SACW | 12 May 2004
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Tue May 11 20:15:38 CDT 2004
South Asia Citizens Wire | 12 May, 2004
via: www.sacw.net
[1] Online Petition to Remove ban on Ahmadiya books in Bangladesh.
[2] Pakistan: Enter the suicide bomber (Rashed Rahman)
[3] Rape survivor educates Pakistan (Juliette Terzieff)
[4] India: Riding The 'Secular' Rath (Nissim Mannathukkaren)
[5] Useful Recent Documentary Films on Kashmir :
by Pervez Hoodbhoy, Shilpi Gupta, a reportage for
Channel 4
[6] India: Gujarat - Who Planned The Genocide?
Struggles For Justice In The Shadow Of Communal Terror
A discussion meeting with celebrated dancer and activist
Mallika Sarabhai and Yusuf Dawood (May 20, London)
[7] The Rise of bin Laden: A Book Review by Ahmed Rashid
--------------
[1]
Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 13:37:59 +0600
Subject: REMOVE BAN ON AHMADIYA BOOKS IN BANGLADESH.
Please join the signature campaign demanding the
removal of ban on the AHMADIYA books in
Bangladesh. Note that while enlisting your name
please use the Private or Available to Petition
Author option instead of public.
Visit this web-site for enlisting your name:
www.petitiononline.com/ahmadiya/petition-sign.html
_____
[2]
The Daily Times [Pakistan]
May 12, 2004
ENTER THE SUICIDE BOMBER
by Rashed Rahman
Karachi burns as Shia anger boils over at years
of sectarian murder in the city. After a long
series of targeted killings of Shia doctors,
shootings at and bombings of imambargahs in
recent years, the suicide explosion in a Shia
mosque on Friday that killed 15 and wounded about
a 100 people, proved the last straw.
Rioting Shia crowds have clashed with shopkeepers
not heeding their strike calls, stoned premises,
torched vehicles, and attempted to bring life in
Karachi to a halt. Their partial success, despite
the violence that accompanied the protests,
reflects in miniature the precariousness of the
Shia minority in Pakistan as a whole.
The city administration and the police, clueless
about how to handle the situation, and condemned
for past and present failures in protecting the
Shias, have again used fire-brigade tactics
against the protestors, thereby inflaming the
situation. Shia leaders express their
helplessness in attempts to calm their followers
until the perpetrators of this latest sectarian
outrage are caught and punished.
One of the reasons the street is ignoring calls
for calm is because the city (and the country as
a whole) has a poor record in apprehending and
punishing perpetrators of terrorism, sectarian or
other. Karachi has suffered 96 bomb blasts in
mosques, churches, government offices, buses,
trains, hotels, foreign consulates and bazaars
since 1987. The attacks have claimed 350 lives
and left 1,350 injured. Despite scores of arrests
in the aftermath of such incidents, not one
perpetrator has been punished, the existence of
special and anti-terrorist courts notwithstanding.
Clearly, intelligence failure has led to such
poor results and fed the government's credibility
deficit on this account. Karachi, as the
industrial and commercial hub of Pakistan, is
particularly vulnerable to economic disruption
when normal life there is disturbed. This round
of riots has already yielded 25-50 percent losses
in business.
The police is now proposing a comprehensive
listing of all imambargahs, mosques, and
seminaries throughout the province. It intends to
depute prominently visible police guards at these
obvious sectarian targets, as well as at
government properties, shopping centres, petrol
pumps, food chains, consulates, offices and
residences of foreign diplomats.
This belated response is typical of the law
enforcement agencies' approach: close the stable
door after the horses have bolted. The police
claims it knows who has perpetrated the latest
sectarian outrage. Lashkar-e Jhangvi heads the
cast of usual suspects. At the same time, a
reward of Rs2.5 million has been announced for
information leading to the arrest of the group
behind the attack. This has failed to mollify the
protestors. Second, it misses the point about the
latest trends and developments in terrorist
actions around the world, and now increasingly in
Pakistan.
The suicide bomber is a comparatively recent
phenomenon. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka are
generally regarded as the pioneers in this field.
They have been followed by people under
occupation whose desperation has mounted to the
level where certain death is embraced willingly
for the cause of national liberation. Examples in
this regard are the Palestinian resistance and,
lately, the Iraqi resistance.
But whereas the Tamil Tigers are a secular
movement inspired by fierce nationalism, the
current crop of suicide bombers around the world
is overwhelmingly populated by religious
extremists. The suicide bomber motivated by
religious underpinnings has no fear and embraces
what is perceived as martyrdom for the cause of
freedom on the guarantee that he will immediately
find a place in Paradise. This makes him
virtually unstoppable by ordinary means.
Of late, a pattern of violent actions in
different parts of the country has begun to
emerge. On Saturday, Quetta suffered another bomb
blast. Before that, the Gwadar attack killed
three Chinese engineers, casting a shadow over
the premier project of the development of a new
port and city. It could affect the efforts of the
Balochistan government to attract investment
through the conference being held for this
purpose in the provincial capital.
Earlier, the Ashura incidents warned of a
resurgence of sectarian violence. The government
failed to respond to the perceived threat in any
meaningful manner. It was on Ashura that a
suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque in
Rawalpindi. Although the loss of human life and
damage to property in that incident was
relatively light, it should have alerted
intelligence agencies to the advent on Pakistani
soil of a new actor: the suicide bomber
fanatically convinced of the justness of his
cause and methods, and sanguine and content in
the received knowledge that he was ensuring
himself a berth in Heaven. This is the domestic
fallout of the policy of fanning religious
fundamentalism in the context of the Afghanistan
wars. Can something be done?
Guarding potential targets is neither effective
nor sustainable in the long term. The only
feasible course is to review the working of the
intelligence establishment and weed out any
elements close to extremist groups. There is a
clear need for agencies to infiltrate groups
known to be wedded to sectarian and extremist
terror. This would require improved humint (human
intelligence) and a change of priorities at the
state level.
Terrorism cannot be eliminated totally. But it
can be contained. In our case it flows from the
extremism we have nurtured in the name of jihad.
The state needs to not only improve its ability
to pre-empt such attacks but must seek to
eradicate the mindset that leads to extremism.
The last is more difficult and requires a
long-term integrated approach to reverse the
process started by General Ziaul Haq.
