Looking Back9/11 and the American Empire
Ten years have passed since those airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center. A journalist just asked me what I thought about this past decade from an Afghan American perspective: how had it changed the Afghan American community? And what about the American intervention in Afghanistan–did it help, did it hurt, is it succeeding? What are the prospects for peace in that region? Certainly, these are all legitimate and interesting questions. They’re questions I care about. But today, to be honest, I am thinking more about the impact of 9/11 on America than on Afghanistan. And I’m not just referring to the curtailing of civil liberties and the anxiety about terrorism that been so pervasive over the last ten years. I’m pondering the truly stunning world historical impact of the event. I suspect that future historians will look back to this decade as the turning point for the American empire. That, they’ll say, is when the collapse began. I hope I’m wrong,but that’s what I suspect. And it didn’t have to be. If it turns out that way, it will be because of vast and avoidable errors. It will because of the way George Bush and his administration responded to the crime of the young century. It was never necessary for America to give Osama bin Laden what he wanted–a war. That was a policy decision–a choice. It was never necessary for the president of the United States to treat Osama bin Laden as if he had the global stature and power of a Stalin or Hitler. That was a choice. Bin Laden didn’t have an army, he didn’t have a mass following, he didn’t have territory or resources or even an authentic political program. His only power was the power of propaganda and in order to use that effectively, he needed someone to magnify his bullhorn. George W. Bush obliged. Context is all. What was happening in America as a whole when the terrorists attacked New York and D.C.? Consider the bigger picture. In the nineties, this country pretty much lost its manufacturing base to the Third World, thanks to globalization; but it looked like it wouldn’t matter because we were inventing new technologies that would spawn a whole new “information economy.” Throughout the Clinton years, the stock market boomed and everybody had jobs because venture capitalist were investing madly in technological start-ups that seemed to have vast potential. Except for one little problem. No one had a clue how these start-ups were going to make money. There was no business model for the information economy. Quite the opposite. People would still pay for the underlying hardware, but not for the information it carried because that could now be gotten for free, thanks to all the technological innovation. And whatever information wasn’t free was radically devalued because the new technologies made so much more information available that the law of supply-and-demand kicked in, making any particular piece of information nearly worthless. In 1995, there were a few thousand magazines being published in America, at most, and that’s where you went to for a certain sort of information. In 2005, where you went to for that sort of informatino was a blog–and in that year there were an estimated 64 million blogs. There are many more of them now. And yet it took just as much time as ever for people to produce good information–to gain expertise in a subject, to research the particulars of a question, to draw smart conclusions, to shape data into a form usable by others. An economy in which the products cost time, effort and resources to make but cost nothing to buy–isn’t an economy. By the time Bush took office, capital was in flight from Smell.com and its ilk. Unfortunately there was no new industry to fly to. So capitalists parked their money in real estate while they waited for something to break. And because money was coming into real estate the price of it began to climb. But money stops being money when it’s parked, because money isn’t a thing with value per se: it’s only a measure of value, and real value consists only of economic activity and interactivity. Period. When the value of real estate climbs, nothing of actual value is increasing. Nothing is being built, no goods or services are changing hands. The price of real estate might climb but the growing value is an illusion. These trends were already emerging when Bush took office. A crisis was coming. Someone should have done something, and I’m not saying who, but Bush was president. His great policy initiative, however, his passion and achievement, was to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans by a trillion-plus dollars. The argument was: leaving more money in the pockets of the rich would lead them to create jobs and grow the economy. But that only works when there is an economy to grow. The Bush tax breaks arrived just when the rich had run out of anything of actual value to invest in, so the additional money they suddenly had ended up parked somewhere, mostly in real estate. What else were they goin to put it into? Smell.com? The failing auto industry? And when the price of high-end real estate climbed, the price of the next level went up, and the next, and the next. At the lowest end, real