I CONTINUE today with the theme I started to explore in this space last week: What will be the defining principle of the new world order which is still in the process of emerging? What will take the place of the bipolar world that defined the global order of the second half of the 20th century?

Communism manifested itself in two forms, one in Russia and the other in Asia. The first was expansionist. It projected itself into Eastern Europe and Central Asia, bringing back to the world another empire — the Soviet empire. The second was more internally focused, concerned not with expansion but with improving the well-being of the mass of people who had infused life into it in the first place. It was unfortunate that for two decades — from the early 1950s to the early 1970s — Washington failed to distinguish between the two entirely different dynamics that propelled these two very diverse movements.

Under the leadership of John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s highly strung secretary of state (1953-59), America developed an approach aimed at stopping the spread of communism into Western Europe, the Middle East, South and South-East Asia. Dulles devised a series of interlocking treaties to throw a chain around the expanding communist domain in Europe and Asia. Pakistan was a member of two of these treaties — the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). It was, in other words, a link between two chains. It was only with President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, that Washington began to understand the difference between the Russian and Chinese communisms.

The intense competition between two conflicting economic and political ideologies — western liberalism and communism — had divided the world neatly into two halves. Both Moscow and Washington saw this conflict in the terms used famously much later by President George W. Bush. The Bush doctrine of “either you are with us or against us,” was to distinguish America’s friends from its foes after “9/11.” But the same approach was used in the years of the cold war. The non-aligned movement (NAM) favoured by some large developing countries such as India, Indonesia and Egypt was shoved to the margins as Moscow and Washington continued to face each other.

Communism’s collapse in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union happened at a breath-taking pace in the two year period between 1989 and 1991. This process began with the pullout of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan in January 1989 and culminated with the formal break-up of the Soviet empire two years later. With the cold war over, what will be the defining principle for the new world order?

Historians like to write about epochs but there are no neat divisions between different periods in real history. This is as true of the line that divided the countries engaged in the cold war as is the case with the world at the start of the 21st century. The cold war’s end was, for many reasons, a disorienting event. But crossing that epoch-ending line is one event that is still being played out. That event is the war in Afghanistan.

The recent Afghan war has morphed at least four times. It began with the Soviet occupation of the country in December 1979 and culminated in the heroic resistance offered by the Afghan mujahideen against the invaders.

Helped by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, the Afghans, even though split in seven factions, defeated the Soviet troops and hastened the collapse of the Soviet empire. Once that awesome feat was accomplished, the seven mujahideen groups turned upon one another and brought the war in Afghanistan into its second phase. None of these groups was able to prevail resulting in much chaos and further destruction of life, and poverty. This period of extreme turbulence ended with the triumph of an entirely new group of Afghans, the Taliban.

The Taliban rule of Afghanistan brought to the world’s attention the spectre of a medieval regime imposing its obscurantist views on an increasingly hostile and alienated population. As the Taliban tightened their control over Afghanistan, they increasingly became a pariah nation. They were able to win the recognition of only three states, all Islamic: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This third phase of the Afghan war ended with 9/11 and the easy victory of America over the Taliban. Afghanistan is now into its fourth phase as the administration it supports is struggling to establish its control over the many centres of power beyond the capital city of Kabul.

I will explore more fully Pakistan’s evolving relations with Afghanistan later. Today my focus is on how the brief war in Afghanistan, fought by America between October and December 2001, was an important event in the way the post-cold war world was evolving. But it proved to be a less important marker in that evolution than another war, launched by America fifteen months after its victory over the Taliban regime in Kabul. This was the second war in Iraq that began on March 20, 2003.

In the intervening period between the fall of Kabul in December 2001 and the equally quick occupation of Iraq in April 2003, the administration of President George W. Bush had developed a doctrine to guide America’s presence in world affairs. In September 2002, a year after 9/11 the Bush White House published a strategy paper in which it spelled out clearly its right to strike out pre-emptively at any place or at any group of people it regarded as a threat to America’s citizens, its economy, and its global strategic interests. Washington alone had the right to define what were precisely the interests it was protecting and how it would hit at the forces — whether countries or groups of people — that posed a threat to them.

This doctrine of pre-emption was seen as a bolt from the blue by the nations of Europe, more precisely “Old Europe,” the term used derisively by Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush’s secretary of defence. Both France and Germany had struggled hard to provide a different kind of underpinning for the world order that was evolving after the end of the cold war. They wanted to let relations between nations be guided not by the interests of one single country, no matter how much power it had at its command.

