Machiavellian politics won't work for peace

Yesterday's supporters are today's critics. Accusation has gradually replaced applause. As mainstream America led by the establishment mourns its dead and yet again sermonises about its crusade against "terrorists", many commentators question the conduct of this "crusade". Both within and outside the U.S.

In Pakistan, the enthusiasm of those who believed that the U.S. military strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan would help to evolve a "new" progressive and democratic‚ Afghanistan, has turned into scepticism. As if internal sustainable socio-political development can be externally prompted.

The process of societal transformation is triggered only through internal dynamics; an organically and politically active intellectual class, as demonstrated in Iran.

It was the South East Asian societies where, in unique circumstances of defeat and destruction, the external factor facilitated their transformation. Irrespective of how keen another state is to see the emergence of a "democratic and modern state" only Pakistan's own home-grown dynamics can prompt that change.

Meanwhile, whichever regime is found "friendly and useful", it will get external support. Irrespective of its democratic credentials.

Simplistically, some Pakistani writers critique Washington for not promoting enlightened and democratic politics in the region, and the international community for not providing sufficient reconstruction assistance.

As if staying the course of traditional power play in inter-state relations, any country can afford to promote such values as a primary foreign policy objective. Hence Pakistan's correct, though somewhat shoddily executed decision, not to be on the wrong side of Washington.

Moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding, states generally and militarily powerfully ones specifically have supported and opposed those forces abroad which actively support or oppose their national interest. Washington's military action against Afghanistan was no exception to this rule.

Indeed, the shocking tragedy of 9/11 removed all the legal and intellectual barriers to a U.S. military operation that the UN's Humanitarian wing and officials and opinion-makers within the international community had, even if feebly, erected.

What is the U.S. score card in Afghanistan? Measure it against its own goal of bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan. On the political front, Washington's handpicked man President Hamid Karzai's election by the Loya Jirga in June was engineered by Washington's envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. The return of warlord-ism and heightened insecurity is the hallmark of today's Afghanistan.

The U.S. response to increased blasts and assassinations is the deployment of additional troops in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operation. The human rights critics of the Taliban remain fairly critical of Afghanistan's current human rights situation. The U.S. has also contributed to this negative human rights situation.

Indeed, the Guantanamo Bay men experienced virtual barbarism by U.S. authorities as the Geneva Convention on war prisoners was completely ignored, the inadvertent but inevitable death of innocent civilians during the ongoing military operation too consistently violates rules of engagement, and U.S. and European human rights groups and writers continue to critique various aspects of the U.S.'s Afghan operation.

Not surprisingly, discussions on the U.S. response to the mind-boggling 9/11 terrorist attacks did acquire a moralising tone. The logic of U.S. interest dictated a simple reasoning ; evil had unleashed itself on 9/11.

Washington's bombers

Washington's bombers would now vanquish this 'evil'. Naturally, a state with monopoly over the most advanced lethal weaponry and a militaristic mindset would respond to terrorist attacks in the very heart of its existence – New York and Washington.

Many legal instruments for conflict resolution lay in tatters as U.S. bombs and bullets were unleashed on Afghan territory to kill or kidnap Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaida men and the Taliban leadership. Washington adopted bullying tactics. Its anger was justified but who was there to restrain its militaristic outburst ?

Washington's post 9/11 policy merely reinforced its pre-9/11 policy; opting for unilateralism over multilateralism, for military force over dialogue, for short-term pragmatism over peace-pursuing principles, for militaristic security over holistic security and ultimately for the quest of domination over mutual accommodation.

In pursuing such policy objectives, the American state has travelled further on the Hobbesian path where brute force becomes the decisive factor. Political roots of strife and struggle are blurred. Often deliberately, but also because of ignorance and intellectual incompetence.

The weak and often the wronged are crushed by the strong. Sense of justice is perpetually violated. The reactive mode of thought among the weak and the wronged is strengthened.

Respect for human life erodes. Instead of banishing violence as a tool of the weak and the angry, it tends to become more popular. The underworld flourishes.

They call it 'terror'

The powerful call it "terrorism"‚ the angry and agitated justify it . The third category looking for negotiation and dialogue guided by humane and universal values becomes marginalised. Extrem-ism flourishes. Ironically the very element that the U.S. claims it seeks to banish, its policies will reinforce.

Policy makers and mandarins tasked with compiling and executing a response to strife and struggle overlook a key factor - that when their compulsions are political the outcome acquires an ideological texture, religious in most cases.

In framing strife and struggles primarily within a religious context policy-makers and mandarins fortify either the deliberately or ignorantly naive theories of clash of civilisations put forward by men like Samuel Huntingon.

With all man-made ideologies dead, the hungry spirit, jarred by the injustice and hate, by the ugly and the vulgar, turns to what it understands as the divine path.

Also misled at a very deep structural and spiritual level, by the U.S. and Pakistan-led forces that the authored post-1979 Afghan struggle, into combining lethal militarism with religion, Muslims struggling against political injustice increasingly use it as a mobilising tool. Whether in Central, South-West or South Asia.

Yesterday's authors of this hugely distorting and destructive religo-militarisation are now its arch enemy. They wish it away with bombs and bullets while ignoring the perpetuation of injustice.

Calmly they accept, if not actively promote, parity between the aggressor and the aggressed; the violator and the violated. Irrespective of the diktats and action of powerful states violence will forever flourish in the shadows of injustice.

The gradual erosion of the state's monopoly over destructive means and the advent of the information revolution, has incapacitated the world's most powerful state. It can no longer adequately control both thought and action.

Hence the strong and the weak conduct a parallel and often antagonistic discourse and mutually undermining actions.

Often merely advancing the cause of conflict. Yet, the primary responsibility for advancing conflict rests with the ascendant, the organised and global power.

Suicide bombers have sabotaged the power of sophisticated weapons and the rules of conventional warfare. The key factor of the adversary's fear of death is done away with.

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