estate became the thing you could buy without money and sell for a profit. Everybody was feeding at the trough of illusion.Trouble was coming. Someone should have done something. And it was right in the middle of all this that 23 terrorists hijacked three planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center. Just as the American economy was losing its legs, just after the Bush Administration had undercut the ability of the U.S. government to take on any expensive projects, or even dotheones it was already committed to, George Bush started two really expensive wars. There is one thing, however, that an empire with hidden weaknesses can’t afford to do and that is to start a war it can’t win. And “win”, in this context, doesn’t mean forcing the other side to say “uncle.” That’s trivial. “Win” means improving some problematic situation the empire confronts. A war is a win for an empire when the result is greater order, more stability. (I’m not saying “stability” is always a good thing; I’m just saying, an empire is winning when it’s creating and expanding the realm of stability.) By this definition, the United States lost the war in Iraq. The violence has wound down there, but Iraq is a shattered mess simmering with hostility, both interfactional and anti-American. As for Afghanistan, the United States will probably pull out of that place over the next two years but when it does, Afghanistan may well see another eruption of bloody disorder, with possibly permanent damage to U.S. interests in the region. That’s not a win. But as soon as an empire looks ineffectual, it loses prestige and influence; its rivals gain heart; its allies lose faith; its currency begins to weaken (because currency is belief); its own internal contradictions turn into conflicts; and its social cohesion begins to erode. And in the end, social cohesion is the basis of imperial strength–not weapons, not economic might, but social cohesion. As a crime, measured against other crimes, 9/11 was virtually unparalleled. As an act of war, measured against other wars, it was a blip. Imagine if, instead of committing a trillion dollars to launching a war, Bush had responded to 9/11 by committing a billion dollars to conducting the biggest man hunt in history. Imagine if Bin Laden and his cohorts had been arrested a month after 9/11 and put on trial. Imagine if diplomatic pressure had forced Pakistan to end its support for the Taliban; Afghans would have driven that regime out by themselves. Imagine if the United Nations had then convened a conference amongst all the warring factions of Afghanistan and helped them create an actual government of national unity. Imagine if the Muslim world had seen a Muslim country restored to health and sanity with American help, but with no strings attached, no pressure on Afghans to remake their culture in the American image. Well, I know. It’s all woulda’-coulda’-shoulda’ at this point. The question is, where do we go from here? And the answer is– Oops I’ve run out of time. Previous PostsDeath, Disguises, and Weddings: Striking small stories from Afghanistan this year. Last Fall in Afghanistan: A roundup of main events and trends. Bags of Cash from Iran Iran has been giving Hamid Karzai bags of cash. What does it mean? How should Americans feel about this? End Game in Afghanistan? Some journalists say the “end game” in Afghanistan has begun. But what would happen if the U.S. and NATO actually pulled out suddenly? Rise of the North Is Afghanistan dividing into two countries, a troubled south and a peaceful, stable, and flourishing north? |
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Some Thoughts on the Arab Uprising
When I ponder the events of the last month in the Arab world, I’m reminded of Herbert Stein’s remark: “Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.” From Morocco to Bahrain, kings and rulers are looking at a prairie fire of popular opposition. And the only thing a guy can say is, what took so long? For decades, all these countries have had authoritarian regimes kept in power by foreign sponsors. All have used secret police, torture, spies, and bribes to maintain their grip. In all these countries, the rulers have to come to look ever more like their foreign sponsors and ever less like the people they rule. Throughout this region, development has shredded the comforting verities of ancient cultural traditions without bringing a nourishing new cultural order. Of course, development has brought material benefits—cars, modern medicine, plumbing, paved highways, well-lit streets, and toys of all sorts: and people have appreciated the material fruits of development but their own elites have sucked up most of the goods and left them mired in squalor. It isn’t just that the rich have been getting richer. The rich have also growing more culturally alien. Obviously, this could not go on forever. Sooner or later, the connection between rulers and ruled was going to snap. The question is: why now? Technically speaking, these countries have different sorts of regimes. Morocco and Bahrain are monarchies, Tunisia and Egypt parliamentary democracies, Libya and Algeria “socialist” states ruled by revolutionary parties. But not really. Not really.