They wanted instead to develop a system of rules, overseen by supra-national institutions to conduct international relations. The slow and methodical evolution of the European Union was a part of this process. At the time America revealed the strategy of pre-emption, the European nations were developing the contours of a new constitutional system to define their expanding Union. Going beyond Europe, the Europeans wished to strengthen multilateral institutions and formulated rules that would help settle disputes among nations.

The Europeans had no problem surrendering a bit of their sovereignty to international institutions in order to bring some order to international affairs. But America under George W. Bush had shown its unwillingness to go down that route even before 9/11. It had withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol that sought to control, inter alia, global warming. It had refused to endorse the creation of an International Criminal Court. It was not prepared to sign the treaty controlling the use of landmines. There were several other treaties, protocols and conventions from which Washington walked away or in which it was, at best, an unwilling participant.

It was in this contest of entirely different European and American approaches to the new world order that preparations were made to fight the second war in Iraq. These differences between the world’s two centres of economic power produced an enormous amount of acrimony. A great deal has already been said and written about the way these differences defined the way America conducted itself as it prepared for the war in Iraq. As the passage of time provides greater objectivity to analysis, more will be written on this subject by all manner of historians — political, military, international, and economic.

For our purpose, it is sufficient to understand that America’s military triumph in Iraq was extraordinary. It provided a new sense of certitude to a group of policymakers in the Bush administration about the new American way. This group — often referred to as neo-conservatives or neocons — was convinced that the American approach was not only correct. They were also convinced that it was America’s manifest destiny to bring its political, economic and social values to the rest of the world.

Will America succeed in this enterprise? In the answer to this question we will find the guide posts that a country like Pakistan must follow in conducting its own affairs with the rest of the world. What then is the answer to this question?

The thinking that motivates America’s “world project” is seen by some analysts as a product of the country’s own history. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote more than a hundred years ago that “people always bear some marks of their origin.” The American origin involves the tale of local citizens and some leaders with great imagination disposing of what they regarded as British tyranny under their king, George III. As an American political scientist wrote recently, the “American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq is driven by an idea so inscribed into the American psyche that it amounts to a syndrome: cast off the tyrannical leader, then citizens and leaders alike will band together to bring about the freedom that a tyrant’s presence alone precluded.”

America has immense military power. It has also equipped itself with a new doctrine that it is legitimate to use military force to change regimes, particularly in the Muslim world. And there is a strong belief that after the tyrants have been removed — be they the Taliban in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein, his sons and their associates in Iraq — the people will automatically embrace democracy and American values. Once that has happened there will be no reason for young Muslim men to do damage to American interests at home and abroad.

But, to go back to the French sage Tocqueville once more, and I quote him again: “Nothing is so perilous as freedom’s apprenticeship.” It takes time — sometimes a very long time — before a regime change can bring about change in the way people wish to be governed.

America’s great confidence in the virtue of its political and social values did not originate with George W. Bush, the country’s 43rd president. This belief goes a long way back. At the founding of the United States, Benjamin Franklin proclaimed that America’s “cause is esteemed the cause of all mankind.”

Abraham Lincoln went a little further and proclaimed that the American nation is “dedicated to a proposition” that is “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” Woodrow Wilson — the president most admired by those who favour an interventionist foreign policy on the part of America — proclaimed that his country’s flag is “the flag not only of America but of humanity.”

Will this thinking work to establish a new global order?

WILL the United States win its war on terrorism? How far has it succeeded in curbing terrorism through its military operations abroad? These are issues that need to be understood and answered in some context.

Let us start with Afghanistan. Ramesh Patnesar in his article in Time magazine of July 1, 2002 throws some light on the subject.

“Huge areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan are still controlled by militants sympathetic to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Mulla Umar is believed to have taken shelter in the mountains near Kandahar. In May 2002, he purportedly gave an interview to a London-based Arab newspaper in which he vowed to defeat the US and claimed that Bin Laden is alive... that is a nightmare scenario for American intelligence.”

The Washington Post highlighted the fact that many Afghans are “praying for the return of the Taliban.” In its issue of June 30, the paper reported an eye opening development namely that Hizbullah and Al-Qaeda are teaming up to strike against the US.

No less a person than chairman of the joint chiefs of staff General Myer admitted that, “the war on terrorism in Afghanistan is losing momentum. The Al-Qaeda has been far more successful in adapting to our tactics that we have been to theirs.”

