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From Britain-A Plan To Promote
Peace & Justice

Published on Tuesday, September 25, 2001 in the Guardian of London
<www.commondreams.org>

Collateral Repair
A massive aid program for Afghanistan will help bring down the Taliban
by George Monbiot

Like almost everyone, I want to believe that the attack on New York was the
work of a single despot and his obedient commando. But the more evidence
United States intelligence presents to this effect, the less credible the
story becomes.

First there was the car. A man had informed the police, we were told, that
he'd had a furious argument with some suspicious looking Muslims in the
parking lot at Boston airport. He led investigators to the car, in which
they found a copy of the Koran and a flight manual in Arabic, showing that
these were the fundamentalists who had hijacked one of the planes. Now,
flying an airplane is not one of those things you learn in the back of a car
on the way to the airport. Either you know how to do it or you don't.
Leaving the Koran unattended, a Muslim friend tells me, is considered
sinful. And if you were about to perpetrate one of the biggest terrorist
outrages the world has ever seen, would you draw attention to yourself by
arguing over a parking place?

Then there was the passport. The security services claim that a passport
belonging to one of the hijackers was extracted from the rubble of the World
Trade Center. This definitive identification might help them to track the
rest of the network. We are being asked to believe that a paper document
from the cockpit of the first plane - the epicenter of an inferno which
vaporized steel - survived the fireball and fell to the ground almost
intact.

When presented with material like this, I can't help suspecting that
intelligence agents have assembled the theory first, then sought the facts
required to fit it. I think there are grounds to suggest that the attacks
were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, even if we don't know precisely
who they were. But why do the agents appear to be overdressing their case?

It's partly, I think, because they need to show that they are not as
clueless as their failure to predict the atrocity suggests. But it's also
because, understandably enough, they want a discrete and discernible enemy
to confront, a structure they can penetrate, a membership they can round up,
and a figure whose personal evil is commensurate with the crime.

Partly as a result of this wishful thinking, the west found itself in a
curious position last week. The Taliban, possibly the most brutal and
barbaric regime on earth, was requesting evidence before considering Osama
bin Laden's extradition: they insisted that he was innocent until proven
guilty. The west, in the name of civilization, was insisting that Bin Laden
was guilty, and it would find the evidence later.

For these reasons and many others (such as the initial false certainties
about the Oklahoma bombing and the Sudanese medicine factory, and the
identification of live innocents as dead terrorists), I think we have some
cause to regard the new evidence against Bin Laden with a measure of
skepticism. There is no question that he is dangerous, and there is
convincing evidence connecting him to previous attacks, but if the west
starts chasing the wrong man across the Hindu Kush while the real terrorists
are planning their next atrocity, this hardly guarantees our security.

The British minister Peter Hain argued on these pages yesterday that "the
values that the terrorists attacked last week were human rights, democracy
and the rule of law". If this is so, then the terrorists have won already.
The presumption of innocence is just one of the human rights both Mr Hain
and Mr Bush appear prepared to abandon in response to the attacks. Operation
Infinite Justice begins with the renunciation of justice. The force Bush and
Blair have mobilized is a gigantic death squad, dispatched to enact
extrajudicial executions.

Already the deployment has almost certainly killed more innocent people than
the terrorist outrage in New York. The UN world food program has pulled out
of a country in which 5.5m are at imminent risk of starvation. The victims
are invisible, their language incomprehensible, so the world neither knows
nor cares.

At a huge anti-war meeting in London on Friday, I saw just how unfairly we
objectors have been characterized. When I described what happened in New
York as a crime against humanity, only one person in the hall demurred ("It
was self-defense!"), and he was immediately shouted down by what appeared to
be the entire audience. No one suggested that the victims of the attack
deserved what they got. No one advocated the appeasement of terrorists. But,
just as the militarists need a single, Hitler-like figure to launch their
new world war, they also need to invoke a fabled set of beliefs which allows
the peace campaigners to be dismissed before they have been heard.

But in one respect we have not, perhaps, made ourselves sufficiently clear.
Assuming the unassumable, namely that Bin Laden was responsible and that he
and his lieutenants are still in Afghanistan, how would we deal with them?
The answer is obvious: let's cut out the world war and go straight to
Nuremburg.

This begs the question, of course, of how we would extract the defendants. I
believe that this is a lot less complicated than the militarists have made
it. Until a few years ago, the Afghan people regarded the western powers as
their allies, as they fought to rid themselves of Soviet occupation. We
squandered their goodwill when we encouraged the Taliban to move in as an
ideological bulwark against communism. But reclaiming it, in Afghanistan's
desperate circumstances, is surely only a matter of months.

Vast humanitarian interventions, dragging the population back from the brink
of famine, would show the people that, unlike the Taliban, the west is on
their side. The Taliban thrive on the fear of outsiders, which, as far as
Afghans are concerned, has so far been amply justified. If the outside world
proves that it is friendly, not hostile, the regime's grip begins to weaken.
As the debilitated population begins to recover, the Taliban's chances of
retaining power will be approximately zero. Bin Laden, long hated and feared
by most Afghans, would be handed over just as soon as they could grab him.

All this, of course, will take time, and it's not hard to see why the
American people want instant results. But justice requires patience, and
infinite justice requires infinite patience. The great advantage of this
strategy is that it's safe. Far from spawning future conflicts, it is likely
to defuse them. Far from immersing a new generation in hatred of the west,
it's likely to inculcate a hatred of those who would deprive them of
friendly contact with outsiders. Far from triggering off fundamentalist
uprisings all over the Muslim world, it could lead to a new understanding
between cultures, even a sense of common purpose. The likes of Bin Laden
would then have nowhere to hide.

And there is an accidental by-product, which has nothing to do with the
west's strategic objectives. Rather than killing thousands of civilians, we
would save the lives of millions. Let's make this the era of collateral
repair.