The writer is currently a freelance contributor
who has held editorial positions in various
Pakistani newspapers
_____
[3]
San Francisco Chronicle
May 10, 2004
Page A - 3
RAPE SURVIVOR EDUCATES PAKISTAN
Victim of tribal sentence pushes for justice, builds school to fight status quo
Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service
Islamabad, Pakistan -- Slight in stature and so
soft-spoken that people have to lean forward to
hear her, Mukhtaran Mai hardly looks the part she
has been forced to play. In this overwhelmingly
male-dominated society where women are seen but
rarely heard, the gutsy 30-year-old rape victim
is taking Pakistani society to task for the
horror she experienced.
Almost two years after she was brutally
gang-raped in her central Punjabi village of
Mirwali on the orders of a local panchayat
(council), Mukhtaran continues to press for the
completion of the legal case against her
assailants while administering a school she
funded with money the Pakistani government gave
her after the rape. She also is trying to help
others who fall victim to the problems of
Pakistani society.
"The unbelievable pain I experienced is hard to
put into words," she says in a near-whisper. "But
I hold on to it, put myself in the public no
matter what they say about my motives. ... I just
don't want people to forget."
In June 2002, members of a more powerful tribe,
the Mastois, accused Mukhtaran's younger brother
of engaging in unacceptable behavior with one of
their women. Panchayat members ignored the pleas
of Mukhtaran's father, who is from the
lower-caste Gujar tribe, and watched as four
Mastoi men dragged the sobbing woman into a shed
to beat and rape her before forcing her to walk
home naked.
In a country where most people are desensitized
or indifferent to the never-ending flow of
newspaper stories about honor killings, rapes and
acid- burnings of women, Pakistanis erupted into
rage -- condemning the feudal system that still
dominates most of the country and demanding
action.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sent envoys
to comfort Mukhtaran and gave her 500,000 rupees
(about $9,000). Human rights workers, Punjab
provincial politicians and journalists rallied to
her side with promises of support.
But as the case entered Pakistan's legal
labyrinth, press reports died down, and Mukhtaran
found herself alone to face the consequences of
her decision to go public with charges of rape.
"Almost from the very beginning, and even more so
now, I receive messages from influential people
in the village pressuring me to keep quiet, drop
the case and stop causing trouble," she says
bitterly. "They want to me to forget it."
Six men -- four convicted rapists and two members
of the tribal council -- were sentenced to death
by hanging by a special anti-terrorism court in
Punjab province; eight other defendants were
acquitted for lack of evidence. But the case is
now locked in appeals that could drag on for
years.
"If they slaughter me to pieces, I will never
give up the case,'' she says. "Justice has to be
served, and everybody should support that."
Last year, she joined about 100 other women in a
march in central Pakistan to protest violence
against women after a young woman from another
village was raped by 10 men.
Determined to overcome her pain, Mukhtaran used
half of the money she received from the
government to purchase land for a primary school
in her area and convinced provincial officials to
erect a building because she believes the
education of future generations is the key to
preventing others from suffering her fate.
But almost nobody came.
For the first six months, the school had only six
students. The first person to enroll was
Mukhtaran herself. The second was her younger
brother, Abdul Shakur.
"People would say they supported the idea when
they were talking to me or my family, but then in
public they were silent," she says.
Mukhtaran stubbornly continued her studies and
has now advanced to the fourth grade. Gradually,
more and more families sent their children to
school. As of last month, the Mukhtaran Mai
Primary School boasted 207 students -- 102 of
them females.
"A lot of people would have taken the money and
run away, tried to forget, but Mukhtaran has not
only stayed but has launched a visible challenge
to the feudal landlords to change the status
quo," says Sarwar Bari, national coordinator for
the nongovernmental organization Pattan, which
has publicly backed Mukhtaran's efforts.
"She is a symbol of resistance, an activist for
others wronged, and to achieve her goals she must
be seen to have broad support," he adds. "She
deserves it."
Her quiet strength has earned Mukhtaran a
reputation that is spreading beyond Mirwali.
Other impoverished Pakistanis who encounter
problems -- like harassment from landlords,
family tensions and neighborhood disputes -- come
to her seeking help and advice.
"Most of the time, I can't really do anything to
help them," she says sadly. "Sometimes, though,
when I can, it's the best feeling in the world."
Mukhtaran's plans for the future are simple: to
work as hard as she can to make the primary
school succeed and to do everything in her meager
power to help the women of her area.
"Maybe it's not much, but it is enough for me,"
Mukhtaran says. "It's more than I would have
thought possible two years ago."
_____
[4]
Outlookindia.com
May 06, 2004
RIDING THE 'SECULAR' RATH
Secularization of the BJP? Nothing could be
further from the truth. The verdict in
Muvattupuzha will tell us whether the Christians
in Kerala will capitulate to the spin-doctors of
Hindutva, or deny the legitimacy it craves for...
by Nissim Mannathukkaren
The noted scholar Benedict Anderson in his famous
book on the origins of nationalism, The Imagined
Communities had pointed out how the pre-bourgeois
classes did not need language to construct
alliances:
"If the ruler of Siam took a Malay noblewoman as
a concubine, or if the King of England married a
Spanish woman - did they ever talk seriously
together?"
If one substitutes ideology for language, one can
get a fair picture of the promiscuity of
political parties in the 'shining India' of ours.
It is this promiscuity that political
commentators across the spectrum of the Indian
media have (mistakenly) celebrated as the
secularization of the BJP. Nothing could be
further from the truth.
In the last two decades we have seen a seething
debate in the academic and non-academic world
about the relevance of secularism in a
'traditional' and 'religious' society like that
of India. In fact, the BJP rode the crest of
success by demolishing - what in its eyes was -
the myth of Nehruvian (read Western) secularism.
But BJP's descent into more perverse forms of
'pseudo-secularism' is something that has not
received enough attention.
If BJP's alliance with the National Conference
was the greatest of ironies (people in Kashmir
saw through this chimera eventually), the
induction of P. C. Thomas into the union ministry
last year made one feel aghast at the brazenness
of the ruling classes. For Thomas represents the
Indian Federal Democratic (sic) Party (IFDP), a
unique entity in the nation's political history:
it was probably the first time a parliamentary
party was formed by MPs from various parties (and
also independents) and regions as varied as
Kerala, Bihar and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
The other known face in the party was Pappu
Yadav, one of the leading members of the Bihar
mafia who has at least twelve charges of murder
(including the killing of Ajit Sarkar, CPI [M]
MLA) and kidnapping against him. The BJP, by
inducting this rag-tag formation into the NDA,
truly proved that it is a party with a
'difference'. The vacuity of a party like the
IFDP was reiterated when recently most of its MPs
other than Thomas left it to join other parties.
