In this exclusive interview, Noam Chomsky speaks to V.K. Ramachandran about
the 'new war against terrorism', imperialism, the media and the role of
intellectuals.
November 15, 2001: there is a break in the North East monsoon, and it is a
clear, cool day in Thekkady. Noam Chomsky is on the second day of his first
holiday in many years, a five-day break from public appearances that takes
Carol Chomsky and himself to the coast, the hills and the coastal backwaters
of Kerala. Both of them have spent much of the morning reading and replying
to e-mails - the torrent that does not recognise time or place - and looking
at the Internet. She is now at the ayurveda clinic nearby, and Professor
Chomsky sits in a wicker chair outside his cottage, reading the newspapers
and preparing for a lengthy interview, exclusive to Frontline, with V.K.
Ramachandran. This is the most recent of many interviews that he has given
Frontline; the first was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, more than a decade
ago, during the Gulf War. The interview, interspersed with conversation,
goes on for more than an hour and a half, and covers many fields: terrorism
and the attack on Afghanistan, imperialism and war, the media, and a theme
on which Chomsky first wrote in the mid-1960s, the role of intellectuals in
society.
V. K. Ramachandran: Noam, what do you see to be the strategic significance
of the new military situation in Afghanistan?
Noam Chomsky: I assume that the U.S. will more or less take control over
Afghanistan. U.S. military force is so overwhelming that it can't fail to
subdue a basically defenceless country. This is quite different from the
Soviet invasion. The Soviets were facing a major mercenary military force,
backed by the United States and other powers. They also had additional
constraints: they never bombed cities or destroyed them, and they never used
what amount to weapons of mass destruction, like carpet bombs or
daisy-cutters. Assuming that this offensive subdues the country mostly, the
United States will probably delegate authority to reconstitute the country
to some other hands, maybe the United Nations or maybe its local allies.
Then comes a very uncertain situation.
The strategic consequences will be particularly significant for Pakistan.
For the rest of the region, it is hard to predict; it depends how local
populations will respond to what has happened. For example, will the
population of Saudi Arabia remain more or less quiescent while observing the
destruction of an Islamic country nearby? Nobody really knows. Experienced
correspondents in Saudi Arabia have been comparing the situation there to
Iran in the late 1970s, where events were completely unpredicted by
Intelligence services or anyone else. These are very volatile, unpredictable
situations, in which no one can tell when a popular explosion will take
place. And if such an event occurs in the Gulf region, it will be of
extraordinary strategic importance.
Ramachandran: Do you think the current military situation will encourage
right-wing triumphalism and serve as justification for military action, here
and elsewhere?
Chomsky: In the United States, undoubtedly. You can predict that any
military triumph of a great power will lead to a mood of triumphalism, which
is very bad news for the world. It frees options for further resort to
military power on the grounds that such power has been seen to succeed. When
violence succeeds on its own terms, it increases the likelihood of further
resort to violence.
Here the question is really how the U.S. population will react and how the
powerful allies will react. Will they be supportive of further unilateral
application of U.S. power in this fashion? If that is tolerated, it is very
bad news for the world.
Ramachandran: What is your assessment of the potential of the Northern
Alliance as a force with political legitimacy in the country and as a force
capable of governing?
Chomsky: The so-called Northern Alliance is not much of an alliance. Its
members are warlords who have been in bitter conflict with one another. In
fact, the massive destruction that they carried out ten years ago when they
were in control was mostly from fighting each other. Some of them have a
very ugly record. General Dostum, who is the 'conqueror' of Mazar-e-Sharif,
was a General in the Soviet Army who was part of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan until the end. After the Soviets withdrew, he retained control
of his region.
The U.S. will certainly try to forge them into a more or less obedient group
that listens to central orders, which ultimately will come from Washington.
However, whether they can impose discipline on these groups is impossible to
guess. These groups are non-Pashtun; they are Tadjik-Uzbek with ties to the
Central Asian countries and are, for many Afghans, a sort of foreign force.
The United States has, of course, been trying to bring in Pashtun Afghans to
represent somehow the roughly 40 per cent of the population that is Pashtun.
Whether there are any credible figures among the biggest sector of the
population who can join a U.S.-run coalition is just unclear at the moment.
Ramachandran: What are the present and potential humanitarian consequences
of this war?
