9-11 (2 page)

The most dangerous case is Pakistan. One of the leading specialists on Pakistan, British military historian
Anatol Lieven, writes that the war in Afghanistan is “destabilizing and radicalizing Pakistan, risking a geopolitical catastrophe for the United States—and the world—which would dwarf anything that could possibly occur in Afghanistan.” At every level of society, he writes, Pakistanis overwhelmingly sympathize with the Afghan Taliban, not because they like them but because “the Taliban are seen as a legitimate force of resistance against an alien occupation of the country,” much as the Mujahadeen were perceived when they resisted the Russian occupation in the 1980s. These feelings are shared by the military, who bitterly resent U.S. pressures to sacrifice themselves for Washington’s war against the Taliban. Further bitterness is caused by the terror attacks (drones) by the U.S. within Pakistan, sharply accelerated by Obama, and demands by the U.S. that the Pakistani army carry Washington’s war into tribal areas of Pakistan that had been pretty much left on their own, even under British rule. The military is the one stable institution in Pakistan, holding the country together. U.S. actions might “provoke a mutiny of parts of the military,” Lieven writes, in which case “the Pakistani state would collapse very quickly indeed, with all the disasters this would entail.”

The potential disasters are heightened drastically by the fact that Pakistan has a huge and rapidly growing nuclear weapons arsenal, and also a substantial Jihadi movement. Both of these are legacies of the Reagan administration, which pretended it did not know that Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of Pakistan’s military dictators and a Washington favorite, was developing nuclear weapons and was also carrying
out a program of radical Islamization of Pakistan with Saudi funding. The potential catastrophe lurking in the background is that these two legacies might combine, with fissile materials leaking into the hands of Jihadis, in which case we might see nuclear weapons (most likely “dirty bombs”) exploding in London and New York. Lieven summarizes by remarking that “U.S. and British soldiers are in effect dying in Afghanistan in order to make the world more dangerous for American and British peoples.”
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The threat that U.S. operations in what has been christened “Afpak”—Afghanistan-Pakistan—might destabilize and radicalize Pakistan is surely understood in Washington. The most significant documents to have been released so far from Wikileaks are the cables from Islamabad from U.S. Ambassador Patterson, who supports U.S. actions in Afpak but warns that they “risk destabilizing the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis in Pakistan without finally achieving the goal,” and that there is a possibility that “someone working in [Pakistani government] facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to eventually make a weapon,” a danger enhanced by “the vulnerability of weapons in transit.”
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A few weeks ago the tortured corpse of Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad was found, probably murdered by the ISI, Pakistan’s powerful intelligence services. Shahzad was a highly regarded (and immensely courageous) investigative reporter who had been exposing how militants were “taking hold of some of Pakistan’s most powerful institutions, in particular the military.” His murder,
it is generally assumed, was a reaction to his exposures of what is recognized to be a “nightmare scenario,” steadily being brought closer to reality, with full awareness, by the Obama-Petraeus Afpak strategy.
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For such reasons as these, the most immediate and significant consequences of the bin Laden assassination are likely to be in Pakistan. There is much discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden. Less is said about the fury in Pakistan that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor had already reached a very high peak in Pakistan, and these events are already exacerbating it.

The U.S. commandos who carried out the assassination were under orders to fight their way out if necessary. Had that happened, they would surely have received air and maybe ground support from U.S. military forces, leading to a confrontation with the Pakistani army. Lieven writes that the Pakistani army is dedicated to protecting the sovereignty of Pakistan, and “if the U.S. ever put Pakistani soldiers in a position where they felt that honour and patriotism required them to fight America, many would be very glad to do so.” If the likely disintegration of Pakistan followed, he concludes, an “absolutely inevitable result would be the flow of large numbers of highly trained ex-soldiers, including explosive experts and engineers, to extremist groups.” That is the primary threat he sees of leakage of fissile materials to Jihadi hands, a horrendous eventuality.
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The Pakistani military had already been pushed to the edge by U.S. attacks on Pakistani sovereignty, including Obama’s drone attacks—which he escalated immediately
after the killing of bin Laden, rubbing salt in the wounds. As noted, that is in addition to the demand that the Pakistani military cooperate in the U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, whom the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis, the military included, see as fighting a just war of resistance against an invading army.