The temptation of flaunting its secular
credentials through the first Christian member of
the cabinet (if we discount the Christianity of
George Fernandes) was too much to resist for the
BJP. More important was the opportunity to make a
headway into Kerala, an electoral barren desert
for the BJP. And what better way to accomplish it
than dangling the carrot of ministership to the
Syrian Christian community, which constitutes a
strong 20 percent of the Kerala electorate.
If Advani's Bharat Uday Yatra rolled onto the
streets of Muvattupuzha, a predominantly
Christian Lok Sabha constituency, which Thomas
has been representing since 1989 (on a Kerala
Congress [Mani] ticket), it is not without a
reason. Unbeknownst to the rest of the country,
the verdict in this constituency, assumes
significant national importance.
A victory for Thomas will be the crowning glory
on the BJP's plank of 'positive secularism',
which apparently can only be an attribute of
Hinduism. After all, ours is the great
civilization that 'happily' and 'peacefully'
tolerated the invasions from the Greeks to the
Mughals. What better advertisement for the BJP
than all the Thomases and Sangmas declaring a la
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, "BJP is the only secular
party in the country"?
Until recently, Kerala has had a relatively
remarkable record of communal harmony (despite
the presence of three major world religions),
something to which the Left has contributed in no
small measure.
The significant influence of communitarian
consciousness was always harnessed to the
peaceful and democratic pursuit of secular goods
thus resulting in what could be called a
non-antagonistic communalism.
In this kind of scenario, even confessional
parties such as the Muslim League were forced to
tone down, if not completely abandon the reliance
on the sacred. The pervasiveness of this model
saw the unique phenomenon of the BJP/RSS combine
reduced to constructing secret alliances with the
Congress-led front or transferring votes to the
latter (for example, the 1982 and 1991 Assembly
elections) in a desperate bid to stop the Left
from coming to power. What is galling for the
sangh parivar is this status of a political
hermaphrodite (to use a term from their own
discourse of masculinity) despite the fact that
the Kerala has one of the highest RSS
cadre-strengths in the country.
However, three decades of RSS activity is finally
beginning to 'bear fruit' (including the
provoking into existence of Islamic
fundamentalist groups in the nineties). The last
decade has seen a shocking incursion of the
Hindutva agenda into the socio-cultural sphere
through the various front organizations of the
sangh targeting sections like children, tribals
etc. and areas like education, arts and
literature, theatre and temple renovation. The
public sphere is now awash with religious
symbols, motifs and 'spiritual' gurus. The
communal violence in Marad in the last two years
was an outcome of the long process of erosion of
the non-antagonistic model of communalism.
Nevertheless, the task of making Hindutva the
political alternative is still an immensely
difficult one in the highly polarized political
atmosphere of Kerala--it is the only major state
in the country that still does not have a BJP MLA
or an MP, a remarkable trough in the high tide of
Hindutva. Here, the alliance with the IFDP allows
the BJP to piggyback on Thomas' popularity and
gain the necessary legitimacy. This is a proven
strategy that has worked in other states.
Therefore, the verdict in Muvattupuzha will be of
crucial importance to the future direction of
state politics too.
History and common sense tells us that it would
be a tough ask for Thomas to win in a
three-cornered contest in Kerala, but reports
from the constituency indicate that there is
substantial support emerging for him among the
Syrian Christians.
While the various factions of the Kerala Congress
representing the latter had always dreamed of the
power and benefits that would flow their way if
they were to enter into an alliance with a BJP in
government, the Kerala sensibility which still
abhors any kind of religious extremism prevented
them from making the final jump.
However, in the present scenario, there is an
increasing attraction for the BJP among the
Syrian Christians. The prosperous sections among
them are enthused by the BJP emerging as a better
enforcer of the neo-liberal agenda, which equates
progress and development solely with capitalism
and economic growth. P.C.Thomas echoed this
sentiment during Advani's yatra:
"only BJP can save the nation and only a BJP
government can bring development to the country".
Advani himself in his speeches throughout Kerala
criticized the state for becoming a "prisoner of
its political ideologies" and thereby lagging
behind in "progress" and "development". In this
discourse of crude neo-liberalism and market-led
Hindutva, the building of an extensive welfare
state in Kerala (the likes of which have been
hardly achieved elsewhere in the third world),
does not even qualify as either progress or
development.
The tendency to view the economic in isolation
from all other aspects of human social life and
glorify it is a pernicious tendency of our times.
In Kerala, this is seen in the celebration, even
by the liberal media, of the 'efficiency' of
someone like O.Rajagopal, RSS man and union
minister (presently Lok Sabha candidate from
Thiruvananthapuram), in fighting for Kerala's
share of the economic pie at the centre. This
totally ignores the role of Rajagopal's ideology
and its culpability in the destruction of the
secular fabric of Kerala.
Christians in Kerala may justify the new bonhomie
between them and the BJP as purely motivated by
the secular motive of economic development, and
thus conforming to the Kerala model of
non-antagonsitic communalism which has
subordinated the sacred to the secular. On the
one hand, this is a misunderstanding stemming
from the inability to recognize the Janus-faced
nature of the BJP - that even when it seeks to
appropriate the centrist space of the Indian
polity, it is dependent on the right wing fanatic
cabal. On the other hand, it shows the increasing
identification of Christians with the Hindu
demonization and vilification of Islam parallel
to the Christian-Jewish alliance against Muslims
in the world stage.
In the psyche of a middle class Syrian Christian,
the threat of Hindutva and the violence
perpetrated by it is a malady that afflicts only
the northern parts of the country. It denotes the
sheer fact that communal violence and its
associated history is something that is
physically far removed from his/her immediate
reality (although, it is increasingly less so).
At the same time, and this is the tragedy of the
times we are living in, it shows the moral
estrangement from the plight of the distant
stranger, not just from the Muslims and Hindus
who are victims of communal violence, but also
from his/her own co-religionists frequently
subjected to violent attacks by Hindu
fundamentalists in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and so
on (the ongoing violence in Jhabua is an
example). This kind of moral apathy was
demonstrated in the muted protest against the
Gujarat events.
The mad rush to align with the BJP across the
country portends a dangerous tendency in our
polity -- the willingness to legitimize the
unspeakable horrors that have been wrought upon
by the fascist forces in the last decade and
more. Sadly, even the minority communities, are
imbibing the 'art of forgetting' systematically
fostered by the forces of cultural and religious
nationalism.
