THE last few months have seen the American dream turn into the world’s nightmare. As the US fights a hidden enemy, it is refining its instruments of this bizarre war. Every resource, newer weapons, intelligence and allies are all being pressed into a colossal enterprise. The Afghan nation paid an awesome price for the follies of its naive Taliban rulers. Probably 20 Afghans were pulverized for every American life lost on 9/11. in this unequal commerce of death, the international coalition became a submissive partner.

The new war now rages deep in the jungles of the Philippine islands. While the nightly armada lurks in the Indian Ocean, George W. Bush has spoken of the “axis of evil” stretching from Iran and Iraq to North Korea. Reminiscent of the Second World War, the Allies of virtue are to defeat the axis of evil. The equations have been reduced to those of the American Wild West where a posse is out to hunt and lynch the outlaws.

America’s allies in the international coalition, are reeling at the Bush declaration of a new war to encompass the world. If there were fissures of dissent then, there are now cracks of alarm amongst America’s allies. The Arab world and the European Union are perturbed to think that the much-sanctioned Iraq may be the next target. Russia, India, and Pakistan are equally uncomfortable if Iran is threatened. China cannot be happy if its backyard is targeted in the Korean pan-handle. China will read an ominous but veiled message of a threat to its own security from the ‘axis of evil’ doctorine. Russia, additionally, is also alarmed at the presence of the US troops in the Central Asian republics.

Impoverished and criminalized Russia living in the fantasies of its foolish myths of the past commissar and Czar glory, considers the CIS a sphere of its influence where it too keeps its armies in the dubious name of its security. What Russia has its eye on is the vast oil deposits of the Caspian Basin. The Russians see an erosion of their oil and other interest by the intrusion of the US forces in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Will nervous Moscow and Beijing invoke the Shanghai Six Forum remains to be seen. Saudi-Iran rapprochement may well be a precursor to the birth of a similar entente in the Middle-East. American unilateralism has sent a wave of discontent all over. The world sees not just ominous portents in the American blood-lust, but also an attempt at total domination.

The signals out of America speak of war, not peace. More war is better than less war for Bush. More war is also good for the American arms contractors. Now, of course, there is a different kind of meltdown from the one on 9/11 of the World Trade Centre. The collapse of Enron will continue to haunt the Bush presidency. This was not caused by Islamic militants from the Middle East, but by American’s own sons. And so Bush must find legitimacy in war rather than peace. The Bush presidency is now condemned to this terrible paradox of conflict rather than concord of peace. While the British commemorate their most famous retreats at Dunkirk and Gullipoli with much fanfare, the Americans celebrate their military advances at Alamo and Wounded-Knee. And this is what the world is in for, an inner American insecurity of a dangerous enemy lurking at the frontier.

But this time the enemy is unseen and unknown, and to boot, knows no frontiers. Under deep cover, he chooses his own time and place to strike. This invisible enemy may have been defeated in Afghanistan but has not been vanquished. The late Daniel Pearl, a gentleman and a reporter, paid with his life for the wake-up call that terrorism is alive and well. So did 10 innocent people killed in a Rawalpindi mosque in this Islamic Republic. Both acts of terrorism were done by highly instructed and trained persons.

Whatever message the terrorists want to convey, one thing is clear. The war is on without let or hindrance. Who knows where will this war take the world? Who will be the winners and who the losers? Will America, now driven by anger and ambition, go on fighting the symptoms or will it seek to treat the disease? Instead of treating the ailment, America is bombing the symptoms. The more symptoms are suppressed, the more the disease will spread. The inexorable truth of this age-old wisdom is lost on America. In this ever-escalating conflict, the danger is that the thin line between terrorism and anti-terrorism will become blurred, taking away the high ground of America. The images of the Gauntanamo Bay al-Qaeda prisoners evoke memories of Hitler’s concentration camps.

As long as America seems a friend of the oppressor and an enemy of the victim, the war on terrorism will not be won. How can America remain an apologist for the brutality of Ariel Sharon against the Palestinian people, of Vajpayee against the Kashmiri people, of Vladimir Putin against the Chechens. As long as there are Caesars, every age will have its Spartacus, for that is in the nature of man. Use of force alone can never sustain civilizations, but fair play and justice do.

Hard-line oppressive conservatism of Washington might be a short-term answer, but is not good enough as a lasting solution to the curse of terrorism. The campaign and its campaigners will need more and more enabling powers as is the wont of every security apparatus. This will inevitably compromise the Bill of Rights, besides creating race and religion related tensions in America. The six million Muslim-American community will be especially targeted by the lunatic fringe.