In the same vein, Democrat Senator Dashchle commented in the media that the US inability to catch the Al-Qaeda leader raises the question, “are we winning the war on terrorism?”

Analysts say that Osama’s success in evading troops who have every advantage of modern technology has made him an irresistible icon to many in the Muslim World.

The Al Qaeda might have lost its training and recruitment bases in Afghanistan but now it seems that its following and tentacles have spread out further.

Ever since the Iraq war, guerilla operations in Afghanistan have intensified and have became more frequent and lethal in which US soldiers have been targeted. US experts acknowledge that the US invasion of Iraq has provided Al Qaeda with a new battleground and a new focus of recruitment, says one media report.

The group is now seeking martyrs, “to help liberate a Muslim land from Western occupation forces” as Osama says in one of his latest audio tapes. Arab veterans of the Afghan wars, always the hard core of Al-Qaeda, are now flocking to Iraq to join the anti-American resistance there.

The US troops stationed in Afghanistan have come under frequent attack from the Taliban since August. This shows that the Taliban are regrouping and resurging and might stage a comeback. Despite a two-year US-led military campaign in Afghanistan, the country is still at war with around 300 deaths in the past two months. This is the bloodiest period since the Taliban fall. At a secret meeting with the commanders of his militia, Mulla Umar asked his commanders to “step up the Jihad.”

The Mulla also had a meeting with his ten member shoora (consultative committee). This shows that the Mulla with all his party apparatus and network of his militants is operating in Afghanistan.

After the fall of the Taliban and under the US backed Karzai government, more than half of the Afghan 20 million population has become affected by drought. Four million are on the verge of starvation, and one million might starve to death in the near future. Fifty per cent of the livestock perished two years ago.

The US administration allocated 400 million dollars from its existing budget for rebuilding as compared with 11 billion dollars for the US military operations in Afghanistan particularly for hunting down the remnants of Taliban and Al-Qaeda. This gives some idea of priorities.

What prospects are there for the US campaign in Iraq to succeed? The US military operation against Iraq was opposed, condemned and denounced the world over. Massive public demonstrations were held in most major cities.

President Bush and his administration, however, remained adamant to attack Iraq. It justified its actions on the grounds that weapons of mass destruction in huge quantities were lying hidden in the arsenals of Saddam, which was inaccessible to the UN weapon inspectors. Vice-President Dick Cheney asserted that Saddam Hussein had re-instituted his nuclear weapons programme. It was further alleged that Saddam had links with the Al-Qaeda and these weapons would fall into their hands to carry out terror attacks against the US.

Americans were made to believe that the military operation against Iraq would not last long and would not cost much as the American army would be received as liberator. Democracy would flourish in Iraq followed by the rest of the Arab world falling over one another to embrace and adopt democracy. All these predictions made and assurances held out to the Americans have since turned out to be untrue.

The US promised freedom but delivered anarchy, it promised the well being the Iraqi people but unleashed loot and plunder.

With the fall of Iraq there was a wave of anger sweeping through the country. On the Friday following the fall of Baghdad, Shia and Sunni Iraqis gathered together in the most important Sunni shrine Mosque of Imam Abu Hanifa and their clerics gave ultimatums to the US forces to quit immediately.

General Nash, a veteran of the Vietnam war in an interview said that the Bush administration had blundered into making a grossly wrong assessment about the mindset and attitude of the people of Iraq. He could see different elements of the Iraqi population converging on a joint programme of carrying out an insurgency against the US military presence.

He minced no words in saying what was common between the Vietnam and Iraq wars was a “quagmire.” General Abizaid, a few days later, after taking over as the head of the Central Command, told the press that a guerilla type of campaign had developed in Iraq. Until a month or so ago, one US soldier on the average was being killed, and 2 to 3 wounded every day. The number of those killed daily on the average has since gone up to 2 or 3 and many more wounded every day.

Insurgents truck-bombed the UN headquarters killing 23 of the UN workers including the head of the mission and wounding almost 50 others. It was soon followed up with the car bombing of a very high ranking Shia Leader and a large number of his followers, for the sin of that leader of collaborating with the US occupation authority.

Only a few days later, on September 20, a gunman shot and seriously wounded a woman member of the Iraqi governing council. Close on its heels, a suicide bomber attacked the UN headquarters killing one security guard and wounding 19 others only a month after the headquarter was first truck-bombed.