Nothing is more shocking than to find that one of
the worst carnages in the post-independence
history of our country -- the state-sponsored
genocide in Gujarat -- does not figure, even as a
foot-note, in the election debates. The BJP's
shift to the discourse of bijli, sadak and paani
does not signify the secularization of the party,
but rather an attempt at evasion of
responsibility for the communalization of society
and its horrendous outcomes. The discourse of
religious nationalism is never given up, but
lurks underneath the discourse of development,
waiting to erupt and cause another Gujarat.
Even development, as noted before, connotes
something else for the BJP. The vision document
of the party gives telling evidence of its
Goebbelsian propaganda and sleight of hand which
dexterously equates development with achieving
'Great Power' status on the world stage. Never
mind that for the time being we are the 'running
dogs' of American imperialism. The party leaders
crow about the world stature that nuclear India
has acquired in the five years of NDA rule, and
how five more years will see it attaining the
'glory' that our 'great' civilization was always
destined for.
Never mind that our Human Development Index
ranking has fallen from 124 to 127 or that the
per-capita food availability for the year 2000-
01 was lower than during the period of the Bengal
famine!
There is some food for thought when the media
here in N.America, which usually devotes not more
than cursory space for the largest democracy in
the world, decided to feature Lalji Tandon in the
headlines. After all, it is not every day that
people die for something which cost less than a
dollar (the cost of each saree was Rs.40)!
However, it is not a surprising fact considering
that in the priority agenda drawn by the BJP,
poverty alleviation comes fifth. So what if the
masses do not have food to eat or sarees to wear,
at least their 'lives' are safe under the nuclear
umbrella? All this shows that in the BJP version
of secularization basic livelihood issues of the
poorest 40 crore Indians do not feature at all.
BJP's recent wooing of Christians and other
minorities and its willingness to align with
anyone and everyone is only seemingly secular. In
reality, it is an abuse of the fundamental
principles of secularism. One need not look
beyond the irony of a Narendra Modi showering
praises on Irfan Pathan to understand this.
Commentators, who have gone to town delineating a
split between the moderate party and the hardcore
RSS/VHP/Bajrang Dal troika, obfuscate the fact
that the BJP is reaping electorally what the
sangh parivar has sown culturally. The
Hinduisation of adivasis and the BJP's stunning
electoral success in the adivasi belt of Central
India is the classic example of this. Pray, where
was the moderate face when fetuses were gouged
out and speared by Ram bhakts in Gujarat? The
ineradicable role that violence plays in BJP's
success should stop us from harboring any
illusions about its benign face.
The 'moderate' face of the BJP and the
shallowness of the media celebration of the same
were exposed when the 'sophisticated' Arun
Jaitley, the darling of the middle classes, had
the temerity to suggest that the scathing verdict
of the Supreme Court in the Best Bakery case was
not an indictment of the Gujarat Government! All
his education and sophistication could not endow
Jaitley with the moral courage needed to condemn
the perpetrators of a human tragedy. He
unwittingly justified the Supreme Court's
characterization of the ruling political class as
the 'modern day Neros'.
Critics who cannot stop gushing at BJP's
downplaying of the issues of Ayodhya and Article
370 in its vision document miss the silent
penetration of the Hindu majoritarian agenda into
various spheres of civil society in the last
decade. Nothing illustrates this more than the
case of the young Indian immigrants in Western
societies: they are some of the brightest minds,
'modern,' 'educated' and at the same time
carriers of the most retrograde of ideologies.
What unites an IIT professional from the
Hindu-Hindi heartland with the Christian doctor
from Kerala is their virulent support for the
American crusade against Islam.
True secularism does not exist in a vacuum; it
can flower only with a simultaneous substantive
commitment to democracy, equality, rights and
justice. BJP's record on these is pathetic. Can
we can dare to talk of secularism without
summoning the courage to look into the eyes of
Bilkis Yakub Rasool, who after being gang-raped
had to see her two-year old daughter's head being
smashed by the rioters along with the killing of
13 other relatives in Gujarat? BJP's religious
nationalism is neither based on a principle of
religious tolerance or on, what Gandhi had
identified as a superior principle, the equal
respect of all religions. The verdict in
Muvattupuzha will tell us whether the Christians
in Kerala will capitulate to the spin-doctors of
Hindutva, or deny the legitimacy it craves for.
(Nissim Mannathukkaren is a doctoral candidate at
the Department of Political Studies, Queen's
University, Kingston, Canada)
_____
[5] [USEFUL RECENT DOCUMENTARY FILMS ON KASHMIR]
(a)
The News International [Pakistan]
May 11, 2004
Movie on Kashmir provokes flak
By our correspondent
KARACHI: Premiere of Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy's
documentary film 'Crossing the Lines - Kashmir,
Pakistan and India' invited a fair amount of
criticism on Tuesday, particularly for offering a
dreamy solution to the 'unfinished business of
the partition'.
Produced by Pakistan's anti-nuke physicist,
focussing the thorny issue of Kashmir, the
documentary appeared on a screen at the Pakistan
Institute of International Affairs (PIIA) with
sharp images ranging from past and present of
India and Pakistan.
The MIT-trained physicist exploited his
filmmaking venture to incorporate the political
agenda of the Pakistan's left-wingers, making it
an old-fashioned political commentary. He played
some of the stock-shots superbly to document
course of Indo-Pak history in its true
perspective as well.
Brig (retd) AR Siddiqui, a defence commentator,
did not like the end piece of the film where Dr
Hoodbhoy yearned for peace in a conflict
situation.
He was critical of not portraying the nuclear
zeal on the Indian part, while showing the very
euphoria emanating from Pakistani leadership of
1998. Similarly, he missed what he called a fair
portrayal of the political thoughts from
Pakistani side of the Kashmir.
Iqbal Haider, a PPP hawk and former law minister,
sounded furious at what he dubbed Jihad culture
that caused more damage to Pakistan than to
India. "Jihadis cannot recover an inch of
occupied territories; they are engaged for vested
interests."
He agreed with Dr Hoodbhoy's realistic message
that people of Pakistan could no longer afford to
be the 'salves of past'. He described Dr
Hoodbhoy's filmmaking a courageous attempt. "This
film must be screened at the National Defence
College."