Chomsky: For obvious reasons, the Western media and doctrinal system are
trying very hard to suppress that question. First, the threat of bombing and
the bombing itself have already caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Even
before September 11, Afghanistan was in a dire predicament from a
humanitarian point of view. Many millions of people - the United Nations
says 6 to 7 million - were surviving, and barely that, from international
aid. With the threat of bombing, international aid workers were withdrawn
and food deliveries were cut. A few days after September 11, the U.S.
demanded that Pakistan cut off food deliveries. International aid agencies
were extremely bitter about this and condemned quite harshly the threats
that were terminating the delivery of badly needed humanitarian aid (in the
United States, these reports were either suppressed or barely mentioned). As
of now, food deliveries are well below what were considered necessary to
help the people just to survive.
It is not simply food; people need shelter and blankets. Huge numbers of
people have been driven from their homes and have fled into the countryside.
There is at least some hope of giving a degree of sustenance to those who
fled across the border, to Iran or Pakistan. But apparently many millions
have fled into the countryside, and it is impossible to reach them. For
example, a couple of weeks ago, Western reporters estimated that about 70
per cent of the population of Kandahar had fled. It may well be that
Kandahar, where the U.S. destroyed electricity and water supplies (which
amounts to biological warfare), is almost unlivable. Where did these people
go? They are off to the countryside, into regions that, first of all, lack
access to food, except in an extremely limited fashion. These areas are also
probably the most heavily mined in the world. The United Nations had been
carrying out limited mine-clearing operations but those were terminated when
all international workers were withdrawn. Now the people have an additional
problem: the area is probably littered with cluster bombs. Cluster bombs are
much more dangerous than mines. They are vicious anti-personnel weapons that
send out flechettes that tear people to shreds. They just sit there and if a
child picks one up, or a farmer hits one with a hoe, it explodes.
Ramachandran: What does a bomb of this sort look like?
Chomsky: It is a little thing that a child would pick up thinking it is a
toy. In fact, they apparently look pretty much like the food drops, except
that they are smaller.
The same is happening in many places. The estimates are that in northern
Laos there are probably thousands of deaths a year, 30 years after the
bombing. In Laos the Pentagon would not even provide instructions on how to
defuse them to a volunteer British de-mining group that was working there.
In Kosovo as well, the U.S. refused to remove cluster bombs.
In Afghanistan nobody is going to clear these things. So in addition to the
mines, there will be cluster bombs unexploded and very little ability to
bring in food or blankets or to provide shelter. Many people will disappear
and no one will even know what happened to them. No one is going to do a
careful census of Afghanistan to find out what the effects were of the
bombing and of the threat of bombing.
There may be another problem looming. Before the bombing began, the Food and
Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations warned that there was a grave
humanitarian crisis taking place. A few days later, after the bombing began,
they announced that by their estimate about 80 per cent of the planting of
grain, which apparently takes place around then, had been disrupted.
A very graphic illustration of the investigation of casualties comes from
the two major atrocities that ended the millennium, Serbian in Kosovo, and
Indonesian in East Timor.
These are two major atrocities, but they are quite different. The Serbian
atrocities in Kosovo occurred after the NATO bombing began. Western
ideologues tried to suppress this fact, naturally, but we have extensive
documentation on it from the West.
The British, who were the hawkish element in the alliance, have now released
their internal records. Up until late January, the British literally
regarded the KLA as being the main source of killing. Although, just given
the proportion of force, it seems hard to believe, that is their estimate,
and that is what Robin Cook and Lord Robertson were saying in late January.
After the bombing, substantial atrocities began. That is when the population
was driven out of the country and truckloads of bodies were tossed into the
rivers. Although it is necessary to conceal these facts, they are apparent
from the Milosevic indictment, which includes virtually nothing before the
bombing. It all started after the bombing. Not a great surprise: if you
start bombing a country, they don't just sit there and throw flowers at you.
And the atrocities constituted real war crimes, no question about that.
After the war, Kosovo was flooded with forensic experts who tried to find
any possible trace they could of Serbian atrocities and these were
calculated down to the last detail. That is interesting, because since the
bombing was not a result of the atrocities but rather a factor in them, the
greater the atrocities the greater the guilt of the West.
In East Timor, the background is much worse. In the late 1970s, within a few
years of its invasion of East Timor, the Indonesian Army had killed a couple
of hundred thousand people, maybe a third of the population. This was done
decisively with U.S. military and diplomatic support. When the atrocities
peaked and really became genocidal, the British wanted to take part, so
since 1978 they have been probably Indonesia's major military supplier.