Really, all of these countries are old-fashioned dynastic monarchies. In each case, the outward form has distorted slight in each case to accommodate whatever Great Power is the sponsoring master. Khadafi came to the throne with the Soviets as his dominus, so he adopted a gun-toting, guerilla-like swagger that was in fashion for anti-imperialist third-world revolutionaries of his day. Mubarak came to power as a client of the United States, so he donned suits, adopted a corporate executive look, and called himself a “president,” staging elections from time to time and adopting other outer decorations of democracy. But the fact is, all these regimes had a single personality at the top, just as in an absolute monarchy. In each case, the ruler had absolute power except to the extent that he had to propitiate his immediate cohorts and family–also typical of monarchies. The fundamentally dynastic and monarchic nature of each regime began to emerge, however, when the first generation of rulers got old and their sons began grooming themselves or being groomed to take over. In Egypt and in Yemen, the sons were already operating as their fathers’ chief executives, his viziers, to use the old parlance. In Libya, Khadafi had his eight sons jockeying for position as he moved them from post to post, pitting one against another, grooming them for the succession while keeping them off-balance, so that they wouldn’t challenge the father in his lifetime—also typical of dynastic monarchies going back through time. The thing is, though, the world has changed. The single most crucial factor in these Arab uprisings has been demographic. Half the people in these countries is under 30 years of age. In some the statistics are even more extreme. In Yemen, I think I heard, the median age is 17! For these kids, the revolutions their parents made and the turmoil they went through struggling with neo-colonialism is ancient history. Cold War? Never heard of it. The events of 9/11? Heard of it. The proliferation of the Internet and of social media here as elsewhere has promoted horizontal connections and weakened vertical ones—young people interacting more with each other and less with their parents and grandparents and through them with their ancestors, ancestral traditions, and cultural past. In this context, when Mubarak addresses a crowd of passionate Egyptian demonstrators and tells them, “I am your father, you are my children,” he just seem preposterous. Khadafi strikes me as especially fossil-like, clueless, and out of touch. That doesn’t mean he’s harmless. He’s a grumpy, terrified, and terrifying old man, he’s killing a lot of people right now, and he might end up as the Arab Revolution’s first Ceausescu—torn to pieces by his own people. But the fact that this revolution is such a spontaneous outburst of young passion means that it doesn’t represent a program. Whose revolution is this? Nobody’s—yet. It’s just happening. Only in the future will we know whose revolution it was. This is true, of course, of pretty much all authentic revolutions. A society bursts at the scenes because its political forms no longer match its social realities. Then come disruption and disorder and everything is up for grabs and then someone manages to grab, and a new shape emerged. The question isn’t who made this revolution happen, but who is going to exploit the fact that it is happening most successfully. In Iran, the revolution of 1988-89 was a broad-based ramshackle outpouring at first. Khomeini was a huge figure, to be sure, but the Mujahideen Khalq had been working to overthrow the Shah forever, there was a vast middle class seething at the dynastic police power that both used them and shackled them, there were the bazaar merchants sidelined by industrial development, there were leftist and liberal as well as Islamist students, and there were so many others. Once the society was in disarray, however, the group most mobilized for action, took over. And that was Khomeini and his Khomeinists. The Iranian revolution became their revolution in those first two years of turmoil. Ditto the Bolshevik revolution The Czarist
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Tamim-
I see that you’ve gone in for sports reporting now too. Very perceptive. It needs to be submitted to some kind of sports venue so more sports nuts will see it.