During the Q&A session with the audience, Dr
Pervez Hoodbhoy defended his deliberate omission
of the post-9/11 reference, as he deemed it would
eventually drag the subject into a bizarre
international perspective demanding inquiry into
the US designs in the region.
o o o
(b)
Shilpi Gupta's documentary WHEN THE STORM CAME
examines the experiences and testimonies of women
from Kunnan Pushpora a village in the militarised
Kashmir Valley. The film delves into the night of
February 23, 1991 when the villagers were victims
of mass rape at the hands by Indian security
forces. Rape remains a universal weapon of war.
URL: www.kashmirfilm.com/
Contact: Shilpi at Kashmirfilm.com
o o o
(c)
The Killing of Kashmir
Unreported World
Published: 08-Apr-2004
By: Channel 4
www.channel4.com/news/2004/04/week_1/05_kashmir.html
_____
[6]
GUJARAT - WHO PLANNED THE GENOCIDE?
STRUGGLES FOR JUSTICE IN THE SHADOW OF COMMUNAL TERROR
A discussion meeting with celebrated dancer and activist
MALLIKA SARABHAI and YUSUF DAWOOD (Dawood Family Campaign)
organised by South Asia Solidarity Group in conjunction with
Akademi South Asian Dance in the UK
Thursday 20 May 7.00pm
Hampstead Town Hall
Haverstock Hill, NW3 [London, UK]
(1 minute from Belsize Park Tube, buses 168, C11)
MALLIKA SARABHAI, renowned Indian classical dancer and
social activist, will speak about her initiative to bring the
perpetrators of the 2002 genocidal attacks on Muslims in
Gujarat to justice and the persecution she has faced from
Gujarat's BJP government as a result.
YUSUF DAWOOD, whose brother and cousin were murdered during
the genocide while visiting Gujarat from the UK, will speak
about the Dawood family's on-going campaign for justice and
their current legal challenge to the Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi.
_____
[7]
The New York Review of Books
Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004
Review
THE RISE OF BIN LADEN
By Ahmed Rashid
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA,
Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet
Invasion to September 10, 2001
by Steve Coll
Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95
1.
As millions of people around the world gathered
in front of their TV sets in March and April to
observe the public hearings held by the
independent commission investigating the
September 11 attacks, the one name that seemed to
hover over the room was Osama bin Laden. While
they watched, one senior official after another
from the Clinton or Bush administrations spoke of
the numerous attempts by the CIA before September
11 to capture or kill him.
Some of the stories of their efforts to capture
bin Laden had already been told. Those who had
followed recent accounts of the work of US
intelligence knew that the Clinton administration
would not give an order to kill him in February
1999, when he was at a hunting camp in southern
Afghanistan with a group of Arab princes. They
also knew that the CIA hired both an Afghan
mercenary group to kidnap him from an al-Qaeda
farm in Kandahar in Afghanistan and a group of
Pakistani commandos to do the same. Some of the
listening public probably knew as much as the
members of the commission.
Among the best informed were those who had read
Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, a remarkable book
published a few weeks before the public hearings
began, which got much attention among people who
follow intelligence matters, although nothing
like the publicity given shortly afterward to
Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies.[1] Clarke,
after all, was one of the most powerful experts
on terrorism in the White House. That he would
openly say that the administration he once worked
for was fighting the wrong war was wholly
unexpected. Steve Coll's background is quite
different. He was a reporter in Afghanistan, and
he has been the managing editor of The Washington
Post since 1998.
Ghost Wars, which has taken him twelve years to
write, spells out the CIA's covert work in
Afghanistan ever since the Soviet Union invaded
that blighted country in 1979. Coll recounts in
detail the CIA's encouragement and support of the
Islamic jihad against the Soviets, and the
consequences of this support for the rise of
radical Islamists like bin Laden. Not
surprisingly, the book gives particular emphasis
to the critical period during the late 1990s
after bin Laden established himself in
Afghanistan and then, with the help of the
Taliban regime, began his global jihad against
the US and the West.
Coll was able to secure secret documents about
the CIA's operations. He talked not just with its
officials, but with spymasters and spies in
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other
countries. No one else I know of has been able to
bring such a broad perspective to bear on the
rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard
put to beat his grasp of global events. Rarely
hasa book been able to anticipate, as Coll's has,
the revelations of government bureaucrats, such
as Richard Clarke, about intelligence. It does
so, moreover, in a more comprehensive way than
the recent testimony of US officials has done.
Coll has avoided a pitfall facing any reporter
who is given access to secret government files.
The CIA has a long record of manipulating the
press and television and putting out its own
interpretation of events. And its chief, George
Tenet, the only high-level official who has
served both Clinton and Bush, is a master of
political survival and spin. Some writers given
access to the innermost corridors of power appear
mesmerized by their proximity to the real
players, and it shows. It does not show in Coll's
book.
Bob Woodward's Bush at War[2] got more attention
than any of the other post-September 11 books.
Woodward was given access to the decision-making
process in the White House in the days following
September 11, which led to the US attack on
Afghanistan.[3] From Woodward's account, George
Tenet and the CIA come out smelling like roses;
clearly, they were prime sources of his book.
Woodward would have us believe that the CIA had
"assets"-informants and agents-on the ground in
Afghanistan; that it was fully in command of the
facts about bin Laden; and that it was raring to
start covert operations in that country before
the war in Afghanistan began. The CIA thus wanted
to put to shame Secretary of State Colin Powell
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld because
they did not appear to have the resources that
Tenet claimed to have. Coll shows that the
reality was entirely different-very few CIA
agents, for example, spoke any one of the
languages of Afghanistan.
Woodward's book made some of his fellow
journalists cringe with embarrassment. In
uncritically reporting Tenet's views to his
readers, he wrote as though he was the court
note-taker for a medieval king. He rarely
questioned what he was told, he seldom offered a
nonofficial point of view, and he accepted
Tenet's self-serving version of events.
We can be thankful that Coll is not mesmerized by
access to the powerful and does not feel obliged
to defend the CIA. Instead, he offers us a much
more balanced account, blaming the CIA for not
having had an adequate presence in Afghanistan
and for not knowing much about the country. He
also blames the Clinton and Bush administrations
for having prevented the CIA from taking action
against al-Qaeda. In contrast to Woodward, Coll
draws on a variety of different sources and shows
how there was conflict within both
administrations over the seriousness of the
threat of terrorism. Particularly striking is the
portrait he gives of Clarke as the tough-minded
expert on terrorism who fought for stronger
measures against al-Qaeda.
At least some of the facts are simple enough.