Since the very start of the war on terror, the Bush government has been suffering military reverses abroad and political and economic reverses at home. Experts estimate that about 400,000 additional troops could be needed in Iraq.

From the domestic perspective it has been calculated that with one-year rotation even the current level of troops could not be maintained beyond March next year unless reservists are called up.

The budget deficit is about to cross the half a trillion-dollar mark. The Pentagon has already spent its 79 billion dollars and is reportedly asking for another 60 to 80 billion dollars for its expenditure.

There is a growing clamour in the United States for “bringing the boys back from the battlefield” of Iraq. President Bush therefore, had to climb down from the high rhetoric of the United Nations becoming “irrelevant”, to the position where he is asking the United Nations to assist America. The question that remains is: who is winning the war on terrorism?

STEREOTYPES can be valuable images if they are treated as background caricatures against which to cast the sharp silhouettes of the real people they misportray. According to cherished international stereotypes, Americans overseas dress badly, talk loudly, walk awkwardly, speak languages clumsily and carry very big sticks (munitions).

Yanks even were described wryly by one of their own number, humourist Mark Twain, as “innocents abroad,” but not, as this anti-imperialist writer knew very well, when it came to divvying up power or wealth. At that point the amusing stereotype shape-shifts into a darker, devious image more befitting a superpower, which is ever so pleased to profit from its activities on foreign soil without the need to occupy the wretched places. Local allies police these accommodating countries for them. The long sordid American record of intimate ties with the worst imaginable elites abroad (Somoza, Diem, Suharto, the Shah, etc.) for mutual exploitative gain is there for anyone who bothers to look at it. This buccaneering behaviour is not peculiarly American, it is what ambitious elites from major powers always do, if they can get away with it.

In the mid-1950s Graham Greene, just back from a reporting stint in Indochina, published a slim but powerful novel (recently made into an Oscar-nominated movie) entitled The Quiet American. His sardonic novel was hailed, especially later in the rueful aftermath of a costly US intervention, as a prophetic masterpiece about blind idealism run amok. With the jaundiced eye of the sly British spy he once was, Greene lampooned what he saw as the destructive enterprise that American true believers launched after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in order to ‘save’ Vietnam, but save it for whom?

Greene’s key character, Alden Pyle, an astonishingly naive covert operative, is serenely incapable of seeing that his government acted out of any but noble and selfless motives. Whatever the current band of US foreign policy officials desire must be good for everyone else too. Pyle actually was a thin and unpersuasive character, little more than an overgrown boy scout meddling in complex nationalist struggles across Indochina with clueless but murderous panache.

He aimed to build a ‘third force’ — set between commies and a profoundly corrupt state — who would be bankrolled by his axiomatically good-hearted American supervisors. Pyle was sure he knew what was best for other nations because while in an Ivy League university he read all the right abstract tomes about the joys of exporting democracy and prosperity. Nothing ought to stand in the way. As a result, this rather addled idealist distributed high explosives to potential cronies with the same businesslike aplomb of a pharmacist filling prescriptions.

Greene’s novel foreshadowed the ensuing relentless, heartless, stupid slaughter in Southeast Asia. For this ghastly spectacle he pointed the finger at Americans who seemed idiotically homicidal and not nearly as wise and cynical as Europeans, after slinking or being driven away from their former colonies, fancied themselves to be. The Quiet American was an awfully British book, and it was wrong. The American phase of the Vietnam War doubtless was fought by many people like Pyle, but it certainly was not begun or run by them. Cold-blooded realpolitik is conducted pretty much the same way the world over: material interests, not ideals, are what motivate foreign policy establishments.

As any perusal of The Pentagon Papers, released in 1971 by the courageous maverick Daniel Ellsberg, shows, the American elites at the time were every bit as “sophisticated’ and calculating and cruel as the most epicene European diplomats were in their imperial heyday. Vietnam was a defeat for the US, but it was no mistake.

Did Pyle exist? Biographers of Graham Greene say the Pyle character as an amalgam of several acquaintances, including super-spy Edward Lansdale who loved to ‘play dumb’ when cornered by questioners. One writer stingingly goes so far as to note how Pyle resembled no one so much as eager British public schoolboys of a certain vintage. But it’s not that there weren’t plenty of naive young Yanks to do the bidding of pragmatic power-grabbers who shed their consciences cheerfully, to find that everything is permitted if you have enough power.

