MGG Pillai Commentary View

<< Previous || Next >>

Clutching at shifting straws

AL QAEDA has said it is responsible for the bomb attacks on three American-owned hotels in Jordon. The Americans call this group Al Qaeda in Iraq. If you listen or read what they have to say or write, they do not tell you the most important fact: that as the war on terror on Muslims is worldwide, the response is too. They ignore this, and suggest the Jordanian Arabs were the ones most affected. But 100,000 Iraqis have died in American bombing. There is no word of that now except that they deserved it. The US Senate has passed a resolution that the American legal system should not be available to those sent to Guantanamo prison from countries in the Third World. The Americans have latched on to Al Qaeda's statement that they are responsible. They are playing an information game as the Americans are. They have found a new organisation called "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and its leaders responsible and therefore gulty. The war on terror against Muslims requires less standards of proof of guilt than murder, for instance. But this is a fight unto death, with both sides having access to the same methods. If the Americans can attack a defenceless country headed by a CIA agent, after months of telling the world a pack of lies, the reaction is equally swift. When it justifies the invasion of Iraq also as a war on terror, and alientate the Sunnis, in power since the British put them in power more than 80 years ago, the reaction was swift. Iraq is in a civil war. It would never be a country again, with handouts from the United States to keep it going, and unsafe for any who supports it. The Sunnis have waged a civil war since they were removed in a fit of anger. They don't want to return. Their aim is to destroy. Four or five Iraqi Sunni organisations supporting the elections next month is neither here nor there. But the Americans and their cohorts in Iraq and elsewhere look upon every Sunni move in their favour as evidence of grasping any floating in the sea. The bombing of the three hotels in Jordan is a direct response to the invasion of Iraq. The hotels would not be bombed if Iraq was not invaded.

The United States had the information war in its favour in Vietnam in the early stages. But it was the Vietcong and Vietminh who won. There was also discussion in Washington over whether the Vietminh controlled the Vietcong. It did not matter. Both were on the same side fighting the Americans and their cohorts. It was the only fight by proxies when the two giants of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, got involved in a fight. But the United States was not satisfied with proxy fighting, it wanted to, and got involved, in the fighting. South Vietnam was lost to North Vietnam. The Americans claim they won because they do business with Vietnam. But if business was the aim, they could have done it without losing a war. They have treated the war in Afghanistan as another war on terror. But it is bogged down there, as the Soviet Union was and the British before that. They happen to be Muslims, and so it is a war of terror. Whatever it says, it is bogged down in Afghanistan. To leave would be as dangerous as staying. The advisers in Washington have seen Iraq as similar to Afghanistan because Islam is the dominant religion. But as the Pakistani civil servant would tell you, it cannot rule the North West Frontier and the remote areas it look when it set the line of control in the dispute over Kashmir. There are periods when a strong government in Islamabad can estabish control in these areas, as President Ayub Khan, himself a Pathan from the North West Frontier, could. The Pathans have ruled in Afghanistan for about 150 years, and there is relative calm now because a Pathan is the West's blued eye boy President. But he still cannot leave his official residence without an escort, or leave Kabul by road. The Pathans – the Taliban (literally, the student) are from this group – will be an opposition if any group that it likes comes into power. The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan because the people it disliked, who were traditionally gardeners and cooks, came to power. Hamid Karzai is not only a Pathan, but from the ruling class, of the Populzai tribe. The United States probably did not chose him for his tribal connections, but the country is peaceful for who he is.

The United States gets complete dominance around the world for what it does in Afghanisation. That is because its opponents there do not have the sophistication that the Sunnis have in iraq. It would have helped the United States if it knew history. They do not. When I took history and inernational affairs in Harvard to whence I had gone as a Nieman fellow in Journalism in 1976, most of my friends in Harvard were dismissive of it. My lecturers included Thomas Kanza, a former foreign minister of the Congo. And what I learnt there was not the dry fact that history is often regarded as, but that the countries in Africa, Asia, South America were different from one another, and we must treat each country in its entirety. The Americans tend to treat contintents as if the countries in them do not matter. From that attitude to the war on terror, where Islam is treated as a monolitic religion, when in fact it is not. That is how it got into the mess it has in its foreign policy. An American who understands the world do not agree with his government's attitude towards war on an adjective. To an independent mind, the United States going to war on Islam was a mistake. True Muslim governments support it. But their people do not. The United States as a result has created a divide between the people and their governments. The governments wag the war on terror, as in Thailand and Malaysia, to remain in power. If in relatively peaceful countries, the difference between the people and the government is present, then do we need to talk of countries where there is no government, as in Iraq or Afghanistan?

As it is, the government in power in Malaysia, which claims is Islamic, has little in common with its people. It uses the Internal Security Act to pressure its opponents into line. What started as a British legislation to keep the Koumintang and the others in line in 1924 has transfored into an anti-communist legislation in 1948 and into the ISA to remain in power. Few communists are detained under the ISA, but Malay extremists and opposition politicians are. The special focus now is on Malay extremists. We are forced to accept, because of the nature of the government, the official version of what has happened. This has been extended to intra-party struggles. What is reported is the President's version. All others are not. The former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir, does not get the press he got as prime minister, when he controlled them, but only when he supports his successor or follows the official line. The presidents of the National Front's members is so treated. Those who are opposed to them do not get their reasons published in the media here. It is assumed that the president of the party, in office since 1978, should be elected for another term. The people have no say about their future. The result would be anyone's guess. What happened in Iraq is the worst example of what could happen. This would not mean that an Islamic government is inherently had but that its government has depended on outside forces to remain in power and has alientated the people.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com