During the 1980s, the CIA paid hundreds of
millions of dollars in covert aid to the Afghan
Mujahideen, an Islamist force that opposed the
Soviet domination of Afghanistan and was also
backed by Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani
Interservices Intelligence (ISI). Following the
initial success of the anti-Soviet campaign, CIA
director William Casey persuaded the Reagan
administration in 1985 to increase this support
dramatically. The CIA particularly encouraged the
recruitment of radical Islamist fighters- many of
whom were linked to the Muslim
Brotherhood-believing them to be more dedicated
to the defeat of the Soviet occupying forces than
secular or royalist Afghani groups. As Coll
writes, the United States adopted a policy that
looked forward to a new era of direct infusions
of advanced US military technology into
Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist
guerrillas in explosives and sabotage techniques,
and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers
designed to demoralize the Soviet high command.
Among other consequences these changes pushed the
CIA, along with its clients in the Afghan
resistance and in Pakistani intelligence, closer
to the gray fields of assassination and terrorism.
When the US walked away from Afghanistan in 1989,
it left behind a seasoned group of jihadists,
whose brand of radical Islam had found an
enormously rich supporter in Osama bin Laden. The
son of a Saudi billionaire, bin Laden had joined
the jihad shortly after the Soviet invasion,
using his financial resources to build military
facilities and training camps for volunteer
fighters. Bin Laden first began to turn his
radical energies against the United States in
1990, when the Saudi royal family agreed to
invite American troops to be stationed in Saudi
Arabia as part of its alliance against Iraq. Coll
quotes Prince Turki, the Saudi intelligence
chief, suggesting that this was the moment when
bin Laden's extremism and hatred for American
infidels began to assert itself: "He changed from
a calm, peaceful, and gentle man interested in
helping Muslims into a person who believed that
he would be able to amass and command an army...."
After the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from
that country, so did the CIA-not just from
Afghanistan, but from virtually all of South and
Central Asia, a region that had less and less
importance for the post-cold war foreign policy
of the two Clinton administrations. In 1996 the
CIA was taken completely by surprise when the
ragtag Taliban captured Kabul and put the famous
Tajik-speaking resistance commander Ahmed Shah
Massoud to flight. In 1998, the CIA failed to
predict that India would explode a nuclear device
or that Pakistan would launch a military
offensive in the Kargil district of Indian
Kashmir the following year. And these are just
some of the more publicly known failures of the
agency that Coll has pointed out.
Coll writes that although the CIA had passed,
through Pakistan, billions of dollars in military
aid to the Afghan Mujahideen, it was not much
interested in who was getting the weapons, nor
was it concerned with what a post-Soviet
Afghanistan would look like. In choosing the
leaders and organization that would get arms and
money, the CIA was dependent on the ISI and the
Saudi Arabia General Intelligence Department
(GID). Coll writes of the period, "There was no
American policy on Afghan politics at the time,
only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as
carried out by Pakistani intelligence." Huge
deliveries of arms and money intended for the
Mujahideen passed first through the hands of the
ISI, which predictably took a considerable cut
for itself before allowing deliveries to the
Mujahideen groups they had selected.
Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's intelligence
services first backed the Islamic extremist group
Hezb-e-Islami-led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar-and
then, finding Hekmatyar greedy and unpopular,
they backed another group, the Taliban, led by
Mullah Mohammed Omar. Both men are now on the US
most-wanted list. When the Pakistanis were
supporting Hekmatyar, the Saudis were channeling
their money to a motley collection of Afghan
Wahhabis tutored or educated in Saudi Arabia, in
part with the help of the Saudi billionaire Osama
bin Laden. In the mid-1990s the CIA allowed the
ISI and the GID to dictate much of the course of
the Afghan civil war, including the rise of the
Taliban when the Mujahideen were weakened by
incessant fighting with one another and by loss
of public support. Coll writes that the Saudis,
preferring to work from a distance, funded ISI
activities in Afghanistan and even paid cash
"bonuses" to the ISI officers who promoted Saudi
interests.
Coll also found that by 1998, when the Taliban
ruled over two thirds of the country, the ISI
maintained eight stations in Afghanistan, staffed
by officers who gave assistance to the Taliban
and helped train militants for the war in
Kashmir. He repeatedly accuses former Prime
Minister Benazir Bhutto of "lying" when she told
visiting US officials that Pakistan had nothing
to do with the Taliban. He also debunks the
widely held theory among conspiracy theorists
that the CIA was directly supporting the Taliban.
It did so essentially through its support of the
ISI.
2.
I spent the 1990s trying to decipher the failure
of the US to have a clear policy toward
Afghanistan. I worked largely from Islamabad,
where the US embassy had a single mid-level State
Department official monitoring events in
Afghanistan and a consulate with a small staff in
Peshawar, near the border. No doubt there were
CIA agents in touch with them, if they were not
agents themselves, but their sources of
information were largely Afghan exiles living in
Pakistan and newspaper reports from journalists
who ventured inside the country. In short,
however energetically and enthusiastically, they
collected much the same information that a
competent journalist would have at the time. This
left the US largely ignorant about the inner
workings of the Taliban organization and its
connections with bin Laden. Coll makes it clear
that the CIA had no serious presence in
Afghanistan or the capacity to monitor events
there, let alone the ability to develop useful
sources and allies inside the country.
Robert Baer, a former CIA official, has written
that, in the 1990s, very few people in the entire
agency could speak Pashto or Persian-the two main
languages in Afghanistan.[4] The writer Robin
Moore, in his book The Hunt for bin Laden,[5]
notes that when groups of US Special Forces and
CIA agents were secretly airlifted into northern
Afghanistan to start mobilizing the anti-Taliban
Northern Alliance against the Taliban after
September 11, most of them could speak Arabic and
Russian, but not any of the languages used in
Afghanistan. In my own reporting, I observed that
the CIA had no competent interpreters and had to
use sign language in their initial contacts with
the Northern Alliance as well as in dealing with
other groups.
After September 11, I was deluged with dozens of
e-mails from US recruiting agencies who asked my
help in hiring Dari or Pashto speakers "for
government work." For an outsider like myself,
this lack of languages was the most obvious and
glaring example of the lack of interest in
Afghanistan by the US government and the CIA in
particular. The CIA had by then a cell of agents
and informants in the region to monitor al-Qaeda,
but it suffered from the same ignorance.
