a great chance. The region is riven by factions, so even if our troops manage to stop the fighting — which seems pretty iffy at this point — altercations will no doubt resurface. In all probability, the future of Afghanistan will be scarred by rebellions, ethnic strife, bad leaders and lousy economies. Right now, however, the U.S. and its European allies are supplying Afghani civilians with some food and medical supplies.
As I see it, fixing things in Afghanistan is beyond the province of the United States. But for quite a while now, we’ve been making matters worse. So at this point, the idea of funding rebel forces without overseeing the results strikes me as unconscionable. Thus, I support the war in Afghanistan, but in a limited sense.
The Taliban offered bin Laden asylum after he had been implicated in terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens, and the regime refused to extradite bin Laden when both the U.N. and the U.S. requested it. Our government tried to stop Al Quaeda attacks without sending armed forces, but economic restrictions merely exacerbated the plight of the citizens, and the U.S. accomplished very little by aiding Afghani forces hostile to the Taliban. Thus, bin Laden continued to run his anti-American jihad out of Afghanistan.
So in that light, I supported a war against the Taliban — but not against terrorism. Bush’s insistence that we’re at war with terrorism is just plain wrong. It removes our obligation to try to resolve our differences before taking up arms, and it has already inspired Israel and India to join in — whether Bush wanted them to or not.
Even though I’m now an acknowledged warmonger, before my letter appeared in February, I started worrying about the lack of anti-war sentiment I was hearing. Obviously, I’m not a pacifist, but I have some pacifistic leanings, and I was hoping that committed pacifists might have some thoughts about how we could discourage terrorism without resorting to war.
In response, Peter Anderson offered some insight. Pointing out that radical Islam is taking root in the most impoverished places in the world, he felt it might make a considerable difference if the U.S. extended more aid to some of those struggling nations (and he figured we could use part of our considerable defense budget to do it).
This was a sobering thought, however, because in the case of Afghanistan, we actually took the opposite course. For a considerable time, the U.S. tried to circumvent terrorist strikes that were being initiated in Afghanistan by restricting trade, imposing embargoes, and confiscating the funds of organizations that trafficked with the terrorists. But that didn’t work. Instead — in trying to keep monies and supplies from reaching anti-American terrorists — our policies created a reduction in the amount of humanitarian aid getting into the region. Thus our policy may have given the wealthy bin Laden an opportunity to play the hero.
My February letter inspired several other anti-war responses, but those letters weren’t primarily pacifistic. Instead, the writers expressed a deep disillusionment with the U.S. government, and a few even seemed to feel that America deserved this attack. Although I had hitherto never thought of myself as a staunch, flag-waving patriot, in the eyes of some readers, I was a blindly gullible supporter of an evil empire. And in their view, our government had invited our troubles; in our May edition, George Sibley’s column echoed that viewpoint.
I was a little bothered by some of this anti-American stance, however, because in every case it seemed to assert that the right-thinking speaker and those who agreed with him were not a part of what’s wrong with America and Americans. For example, George Sibley — who tends to be very charitable — actually excused everyone but government officials from responsibility for America’s flaws when he contended that Americans are basically good-hearted people who are too congenial “to just say no to the angry and aggressively insecure alpha types.”
Personally, however, I don’t think we should let ourselves off the hook so easily. We all knew about the U.S.S. Cole getting attacked, so why weren’t we asking our government what it was doing in response? Why were we paying so much attention to Clinton’s sex life when the Afghanis were starving?
The U.S. has repeatedly been accused of mistreating Afghani war prisoners in recent months. Why haven’t we heard more about it? And there’s not enough food or supplies for Afghani refuges who have fled the fighting. Perhaps if Americans knew more, they could help.
So why are we always in the dark? Probably because news media in the U.S. are more likely to report on the marriages of movie stars than on matters of international import.
Yet we don’t do anything about it. Americans are watching more news than ever before, but it’s lightweight, and our newspapers seem to be getting their ideas from Fox. Therefore, if our senators and congressman really are worthless, maybe it’s because they don’t know enough not to be.
In trying to come to terms with recent events, I started reading stuff that I probably should have looked into long ago: the Geneva and Hague Conventions; the text of numerous treaties the United States has signed; the U.N. Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind; Amnesty International’s website; and sundry other documents concerning crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. And the U.S. has been breaking rules for a long, long time. Ronald Reagan was a master at it, but it’s not like the Democrats are pikers.
But even so, I’m not as pessimistic as some of our readers. The U.S. may need considerable reform, but it’s not solely to blame in this case. Recently, Islamic fundamentalism has been spreading, and extremists have been targeting Americans and Europeans in Bosnia, Indonesia, the Philippines and other hotspots.
