How can the US bomb this tragic people?
By Robert Fisk



We are witnessing this weekend one of the most epic events since the
Second World War, certainly since Vietnam. I am not talking about the
ruins of the World Trade Centre in New York and the grotesque physical
scenes which we watched on 11 September, an atrocity which I described
last week as a crime against humanity (of which more later). No, I am
referring to the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations now
under way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God's
Earth to bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and
tragic country in the world. Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the
Russian army for 10 years, abandoned by its friends - us, of course -
once the Russians had fled, is about to be attacked by the surviving
superpower.



I watch these events with incredulity, not least because I was a
witness to the Russian invasion and occupation. How they fought for
us, those Afghans, how they believed our word. How they trusted
President Carter when he promised the West's support. I even met the
CIA spook in Peshawar, brandishing the identity papers of a Soviet
pilot, shot down with one of our missiles - which had been scooped
from the wreckage of his Mig. "Poor guy," the CIA man said, before
showing us a movie about GIs zapping the Vietcong in his private
cinema. And yes, I remember what the Soviet officers told me after
arresting me at Salang. They were performing their international duty
in Afghanistan, they told me. They were "punishing the terrorists" who
wished to overthrow the (communist) Afghan government and destroy its
people. Sound familiar?



I was working for The Times in 1980, and just south of Kabul I picked
up a very disturbing story. A group of religious mujahedin fighters had attacked a school because the communist regime had forced girls to
be educated alongside boys. So they had bombed the school, murdered
the head teacher's wife and cut off her husband's head. It was all
true. But when The Times ran the story, the Foreign Office complained
to the foreign desk that my report gave support to the Russians. Of
course. Because the Afghan fighters were the good guys. Because Osama
bin Laden was a good guy. Charles Douglas-Home, then editor of The
Times would always insist that Afghan guerrillas were called "freedom
fighters" in the headline. There was nothing you couldn't do with
words.



And so it is today. President Bush now threatens the obscurantist,
ignorant, super-conservative Taliban with the same punishment as he
intends to mete out to bin Laden. Bush originally talked about
"justice and punishment" and about "bringing to justice" the
perpetrators of the atrocities. But he's not sending policemen to the
Middle East; he's sending B-52s. And F-16s and AWACS planes and Apache
helicopters. We are not going to arrest bin Laden. We are going to
destroy him. And that's fine if he's the guilty man. But B-52s don't
discriminate between men wearing turbans, or between men and women or
women and children.



I wrote last week about the culture of censorship which is now to
smother us, and of the personal attacks which any journalist
questioning the roots of this crisis endures. Last week, in a national
European newspaper, I got a new and revealing example of what this
means. I was accused of being anti-American and then informed that
anti-Americanism was akin to anti-Semitism. You get the point, of
course. I'm not really sure what anti-Americanism is. But criticising
the United States is now to be the moral equivalent of Jew-hating.
It's OK to write headlines about "Islamic terror" or my favourite
French example "God's madmen", but it's definitely out of bounds to
ask why the United States is loathed by so many Arab Muslims in the
Middle East. We can give the murderers a Muslim identity: we can
finger the Middle East for the crime - but we may not suggest any reasons for the crime.



But let's go back to that word justice. Re-watching that pornography
of mass-murder in New York, there must be many people who share my
view that this was a crime against humanity. More than 6,000 dead;
that's a Srebrenica of a slaughter. Even the Serbs spared most of the
women and children when they killed their menfolk. The dead of
Srebrenica deserve - and are getting - international justice at the
Hague. So surely what we need is an International Criminal Court to
deal with the sorts of killer who devastated New York on 11 September.
Yet "crime against humanity" is not a phrase we are hearing from the
Americans. They prefer "terrorist atrocity", which is slightly less
powerful. Why, I wonder? Because to speak of a terrorist crime against
humanity would be a tautology. Or because the US is against
international justice. Or because it specifically opposed the creation
of an international court on the grounds that its own citizens may one
day be arraigned in front of it.



The problem is that America wants its own version of justice, a
concept rooted, it seems, in the Wild West and Hollywood's version of
the Second World War. President Bush speaks of smoking them out, of
the old posters that once graced Dodge City: "Wanted, Dead or Alive".
Tony Blair now tells us that we must stand by America as America stood
by us in the Second World War. Yes, it's true that America helped us
liberate Western Europe. But in both world wars, the US chose to
intervene after only a long and - in the case of the Second World War
- very profitable period of neutrality.



Don't the dead of Manhattan deserve better than this? It's less than
three years since we launched a 200-Cruise missile attack on Iraq for
throwing out the UN arms inspectors. Needless to say, nothing was
achieved. More Iraqis were killed, and the UN inspectors never got
back, and sanctions continued, and Iraqi children continued to die. No
policy, no perspective. Action, not words.



And that's where we are today. Instead of helping Afghanistan, instead
of pouring our aid into that country 10 years ago, rebuilding its
cities and culture and creating a new political centre that would go
beyond tribalism, we left it to rot. Sarajevo would be rebuilt. Not
Kabul. Democracy, of a kind, could be set up in Bosnia. Not in
Afghanistan. Schools could be reopened in Tuzla and Travnik. Not in
Jaladabad. When the Taliban arrived, stringing up every opponent, chopping off the arms of thieves, stoning women for adultery, the
United States regarded this dreadful outfit as a force for stability
after the years of anarchy.



Bush's threats have effectively forced the evacuation of every Western
aid worker. Already, Afghans are dying because of their absence.
Drought and starvation go on killing millions - I mean millions - and
between 20 and 25 Afghans are blown up every day by the 10 million
mines the Russians left behind. Of course, the Russians never went
back to clear the mines. I suppose those B-52 bombs will explode a few
of them. But that'll be the only humanitarian work we're likely to see
in the near future.



Look at the most startling image of all this past week. Pakistan has
closed its border with Afghanistan. So has Iran. The Afghans are to
stay in their prison. Unless they make it through Pakistan and wash up
on the beaches of France or the waters of Australia or climb through
the Channel Tunnel or hijack a plane to Britain to face the wrath of our Home Secretary. In which case, they must be sent back, returned,
refused entry. It's a truly terrible irony that the only man we would
be interested in receiving from Afghanistan is the man we are told is
the evil genius behind the greatest mass-murder in American history:
bin Laden. The others can stay at home and die.