All this carries ominous portents. This need not be so. The September tragedy has given America a historic opportunity to address itself to containing terrorism and to remove its causes. Containment and redressal together can form a formidable weapon in this war. One without the other is doomed to failure. Muslim causes will need to be redressed for Muslims to believe in the virtue of fighting terrorism. The solution of Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya disputes will dry up the breeding grounds for terrorism. Anguish can give way to hope. The cause celebre of the terrorists will continue to be served unless political solutions are found for Muslim causes.

Today in the Muslim world the US is seen to be supportive of state-sponsored terrorism let loose by Israel, India and Russia. America and the West refuse to make a distinction between genuine struggle of the people under illegal occupation and terrorism. Unless this distinction is made, the foundations of international law and morality will be shaken.

The American architecture of security for the 21st century must not be based on arrogant and racist assumptions. The birth of the US was the result of valiant liberation war and even celebrated by America and admired by the whole world. Surely, General Lord Cornwallis commanding the Imperial British Regiments would be right in calling George Washington a terrorist, if the American definitions of today are applied to the events of yesterday.

Economic deprivation, hunger, disease, environmental degradation are among the causes fuelling hatred between the haves and the have-nots. The First World will need to reconsider its global economic policies towards the Third World. I think a very basic change of attitude is needed in the G-7 countries. Instead of treating the less developed countries as their markets, and its people as slave-workers; the West must now move forward.

From this colonial mindset relationship, it needs to become one of partnership. The West must develop new economic relations with focus at poverty alleviation and debt reduction. A minimum economic growth must be assured. Debt reduction and market access to the Third World will undoubtedly increase the trickle-down effect from the prosperity of the West.

This partnership approach in a ‘New Deal’ with the Third World, will increase the aggregate size of the world market for all. If this new relationship is not sought, the people of the Third World will continue to live in deprivation, despair and hate. If the Third World’s economic woes are not addressed, terrorism will continue to go about its business of death. Besides, small islands of prosperity will be inundated with economic refugees, transmission of communicable diseases, degradation of world eco-systems, and such global distortions.

The erstwhile cold-warriors need to ponder these issues and to act rationally in their own enlightened self-interest. While war may be a temporary way out, only political and economic solutions can be lasting to deal with international terrorism. Use of force alone inevitably leads to retaliation, and cannot be a substitute for justice and fair play.

The writer is a former foreign minister of Pakistan.

WOEFULLY, the Gujarat riots have come at a time when the Muslims of India have been joining the mainstream. Their faith in constitutional guarantee for equality has been deepening and their confidence in the country’s secular ethos steadily increasing.

Even after partition, their romance with Pakistan had not ended, although they had felt let down. But the liberation of Bangladesh, one Muslim area cutting itself from another, disillusioned Indian Muslim community. Good or bad, it accepted the fait accompli and began to develop an identity, which was neither theocratic nor pan-Islamic but wedded to the soil.

Otherwise, how do you explain their deliberate aloofness from the issues which caught the imagination of the Muslim world? India, next to Indonesia, has the largest Muslim population. But no Indian Muslim has ever joined any jihad anywhere in the world. Take, for example, Afghanistan. The Pakistani Muslims fought by the side of the Taliban against the American-backed Northern Alliance. So much so, Islamabad took Washington’s permission to evacuate them. Some Bangladeshi Muslims were also found in Afghanistan, but no Indian Muslim.

Nearer home, take Kashmir. You find Muslims of different countries participating in what is going on in the valley, but there is no Muslim from the rest of India. Even the support to the autonomy demand is lacking. Silence of Indian Muslims on such issues is often misunderstood. Yet, they have seldom said or done anything, which they think does not represent the sense of the country.

The happenings in Gujarat have indeed jolted the community. On the one hand, it is surprised over the reaction of some who became so desperate that they went to the extent of burning the coaches of the Sabarmati Express at Godhara. On the other hand, the community has suffered beyond proportion when it comes to retaliation. It has also found most of the Hindu intelligentsia coming to be part of the anti-Muslim sentiment in one way or the other.

True, the Gujarat fire did not spread to the rest of the country, except stray incidents in three or four cities. But it is of little satisfaction to the community when once in a while there is such a communal conflagration that whatever confidence it may have built over the period is decimated in no time. Every time the dishonesty, if not the animus of the majority, is more visible than before.

