Author: Vir Sanghvi
Publication: Mid-Day
Date: September 8, 2002
If you haven't already been submerged
beneath a sea of September 11 articles and analyses, then, brace yourself;
the first anniversary of the attacks is on Wednesday and it will be impossible
to keep your head above water as the media and TV channels remind us of
the horrors of the WTC attacks.
Nobody who saw the second plane
going into the World Trade tower - and nearly all of us saw the footage
after it was repeated endlessly on every channel - will forget the power
of that image. Nor will we forget the carnage and destruction that followed:
the loss of thousands of innocent lives, the collapse of the towers and
the cloud of dust and debris that enveloped downtown New York.
But as the anniversary approaches,
here's my question: as horrific as the attacks were, is America overstating
their global significance? According to America, September 11 changed the
world. Nothing was ever the same. The only possible parallel in its historical
significance is the attack on Pearl Harbor - the so-called day of infamy
- when the US (or at least Hawaii) also faced death and destruction from
the skies.
You will note that nobody in America
mentions the one day that really did change the world:
When the Enola Gay dropped its nuclear
pay load on the city of Hiroshima. By any objective standards - number
of deaths, level of destruction, the launch of the nuclear age etc - that
was a much more significant event than an air raid on a US naval base or
a terrorist attack on a New York office block.
There are reasons for America's
preoccupation with the WTC attacks. The US has always fought its wars in
other people's countries. Even the Pearl Harbor raid did not touch the
mainland (Hawaii is an island). So, any attack on the continental US -
let alone America's financial capital - is an event of unprecedented significance
for US citizens. But is it an event that changed the world?
In the first few days after September
11, when the semi-articulate George W Bush had finally been brought to
Washington after crazily crisscrossing the country and Dick Cheney had
emerged from the underground bunker where he had been hiding, there was
some hope that the world would really change, that a new global order would
emerge.
There was, first of all, the personality
of George W Bush to consider. Though Bush responded to the terror of September
11 with all the eloquence of a yokel ("We're gonna get the folks who did
this." Folks?), there was enough in the statements that came out of Washington
to suggest that the President had changed, that he had made the transition
from isolationist, death penalty-loving party boy to global statesman.
Perhaps there would be, as Colin Powell promised, a continuous and concerted
war against terror.
A year later, it seems clear that
those hopes were misplaced. The first lesson of September 11, or so Bush
told us, was revenge. Not only was he going to get the perpetrators - sorry,
'folks' - but, speaking of Osama bin Laden, he declared, "There's a poster
in the Old West that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive'." In other words, you
didn't just bring down the might of the law on the terrorists, you dispensed
your own brand of frontier justice.
The second lesson followed from
the first: you didn't bother about proof, you followed your own instincts.
The US had no evidence that would stand up in a court of law that al Qaeda
was behind the WTC attacks. But it had intelligence leads that suggested
a bin Laden connection. And it reckoned that once it went into bin Laden's
lair, it would probably find the proof it needed. (Sure enough, a videotape
in which bin Laden discussed the WTC attacks was eventually found in Kabul.)
The third lesson was that anybody
who associated with or harboured a terrorist suspect was to be treated
on par with the terrorist. For instance, Mullah Omar. the one-eyed leader
of the Taliban, is a thoroughly unpleasant man. But there's still no evidence
at all that he ever sponsored terrorism, let alone engaged in it. But if
he refused to hand bin Laden over to the Americans, then, said Bush, he
would also be treated as the enemy.
The fourth lesson was that the concept
of national sovereignty and of international borders was irrelevant in.
the fight. Today's terrorists recognise no nations and respect no borders.
Bin Laden, an Arab, was based in Afghanistan and headed a force that included
Sudanese, Jordanians, Egyptians etc. If you were fighting international
terrorists then you had to adopt their rules. If they did not respect borders,
then you had to do the same. Afghanistan had never attacked the US. But
if terrorists were based in Afghanistan, then it was entirely legitimate
to invade that country.
Take these four lessons - the very
foundations of the US's post-September 11 response- and place them in an
Indian context. Unlike America, which faced terrorism on this scale for
the first time, we are no strangers to terror. We have lived with it for
over a decade. We've been subjected to serial bomb blasts in our commercial
capital, Bombay. And long before George W Bush discovered how bad the Taliban
were, we had to deal with them over the hijacking of 1C 814.
Assume now, that we were to respond
to terrorism on the basis of the four principles that guided American policy
after September 11. According to these lessons, you seek revenge without
worrying about hard evidence, ignore all this nonsense about international
borders and treat anybody who associates with terrorists as being a terrorist
himself.
We have evidence - and it is more
substantial than the leads that US gathered after September 11 - that the
Bombay serial blasts were masterminded by Dawood Ibrahim. We know also
that Dawood lives in Pakistan - this is cheerfully admitted by the Pakistan
press. So, if we were to follow the US's lead, then we should seek revenge
on Dawood - "dead or alive" - and if necessary, invade Pakistan to capture
or kill him.
Or, take the instance of the 1C
814 hijacking. We know the identities of the hijackers. We know that they
are Pakistanis. We know - and the Taliban confirmed this - that after they
left the aircraft at Kandahar airport, they spent the next few days in
Afghanistan and then crossed over into Pakistan. We have proof that of
the three terrorists who were exchanged for the passengers, two ended up
in Pakistan. Masood Azhar became a public figure and Omar Sheikh later
kidnapped Daniel Pearl.
According to the principles followed
by America, post-September 11, we would be justified in hunting down and
killing the hijackers or Masood Azhar. Even the Americans accept that Omar
Sheikh had ISI controllers, so we would be as justified in targeting the
Pakistan government as the US was in attacking the Taliban.
But were we to do that, we would
be accused of spreading tension in the region and asked to desist from
any action.
And who would stop us? Why, America,
of course.
So much for the new world order.
So much for the global war against terror. And so much for the day that
changed the world. The truth is that September 11 changed America. And
it changed the way that America looked at the world. For decades, the US
had told us that dialogue was better than war. When other countries were
faced with terrorist movements or suicide bombers, the US told us that
we needed to address the roots of the violence.
But when America was attacked, these
principles flew out of the window. Today, no American has any interest
in dialogue. And as for fighting global terror, it is quite happy to do
business with the ISI, the sponsors of the Taliban and the protectors of
bin Laden.
When US interests are involved,
the end justifies all the means.
I am not entirely unsympathetic
to the American response. The notion that all terrorism flows from genuine
grievances is a bizarre one. Nor is dialogue always the answer. What kind
of dialogue can anyone have with the madmen of the Lashkar-e-Taiba? For
a certain kind of religious fanatic, Kashmir is not the issue; it is the
excuse.
But my problem is this: America
still does not grant us the right to respond as it does itself. It still
forces the world to adopt solutions that America itself has discarded.
And that ultimately is why, one
year later, the anniversary of September,11 has much more significance
for America than it does for the rest of the world. All of us who've been
victims of suicide bombers and ruthless terrorists believed, on September
11, that just as we were one with America in its shock and sorrow, America
would be one with us in fighting the menace of global terror.
Sadly, we were mistaken.
America chose to go it alone. It
fought its own private battle. And in the process, it became even more
isolated from the rest of the world.