For the preceding fifteen years, leading Afghans
had been warning US officials of the dangers of
ignoring the country. Coll quotes a prophetic
statement by President Najibullah, the Communist
leader who was ousted by the Mujahideen in 1992.
He attempted to convince Washington to help put
together a coalition government in Kabul that
would keep out the most hard-line Islamic
Mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar. "We have,"
he said,
a common task-Afghanistan, the USA and the
civilized world-to launch a joint struggle
against fundamentalism. If fundamentalism comes
to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years.
Afghanistan will turn into a center of world
smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be
turned into a center for terrorism.
In 1992, Najibullah took refuge in a UN guest
house in Kabul and was then captured and hanged
by the advancing Taliban.
In the mid-1990s other leading Afghans, including
Ahmed Shah Massoud, Abdul Haq, the Afghan rebel
commander, and the current president, Hamid
Karzai, criticized US officials for ignoring
their country, but they could not get a hearing
in Washington. Abdul Haq was wholly ignored by
the CIA even after September 11 and he was killed
by the Taliban soon after the US-led war began.
Karzai, living in Quetta in Pakistan, was given
an expulsion order by the ISI to leave the
country just a few weeks before September 11,
because he was trying to organize Afghan tribal
chiefs to oppose the Taliban from Pakistani soil.
Indeed, as I have learned, when Karzai went to
the US and European embassies to try to get the
expulsion order lifted, he received no support.
Coll makes it clear that when these men said they
feared that their country was being taken over by
the Taliban and al-Qaeda, they were considered no
more than politicians with personal ambitions.
Al-Qaeda took them far more seriously. Massoud,
who continued to lead a fighting force against
the Taliban, was killed by as- sassins linked to
bin Laden just before September 11, and Karzai
has survived several assassination attempts. To
anyone who closely followed events in the region
it was clear that before September 11, the
threats posed by the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and bin
Laden were of low priority for the Clinton and
Bush administrations. After September 11, the US
was suddenly faced with the problem of how to
track down bin Laden and eliminate him, when he
had for years successfully created close
relations with the Taliban and many other Afghans
and Pakistanis.
Coll gives a fresh account of those years. In
January 1996, he writes, the CIA's
Counterterrorist Center at its headquarters in
Langley, Virginia, first opened a new office to
track bin Laden, which became known as the "bin
Laden Issue Station" with the code name "Alex."
At the time the CIA thought bin Laden was merely
funding terrorist groups, not directing them. A
few months later bin Laden flew on a rented
Afghan Airlines plane from Sudan, where he had
organized al-Qaeda cells among Muslims in Africa,
to Jalalabad in Afghanistan; he needed two other
flights to take his wives, children, and
bodyguards. The CIA officials were unable to
monitor his arrival, Coll writes, because they
had no agents in Jalalabad, one of Afghanistan's
largest cities and just a few miles from the
Pakistan border. Such, Coll found, was the state
of knowledge about bin Laden when he arrived in
Afghanistan, a country which he was to virtually
take under his control within the next four to
five years.
Coll outlines the various plans that the CIA's
specialists on bin Laden drew up to try to kidnap
him. They wanted to fund a commando swat team
from Uzbekistan which had no experience in such
matters. They tried to find such a team in
Pakistan, whose government had little interest
because it was backing the Taliban. The CIA
started financing an Afghan squad to try to
kidnap him; it restarted a relationship with the
anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, paying
him a monthly retainer and providing him
equipment so his forces could keep track of bin
Laden's movements. As Coll points out, the
enthusiasm and dedication of the members of the
CIA's special unit concerned with bin Laden were
of no help, since they were supposed to carry out
the foolish plans of the CIA management.
One problem was simply that the CIA had few
people they could count on-"assets"-in
Afghanistan itself. The Clinton administration
had no coherent policy toward the three main
political forces-the Taliban, the anti-Taliban
resistance, and Pakistan. Condoleezza Rice almost
inadvertently summed up the dilemma of both the
Clinton and the Bush administrations when she
testified before the September 11 commission on
April 8:
America's al-Qaeda policy wasn't working because
our Afghanistan policy wasn't working. And our
Afghanistan policy wasn't working because our
Pakistan policy wasn't working. We recognized
that America's counterterrorism policy had to be
connected to our regional strategies and to our
overall foreign policy.
But Rice also claimed in her testimony that the
Bush administration had been moving toward a
decisive new policy in the region that would have
increased the chances of catching bin Laden just
a week before September 11. In fact, nothing she
proposed showed any promise of accomplishing that
aim. Once again, it was a case of too little too
late.
In fact, as Coll makes clear, since 1996 the CIA
and the US government have been working in a
region where both governments and inhabitants are
largely opposed to the US catching bin Laden. The
US made no serious attempt to change this
situation. Yet nowhere in the testimony and
documents made public so far does George Tenet
even acknowledge these obvious contradictions.
Nor did he push for the strategic shift in
regional policy -particularly toward
Pakistan-that should have been dictated to the US
by the threat that al-Qaeda posed.
In his testimony to the September 11 commission
on April 14, Tenet admitted that the CIA made
mistakes and he concentrated on the technical
failings, lack of manpower, and coordination with
the FBI and other agencies that hampered the CIA
before September 11. He stated that "between 1999
and 2001, our human agent base against the
terrorist target grew by over 50 percent. We ran
over seventy sources and sub-sources, twenty-five
of whom operated inside Afghanistan." Even for
those who know little about intelligence matters,
it should be clear that this very small number of
sources inside Afghanistan was insufficient. And
Tenet gave us no idea of the quality of these
sources-were they cooks and drivers or commanders
and mullahs?
3.
Coll's book is deeply satisfying because it is
much more than a treatise on the CIA's
performance. It covers the entire region from
Saudi Arabia to Pakistan; shows where al-Qaeda
and bin Laden were getting support, discussing in
detail bin Laden's complicated relationship with
the Saudis, who had expelled him in 1991 but
remained ambivalent about bringing him to
justice; and it clarifies the battles over policy
among the CIA, the White House, and the US's
principal allies. It's an inside account written
by an outsider, the most objective history I have
read of the many failures of the CIA and the US
government in the region.
Two minor criticisms can be made. First, the
CIA's relationships with China and Iran could
have had considerably greater emphasis. In the
1980s China had developed a close relationship
with the CIA by providing the Mujahideen with
weapons during their war with the Soviets. In the
1990s with the advent of the Taliban, China
became increasingly concerned that some militant
Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang province were
joining the Tal- iban and al-Qaeda. Although
China was Pakistan's closest ally, Beijing was
never in favor of Pakistan's support of the
Taliban. But China disappears from Coll's account
after the 1980s.