The community’s fears have heightened because it finds the authorities purposely inactive, the police contaminated and the government interested more in covering its tracks than in punishing the guilty. This was their experience in the last big killing at Ahmedabad in 1969, nearly 33 years ago, and now again in Gujarat. In fact, the community increasingly feels that a Hindu-Muslim riot generally turns into a Muslim-police clash. The proposal to have a mixed force in every state has remained only on paper.

The biggest challenge facing the community and the country is how to change the biased mindset of the police. And an almost equally big challenge is how to stop the injection of communal poison by the RSS parivar in the states under the BJP and in the central ministries headed by the BJP men.

The Ayodhya issue has risen at a wrong time. It has re-ignited the fears in the community, which is still reeling under the loss of the Babri masjid, demolished more than nine years ago. The community has also become nervously conscious of the clout the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a fundamentalist organization, has in the corridors of power. The prime minister had to bring the Kanchi Sankaracharya (high priest) from down south, to make an equivocal statement that it would abide by the court’s verdict on the disputed Ram Janambhoomi-Babri masjid site.

Even Otherwise the community’s faith in Vajpayee’s liberalism has been lessening for some time. This is clear from the way the Muslims voted in UP, bringing down the party strength in the assembly by 68 seats. Still the message has not gone home. Vajpayee, to the chagrin of the community, is as dependent on the RSS as before. It was the third party at the meetings between the Kanchi seer and the VHP.

The fallout from the events, as they have unfolded, is the closing of ranks by the community. The Muslim Personal Law Board is emerging as a rallying point. If this development had remained confined to religious problems, it would not have mattered. But it looks like becoming an instrument of political pressure. Many Muslims have begun talking in terms of one platform and even a Muslim party.

This might well be what Hindu fundamentalists and even the BJP are wishing. Their efforts to polarize the country have not succeeded so far but it is very clear that they are hell-bent on doing so. In fact, this has been their objective all along since partition. The community will play into their hands if it decides to go it alone. The Muslim Personal Law Board has not, however, done well by combining the Ayodhya dispute with its normal work. The demolition of the Babri masjid hurt the conscience of all, not the Muslims alone. The entire nation felt horrified because the masjid represented India’s composite culture. So many Hindus joined hands with the Muslims to condemn the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, another member of the RSS parivar, over the masjid’s demolition. The mood of the nation can be judged from the dismal defeat of the BJP in UP and Rajasthan in the state elections held soon after what happened at Ayodhya.

Muslims will be well advised in constituting a separate body in dealing with the Babri masjid problem. That body should have members of all communities. The Muslim Personal Law Board can join the body, but not appropriate it. The Ayodhya matter is not between Hindus and Muslims. This is a matter between those who believe in secular ethos of the country and those who are out to establish Hindu Rashtra. This is a matter which goes to the roots of our beliefs, our faith in the constitution.

The Supreme Court’s verdict was flouted when the masjid was demolished and the VHP is traversing a similar path in a zigzag manner. In a way, the prime minister is right when he says that a settlement between the two communities can decide the dispute. But it will be a limited settlement if it is ever reached. Many Hindus do not want the temple to come up where the masjid once stood. Many Muslims also do not want to rebuild the mosque at the same site.

Most people in the country would like the place to be left vacant so as to serve as a reminder to the nation that a structure that represented our pluralistic society was pulled down by religious zealots on December 6, 1992. Japan has done a similar thing to keep the horrors of war before its people. Hiroshima has left the ground, where the bomb was dropped during the last World War, vacant. It serves as a catharsis. The vacant site at Ayodhya may have a similar effect.

It is a pity that those who were once the supporters of a secular India are now apologists for a policy which is communal in content and ruinous in objective. Their rationalization of what happened in Gujarat is as disgusting as is their craze to stick to ministership. This is not a political issue. It is sheer communalism. How many Gujarats should happen before the different parties, particularly the ruling BJP, realize that religion and politics cannot be mixed if India is to stay united?

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.

I DON’T know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the current situation argues the exact opposite.

Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arabic or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention.

And of course, the media have run far too many “experts” and “commentators” on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as now seems to be the case with the projected attack to “end” Iraq. There are US forces already in several countries with important Muslim populations like the Philippines and Somalia, the build-up against Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its sadistic collective punishment of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in the United States.

While true in some respects, this is quite misleading. America is more than what Bush and Rumsfeld and the others say it is. I have come to deeply resent the notion that I must accept the picture of America as being involved in a “just war” against something unilaterally labelled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role either of silent witnesses or as defensive immigrants who should be grateful to be allowed residence in the US.

The historical realities are different: America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as an American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld.