In their Colorado Central correspondence, George Sibley and several letter writers associated the war in Afghanistan with America’s rampant greed and materialism. But Islamic extremists aren’t succeeding in places where the people are inundated with cell phones and Happy Meals. They’re operating in places where communication, transportation and medical systems barely exist. Right now, the poor, the desperate, and the powerless are being recruited by radicals. Thus, in some cases, it might actually help to send in more American goods.
Or maybe it wouldn’t.
Several writers objected to me calling the attack on the World Trade Center unprovoked, and maybe they have a point. But since bin Laden has taken credit for the attack, and he’s been trying to provoke us since the Trade Center attack in 1993, I think it could be argued either way.
Those writers are definitely right about our country being provocative, however. The U.S. is big, rich, and entrepreneurial, and sometimes it crushes people and cultures without even noting that they’re there. And we need to work on that.
But provoking bin Laden and the Taliban was a very simple matter. The Taliban was so repressive it outlawed darned near everything, including: non-religious music, movies, television, mixed-sex gatherings, paper bags, dolls, stuffed toys, kites, chess boards, card games, cameras, photos, wedding gowns, pictures of people and animals, statues, the Internet, dancing, and picnics.
Jan Goodwin, author of Caught in the Crossfire and Price of Honor, says the Taliban even banned applause, “a moot point, since there’s nothing left to applaud.”
But Taliban rule did provide some entertainment in the form of public beatings, amputations and executions.
In a not-too-complementary letter to me, Slim Wolfe
wrote, “Is there a kind of diversity which says it’s OK if somewhere in the world they have a different take on the male-female thing, and on God and government and Taco-Bell?”
Of course. But the Taliban didn’t just have a different take on the male/female thing. Under Taliban rule, working, driving, education, loud talking, public laughing, showing their faces in public, makeup, white socks, high heels, and talking to any male not closely related were forbidden for women. Whenever they went out, women had to wear burqas and be accompanied by a male relative; women couldn’t show their faces in public; they were relegated to separate, inferior hospitals; and they couldn’t leave their homes after curfew. Punishments for infractions included public beatings and being stoned to death. It’s one thing if men want beards and women choose veils, but quite another if their government flogs them into complying with such strictures.
On this almost 4th of July eve, that’s enough to make me glad I’m an American. Even though our government has its problems, we are still astoundingly fortunate compared to some.
Yet despite the repressive nature of the Taliban, I don’t want to suggest that war is the key to ending oppression. On the contrary, the Taliban gained power by subduing the gangs of thieves and pillagers that roamed Afghanistan in the wake of war. To do so, the Taliban employed executions, amputations, and floggings and the public breathed a sigh of relief — until the Taliban made practically everything a punishable offense and turned its outrage on the citizenry.
War begets war. Germany’s inability to establish a viable economy after being ravaged in WWI begat WWII, whereupon the Jews were inspired to found Israel, which begat a string of Arab/Israeli wars, which have spread antagonism throughout the Arab world as it struggles to deal with a host of impoverished Palestinian refuges and the presence of Israel, a dynamically modern and technological society sitting in the midst of a region ruled by tradition.
Historically, war-torn countries have often gotten caught in a spiral of violence and poverty. Thus if the U.S. and its allies are generous enough with war reparations to restore Afghanistan’s countryside, and resupply crops and livestock, and rebuild buildings and business, there is a chance that the next regime won’t be so harsh or anti-American. But first there’s a war to fight to expell bin Laden’s terrorists and their fanatical hosts from Afghanistan, and I support it — for whether bin Laden is personally caught or not, his terrorists need to be routed and his network disrupted.
But even so, I don’t just support any old U.S. war. For example, I don’t support President Bush’s “war against terrorism.” To me, it seems crazy to expand the war in Afghanistan to include terrorists everywhere — and perhaps even drug runners and other assorted criminals. By embracing that objective, the President ensures perpetual war and gives himself unprecedented power, and he also encourages other countries to take up arms. Plus, with other nations claiming that they’re merely fighting “America’s War on Terrorism,” we will no doubt earn many more mortal enemies.
President Bush’s war against terrorism has the potential to develop into another “cold war,” which may inspire battles here, there and everywhere for decades to come. This time around, however, our police actions will be to curb terrorism rather than communism, and since terrorism is difficult to define, our battles could conceivably evolve into a constant and never-ending war.
Yet hardly anyone has addressed this dubious notion of fighting terrorism. So once again, I think that we need to talk more about this war.
In writing this I relied on numerous sources for inspiration and information. My thanks to George Sibley, and to everyone who wrote letters the last time around, and also to Amnesty International, CBS News, the U.N., the University of Minnesota, BBC News, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, Time Magazine, the Joyner Library, and the International Committee of the Red Cross for maintaining informative websites.