U.S. correspondents in Afpak are aware of the rising threat to security that has been enhanced by the bin Laden assassination. Jane Perlez reports the view of “a well-informed Pakistani,” close to the top military command, that “a colonels’ coup, while unlikely, was not out of the question” after the assassination. “An American military official involved with Pakistan for many years” concurs in this judgment. The result could be that army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, “the most powerful man in the country,” will be replaced by “a more uncompromising anti-American army chief,” commanding soldiers who are already “almost uniformly anti-American.” The Pakistani military-intelligence complex wasted little time reacting to the assassination. The ISI “arrested five Pakistani informants who helped the Central Intelligence Agency before the Bin Laden raid,” according to U.S. officials. The top Army commanders, who run the military by consensus, demanded “that General Kayani get much tougher with the Americans, even edging toward a break, Pakistanis who follow the army closely said.” The commanders issued a statement that condemned drone attacks anywhere in Pakistan as “not acceptable under any circumstances.” The military authorities had “already blocked the supply of food and water to the base used for the drones, a senior
American official said, adding that they were gradually ‘strangling the alliance’ by making things difficult for the Americans in Pakistan.”
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A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” Eric Margolis writes. “ ‘Bleeding the U.S.,’ in his words. The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap.… Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction … may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States”
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—particularly when the debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny, a different topic I cannot pursue here.

That Washington was bent on fulfilling bin Laden’s fervent wishes was evident at once. As discussed in the text below, written shortly after 9/11, anyone with knowledge of the region could recognize “that a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the U.S. and its allies into a ‘diabolical trap,’ as the French foreign minister put it.” The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, wrote shortly after that “bin Laden has been precise in telling
America the reasons he is waging war on us. [He] is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world,” and largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.”
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And arguably remains so, even after his death.

Was there an alternative? There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11. The “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized at the time, but no such idea was even considered. It might also have been possible to follow the precedent of law-abiding states, like Nicaragua’s response to the massive U.S. terrorist war to which it was subjected (discussed in the text below). Again, unthinkable.

In
9-11
, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty,”
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an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an
international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

Unfortunately, it is not a thought experiment. It happened. The only inaccuracy in this brief account is that the numbers should be multiplied by twenty-five to yield per capita equivalents, the appropriate measure. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the U.S. succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s brutal regime in office. One way to get a sense of it today is to visit the Villa Grimaldi in Santiago with one of the rare survivors as a guide, who can describe the exquisite torture regime stage by stage, with doctors attending to ensure that the subject survives to the next and more horrific stage until almost inevitable death. An experience not easily forgotten. The goal, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus”
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that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us” to take over their own resources and in other ways to pursue an intolerable policy of independent development. In the background was the conclusion of the National Security Council that if the U.S. could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.”
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Washington’s “credibility” would be undermined, as Henry Kissinger put it.

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” as Henry Kissinger assured his boss a few days later.
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These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. The first 9/11 was just one act in a drama, amply reviewed elsewhere, which began in 1962, when John F. Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American military from “hemispheric defense”—an anachronistic holdover from World War II—to “internal security,” a concept with a chilling interpretation in U.S.-dominated Latin American circles. The consequences are outlined by Charles Maechling, who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966. He described Kennedy’s 1962 decision as a shift from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” In the recently published Cambridge University
History of the Cold War
, Latin American scholar John Coatsworth writes that from that time to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites,”
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including many religious martyrs and mass slaughter as well, always supported or initiated in Washington. The last major violent act was the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, a few days after the Berlin Wall fell. The perpetrators were
an elite Salvadoran battalion, who had already left a shocking trail of blood, fresh from renewed training at the JFK School of Special Warfare, acting on direct orders of the high command of the U.S. client state. That act also framed a decade, which opened with the assassination of Archbishop Romero, the “voice for the voiceless,” by much the same hands, while he was reading mass.

The consequences of this hemispheric plague still of course reverberate.

All of this, and much more like it, is dismissed as of little consequence, and forgotten. Those whose mission it is to rule the world enjoy a more comforting picture, articulated well enough in the current issue of the prestigious (and valuable) journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. The lead article discusses “the visionary international order” of the “second half of the twentieth century” marked by “the universalization of an American vision of commercial prosperity.”
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There is something to that account, but it does not quite convey the perception of those at the wrong end of the guns.