The American Constitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness, nor for approved or disapproved forms of “American behaviour,” including things that have come to be called “un” or “anti-American” statements or attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr. Bush insists on the importance of religion in America he is not authorized to enforce such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and himself. The Constitution expressly separates church and state.

Moreover, as Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat of Ohio) said in a magnificent speech given on February 17, the president and his men were not authorized to declare war (Operation Enduring Freedom) against the world without limit or reason, were not authorized to increase military spending to over $400 billion per year, were not authorized to repeal the Bill of Rights, and, he added for the first time by a prominent, publicly elected official, “we did not ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.”

The problem for the world today is how to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States, which in effect has made no secret of the fact that it does not need coordination with or approval of others in the pursuit of what a small circle of men and women around Bush believe are its interests. So far as the Middle East is concerned it does seem that since September 11 there has been almost an Israelization of US policy: and in effect Ariel Sharon and his associates have cynically exploited the single minded attention to “terrorism” by George Bush and have used that as a cover for their continued failed policy against the Palestinians.

The point here is that Israel is not the US and, mercifully, neither is the US Israel: thus even though Israel commands Bush’s support for the moment, Israel is a small country whose continued survival as an ethnocentric state in the midst of an Arab-Islamic sea depends not just on an expedient, if not infinite dependence on the US, but rather on accommodation with its environment, not the other way round. That is why I think Sharon’s policy has finally been revealed to a significant number of Israelis as suicidal, and why more and more Israelis are taking the reserve officers’ position against serving the military occupation as a model for their approach and resistance. This is the best thing to have emerged from the intifada. It proves that Palestinian courage and defiance in resisting occupation have finally brought fruit. What hasn’t changed, however, is the US position, which has been escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his people identify themselves with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny. The people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard for accuracy of definition.

A week ago I was stunned when a European friend asked me what I thought of a declaration by 60 American intellectuals that was published in all the major French, German, Italian and other continental papers but which did not appear in the US at all, except on the internet where few people took notice of it. This declaration took the form of a pompous sermon about the American war against evil and terrorism being “just” and in keeping with American values, as defined by these self-appointed interpreters of our country.

Paid for and sponsored by something called the Institute for American Values, whose main (and financially well-endowed) aim is to propagate ideas in favour of families, “fathering” and “mothering,” and God, the declaration was signed by Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Daniel Patrick Moynihan among many others, but basically written by a conservative feminist academic Jean Bethke Elshtain, and its main arguments about a “just” war inspired by Professor Michael Walzer, a supposed socialist who is allied with the pro-Israel lobby in the US, and whose role is to justify everything Israel does by recourse to vaguely leftist principles.

All in all this declaration of principles and complaint addressed by American intellectuals to their Muslim brethren seems like neither a statement of real conscience nor of true intellectual criticism against the arrogant use of power, but rather is the opening salvo in a new cold war declared by the US in full ironic cooperation, it would seem, with those Islamists who have argued that “our” war is with the West and with America.

Speaking as someone with a claim on America and the Arabs, I find this sort of hijacking rhetoric profoundly objectionable. While it pretends to the elucidation of principles and the declaration of values, it is in fact exactly the opposite, an exercise in not knowing, in blinding readers with a patriotic rhetoric that encourages ignorance as it overrides real politics, real history, and real moral issues. Despite its vulgar trafficking in great “principles and values,” it does none of that, except to wave them around in a bullying way designed to cow foreign readers into submission.

I have a feeling that this document wasn’t published in the US for two reasons: one is that it would be so severely criticized by American readers that it would be laughed out of court and two, that it was designed as part of a recently announced, extremely well-funded Pentagon scheme to put out propaganda as part of the war effort, and therefore intended for foreign consumption.

Whatever the case, the publication of “What are American Values?” augurs a new and degraded era in the production of intellectual discourse. For when the intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of the world align themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that power’s case instead of urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication and understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual war against communism, which we now know brought far too many compromises, collaborations and fabrications on the part of intellectuals and artists who should have played an altogether different role.

Subsidized and underwritten by the government (the CIA especially, which went as far as providing for the subinvention of magazines like Encounter, underwrote scholarly research, travel and concerts as well as artistic exhibitions), those militantly unreflective and uncritical intellectuals and artists in the 1950s and 1960s brought the whole notion of intellectual honesty and complicity a new and disastrous dimension. For along with that effort went also the domestic campaign to stifle debate, intimidate critics, and restrict thought. For many Americans, like myself, this is a shameful episode in our history, and we must be on our guard against and resist its return.—Copyright Edward W. Said, 2002