I read on “The Scotsman” online that U.S. forces have admitted they killed Linda Norgrove. Ms. Norgrove was killed when U.S. forces threw a grenade into the room in which she was captive. Why a grenade was thrown in this manner during a rescue operation has yet to be explained. Speculation in the Scotsman was that the U.S. had faulty intelligence regarding her exact location.
what does endgame mean in the case of Afghanistan?? In the past thirty years we have heard of many endgames and many other expressions that do not solve Afghanistan’s problems. I think what Afghanistan need is not this sort of talk and analysis because non of these talks has brought peace and stability and has helped the Afghan people. Afghanistan problems will be solved when all sides who have a say stop doing what which is play a game that they n so good in all these years and be serious about a free, and peaceful Afghanistan.
Your idea is not just true, it’s a truism. Yes of course if every side involved stops doing what they’re doing and dedicates themselves seriously to a free and peaceful Afghanistan there would be no further problems there. But that’s like saying, it’s easy to be rich, you just open a bank account with plenty of money. How do we get from here to there? That’s the problem.
I know it’s not easy to be an optimist these days, especially in the case of Afghanistan but I believe we can start seeing progress and light at the end of the tunnel if most players are eliminated from this dirty game and those are the drug lords, risky and unqualified politicians, foreign powers with long-term agendas (Afghanistan’s neighbors)-we know who they are, Western powers including NATO and the US that knowingly or unknowingly has perpetuated this war. The only people who do not gain from this war and want it to be over are the ordinary Afghans and non-Afghans who are tired and worn-out, who want to see an end to this misery, and who feel for the Afghan people and say enough is enough!
“are eliminated” you say. Who is going to be doing this eliminating?
Good question! I wish I had the answer to that. I’m not quite sure if “eliminated” is the correct word to use. What I’m trying to say is that these players continue to go forward with their agendas even though they are not getting anywhere. I wish the Afghan people had that power to stand and do that but since they don’t have that power, their only hope is the International community and for the world to understand that Afghanistan has been, is , and will be a free country-similar to the wasy it was before the fall of the king, a-non-aligned and similar to Switzerland. Wishful thinking? I don’t think so-I just hope to be alive and see it in my life time!
Was really interested to see that story about growing saffron instead of opium!! Of course, if that caught on, then the price of saffron would go down if the world’s supply went up, but if its now 4 times the price of opium, I guess it could go down a bit and still be a profitable commodity!!
What is most apparent in the problems seen in Afghanistan today is the inherited general lack of capacity and education
For those who remember Afghanistan
We originally faced these challanges, therefore the same problems have multiplied with over 24 years of war the factor has grown proportionaly and adversaly effected its professional community.
Tamim — Thought you might be interested to see (if you haven’t already) the article in The New Yorker (Feb 14 & 21, 2011) by Dexter Perkins called “The Afghan Bank Heist” (pp. 48-62). It mentions “New Ansari” (p.54), “a bank known as a hawala, which enables people to move money into and out of the country without any electronic record.” Any relation? Or have they hijacked your family name?
You probably won’t remember but I took an OLLI course with you and am signing up again for your course this spring, and introduced you when you came to our book club at the Berkeley City Club last year to discuss your book “Destiny Disrupted.” I love all your books. Your writing is so straightforward, also sunny and funny, it makes even the most complex and sometimes horrible stories readable.
Hey Tamim,
Some argue that the American Mid-East policy has become this elephantine, monstrously irrelevant stereotype. This implies that the boys in the Pentagon are clueless.
I disagree.
The war in Afghanistan was never about exporting democracy or conducting counter-insurgency (Can someone explain what that means?) or winning. Winning what? Definitely not about capturing what’s-his-name.
The usual suspects are injecting dirty money into the multi-billion dollar weapon industry, redirecting oil revenues, reinventing financial clandestine ops, re-inventing export matrixes. They’re playing their geo-strategic-war-games. As they always have. Always will. They have no intention of “eliminating” those player/puppets who play by their rules.
Mine is a grim opinion as opposed to Nazrin’s solar optimism but, unfortunately, I think it sums up the motives/outcome better.
Alessandrob
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