Perma-War

On a September morning, two airliners slammed into the Twin Towers, and turned them to ash; the stuff nightmares are made of. Fifteen years later, the world’s yet to wake up.

The perp was a maniac from a forgotten war; a boy billionaire that had switched sides. “This is a battle of Muslims against the global crusaders,” he told al-Jazeera in 2001. Osama bin Laden knew all about the crusaders — he’d been one for so long.

But when the response came, mania ran both sides: neocons that thought, like Osama, that the world’s borders required remaking.

“If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map,” reads Rumsfeld’s memo from 2001, “the US will not achieve its aim.”

That logic’s long fallen apart: the war did change the world’s political map — the US did not achieve its aim. That is, if there ever was one. After a while, one’s left with the same hapless question: what was it all for?

It wasn’t revenge: Iraq did not attack America. Afghanistan did not attack America. Of the 15 hijackers, not one was Afghan. Not one was Iraqi.

It wasn’t rogue nukes: the closest the Bush boys came to finding any was a trailer that made balloon hydrogen.

It wasn’t liberation: the Taliban now control more territory in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001.

It wasn’t regime change: in Iraq, the US swapped a deranged dictator for a sectarian statelet. Saddam was a lone nutcase — a pariah to any place that mattered.

It could indeed be all the other stuff: Cheney’s lust for oil (documented) and Rummy’s need to bomb targets (documented) and the generational grudge match between House Bush and House Saddam (two wars and two idiot firstborns).



If that was really the case, what a waste. It took five trillion dollars — a number too large to make sense of — to kill half a million people, midwife the IS, and buy Hamid Karzai’s brother a drug trail.

And if those were the ends — cloudy, conflicted, and self-defeating — they didn’t justify the means.

There was ‘enhanced interrogation’ (didn’t work). There was ‘light invasion’ (dubbed ‘just enough troops to lose’). There was ‘shock-and-awe’ tactics (firepower so gruesome, it left thousands of civilians dead). There were ‘extraordinary renditions’, a cute way of describing the carting away of citizens to Third World torture zones.

‘Enhanced’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘light’, ‘special’: the vocabulary’s a dead give-away –nice words meant to assure people it’s not actually the horror shots that come to mind: loosed dogs and forced drowning and human pyramids.

But it was supposed to be over by now. With Bush’s exit and Barack’s entry, it would all go away.

Instead we end up with 2016: Obama’s left troops in Afghanistan, re-ordered strikes in Iraq, and blown open Libya for good measure.

Most immediately for us, he expanded the drone war in Pakistan with murderous enthusiasm, ramped up surveillance in ways that would embarrass Nixon, and turned away from Guantanamo, a medieval dungeon open only to Muslims.

The war is here to stay: they do not know how to fight, what they fight, or why they fight it.

And our war, our war’s here to stay as well. But unlike the US — perpetuate conflict as it has — Pakistan cannot afford for its own war to be permanent.

Doubtless, our objectives are narrower, and our enemy is weaker. But our response — after so much blood and tears — remains muted.

Last week’s images from Shikarpur — trays upon trays of ball-bearings — told us what’s at stake. Those ball-bearings would have otherwise torn through a mosque of congregants, had it not been for constable Rafique Qureshi.

Yet we do not celebrate this man. And though mass murder was stopped in Shikarpur, Mohmand was not so lucky: another bomber, another mosque, 28 dead.

Perhaps our failures warrant more discussion than our successes. Yet no one spoke for Mohmand — the TV channels switched over to Karachi; the print press didn’t even bother making it the main lead.

What makes this doubly devastating is that no one spoke for Mohmand even when casualties were four times as high: in 2010, when a twin suicide attack took the lives of over a hundred people.

Mohmand Agency — brought up only in the event of disaster — now no longer merits that much.

And it starts to seem — critique though we do the West for its perma-war — that we seem less and less interested in ending our own. At best, the press was insensitive. At worst, it was complicit in the culture we’ve created; a culture that turns an act of savage violence into a slow Friday.

But that’s just the press — what to say of the state?

Yes, the agenda’s out there: the National Action Plan, meant to save us from what we thought we’d never see on 16 December 2014. But we did see it: it was the turning point, ‘action’ quite literally the NAP’s middle name.

Yet, as Moeed Yusuf put so well in another paper, the Plan needs unpacking — root causes and impacts require identifying. And the state ‘needs to give it real meaning by devising specific action plans for each of its achievable elements and performing sincerely against those.’

Otherwise, writes Dr Yusuf, “it will be blamed for failure; and we’ll keep firefighting through kinetic means.”

Yes, left like this, we’ll be fighting forever.

As a young man, Henry Kissinger once wrote, “Life is suffering. Birth involves death.” Cynicism suited Kissinger, and the world paid for it: he took to Washington a doctrine of endless war and endless death, the beginning of the perma-war age.

What we saw in Mohmand, more than once, are the beginnings of that cynicism. Let’s not lose our capacity to be shocked. Let’s not lose our anger towards men that would shred our mosques with ball-bearings. This is not, cannot, be the new normal.

NAP must be made coherent. The war, long as it may be, must be decisively concluded. We’ve lost enough Rafique Qureshis.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2016.

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