Similarly, Iran was vehemently opposed to the
Taliban and nearly went to war with it in 1998
when Iranian diplomats were killed in the
Afghanistan town of Mazar-e-Sharif, near the
Uzbekistan border. Here the lack of official
contacts between the US and Iran was a
disadvantage for the US. But it is still unclear
to what extent the CIA tried to take advantage of
Iran's anti-Taliban sentiments. If they did not,
they surely should have done so through British
or German or other intelligence agencies. What we
know is that Iran quietly acquiesced to the
American war in Afghanistan and that a low-level
dialogue between the two countries finally began,
which culminated in Iran giving the US and the UN
its full support at the Bonn peace talks in
December 2001, when the new Afghan government was
formed. This could have led to an opening with
Iran, but within weeks Bush had foreclosed that
possibility by including the country in "the axis
of evil."
Meanwhile what of bin Laden himself? There can be
no doubt that he is alive and active. On April
15, he issued a new tape recording, which was
interpreted by analysts as suggesting that
al-Qaeda was taking a new strategic direction by
trying to exploit the differences between the US
and Europe. He offered European nations "a truce"
if they would pull out their forces from Muslim
countries. "The door to a truce is open for three
months.... The truce will begin when the last
soldier leaves our countries," bin Laden said.
"Stop spilling our blood so we can stop spilling
your blood...this is a difficult but easy
equation," he added. Previous tapes issued by bin
Laden have almost invariably been followed by
further terrorist attacks. His reference to the
March 11 attacks in Madrid as "your goods
delivered back to you" intensified fears that an
al-Qaeda cell may be organizing another major
terrorist attack in Europe.
The next day almost every European leader replied
to the tape saying they would not negotiate with
terrorists, showing that bin Laden can now expect
comment on his proposals from heads of
government. The tape is also a major
embarrassment to US and Pakistani forces, who
since February have assigned thousands of
soldiers to renewed offensive sweeps in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in order to
hunt down bin Laden. It is no secret that the
Bush administration is desperately anxious to
catch him before the November elections, a goal
that has become all the more urgent in view of
the difficulties facing the US forces in Iraq.
Ultimately, it has been the war in Iraq that has
been mainly responsible for the failure of US
attempts to capture bin Laden. Despite the
horrific killings in New York and Washington on
September 11, there is now (especially in view of
the information in Woodward's recent Plan of
Attack) more than enough evidence to prove that
the Bush administration began planning the
invasion of Iraq even before the war in
Afghanistan ended in December 2001. Afghanistan
badly needed peacekeeping troops, adequate
security for both leaders and local populations,
and funding for rebuilding the country. All were
neglected by the US. Similarly neglected was the
hunt for bin Laden. That many of his top leaders
were arrested created the false impression that
he and the cells of jihadists linked to him have
fatally lost power. As events in Madrid and in
Iraq have shown, this was an illusion.
The good will for the US and its allies arising
from the defeat of the Taliban in 2001 should
have been followed up by extensive local recon-
struction projects, providing not only schools
but, among much else, security forces, a basic
welfare system, and jobs. If this had been done,
local sources of reliable intelligence would also
have been found. Instead, small US army garrisons
were scattered along the border hundreds of miles
apart. They were never provided with the funds,
equipment, personnel, and other support they
would have needed to gather information, follow
up leads, concentrate on suspicious groups and
activities, and take the other measures that are
necessary if bin Laden is to be caught.
The hearings on September 11 have so far barely
touched on the fact that the moment the Afghan
war was over the US started moving much of its
counterterrorism resources and activities from
Afghanistan to Iraq-including soldiers, civilian
experts, intelligence units, satellite
surveillance, drones, and other high-tech
devices. The hunt for Saddam Hussein took on more
importance than the hunt for bin Laden, even
though there is still no conclusive evidence that
Hussein supported al-Qaeda or needed its backing.
Now the US military and the CIA, in a great hurry
to catch bin Laden, are trying to make up for
lost time in Afghanistan, sending in some two
thousand Marines and moving large numbers of
troops from Kabul and Kan- dahar to the border.
But additional US troops will not make up for
months that were lost both in gathering
intelligence and gaining local tribal support as
Washington pursued the war in Iraq.
Hiding out in the rugged and mountainous terrain
between Afghanistan and Pakistan where some
Pashtun tribesmen have proved to be excellent
hosts, generously financed by cash from al-Qaeda,
bin Laden seems far from being caught. The lack
of attention from the US during 2002 and 2003 has
probably allowed him to establish even closer
links to the local population and to find more
hiding places if he is threatened.
Some 70 percent of the original al-Qaeda
leadership is now captured or dead, and bin
Laden, unable to use the electronic
communications that would reveal his location, is
in no position to run day-to-day operations or
direct the many organizations linked to al-Qaeda
throughout the world-in sixty-eight countries,
according to Tenet's testimony to the September
11 commission. However, bin Laden remains the
spiritual guru and strategic guide for many
thousands of Muslim militants around the world;
every time he demonstrates that he is alive and
can still make a forceful presentation on tape,
he can be assured of more recruits to his cause
of global jihad.
In hindsight, September 11 was the result both of
a chronic failure of intelligence gathering and
coordination among agencies working in Washington
and of a failure to conceive of a strategy for
the region including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
neighboring countries. But since September 11
there has been a far bigger blunder by the Bush
administration: its failure to sustain momentum
in the efforts to make Afghanistan more secure
and more stable and to catch bin Laden. No
hindsight is required in order to make this
judgment. What needed to be done after the defeat
of the Taliban should have been obvious. What
successive US administrations could have done to
prevent September 11 will always be debatable;
perhaps the failure of intelligence to anticipate
it is ultimately understandable, in view of the
ponderous workings of bureaucracies. What is
unforgivable is the failure of the current US
administration to maintain the resources and
manpower needed to rebuild Afghanistan and to
arrest bin Laden after September 11, and its
decision to go to war in Iraq instead.
-April 28, 2004
Notes
[1] Free Press, 2004. See Brian Urquhart's
review, "A Matter of Truth," The New York Review,
May 13, 2004.
[2] Simon and Schuster, 2003.
[3] Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack (Simon
and Schuster), will be reviewed in a coming issue.
[4] See Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story
of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
(Crown, 2002).
[5] Random House, 2003.
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
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