This is the psyche of the ruling class, not the ordinary citizen. As for useful idealists, in his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare (as Chalmers Johnson reminded us) has cynical Octavian say of noble Brutus, “According to his virtue let us use him . . .”

One of us was in Saigon in 1966 observing the young soldiers, who were woefully misled about what they were really doing there, surrounded by hostile communities whom they were told they were saving from foreign aggression. They believed, or were told to believe, they were repelling the Chinese communist menace when the Vietnamese already regarded the Chinese historically as their key foe. The GIs often became extremely bitter when discovering the gruesome realities.

The fighting in the countryside especially had grown so vicious that soon their genuine goodwill dissolved into raging distrust of even their own government.. The discrepancies between the young Yanks apple-cheeked beliefs and the nasty realities of a counter-insurgency war were enormous and sparked a tremendous number of tragedies.

Women were attracted to the generous young soldiers who in Saigon at least, were often surprisingly well-behaved. You can get a taste of the Americans’ sense of themselves as well-meaning saviours in movies like ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’. The worst Yanks in Saigon were the arrogant middle-aged American businessmen who prowled there in packs, fattening on military building and supply contracts.

Meanwhile, the bloody intervention reduced rurally displaced Vietnamese families to destitution: the daughter a prostitute, the son a shoe shine boy, and their father a coolie. In advance of elections that year the Yanks amassed crowds in the streets to support their own candidates. On inquiry, these people turned out to be nearly all American employees and South Vietnam government personnel. No more mass support was displayed then than later in the carefully cropped photo last March of Saddam’s toppled statue, surrounded by a sparse band of Iraqi exiles imported for the purpose.

In any case, it took a long tortuous decade for most Americans to realize what really was going on in Vietnam. The psyche of the leadership hasn’t changed, but apprehensive Americans are twigging on more quickly to what is afoot today. Betting on Bush’s re-election is not the sure thing it was a few months ago. Polls already show a majority of Americans disapproving of Bush’s handing of Iraq.

Greene’s ‘quiet American’ not only was a condescending but also a misleading stereotype because Pyle seemed so primly unconcerned about what was in it for him. What Greene’s portrait missed was the anchoring of a febrile fanaticism in calculated interests. Where the Quiet American character does begin to ring true — if we add this missing ingredient — is beholding the gleeful US neo-conservatives who gained control of the machinery of an unelected government in 2000. Their Armani-suited fanaticism always stemmed, unlike Pyle’s, from unadulterated power-seeking, as the avid authors of the Project for a New American Century clearly have shown in that disturbing document.

These implacable ideologues — Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, John Bolton and others — stood to gain from extending US control, and braying for a Pax Americana. The Project gives them something gratifyingly grandiose to do. As jobs go, the role of imperial tribune beats that of musty scholar in the book stacks any day. Six key neoconservative figures also are linked to Israel’s Likud Party, raising the legitimate question, which the American media are too timid to ask, as to whose national interests they actually serve. They are the slick American equivalent of the grubby Taliban — true believers who never had to defend or even explain crackpot ideas in an open forum, and often were incubated in right-wing foundations.

One of us witnessed some of them at play in a university stronghold where they formed a silly cult of self-styled Nietzschean ‘supermen,’ all filled with a heady glow of truly communing with the ancient texts. Formerly dismissed as a bunch of ‘Conan the librarians,’ these bookish barbarians suddenly were in charge. What separates them from fanatics among Muslims are their natty attire, resources, and language; they are identical in their intense intolerance of others. Pyle is far more akin to this international wrecking crew, but even Pyle would have recoiled at their lack of humanity, conscience or shame.

What will neoconservatives do as the American peoples’ fear and acquiescence, exploited expertly since 9/11, erodes under the daily bloody toll exacted by the Iraqi occupation? Well, they carry on regardless. In the midst of the self-inflicted Iraqi mayhem this month Undersecretary of State John Bolton blithely pushed for armed confrontation with Syria while Assistant Secretary of State Paula De Sutter ached for an assault on Iran in her testimony before Congress.

Yet Yank citizens are showing signs of wising up and no longer are so quiet. Leaders in Britain, where dissent runs deeper, already talk about withdrawal. With infinite irony, it may be Tony Blair, by following Bush’s lead, who most closely resembles the Pyle of the novel — a cheery fanatic believing that because he has the might he must be right. Blair, like many American leaders, pleads that it will be more dangerous to withdraw from Iraq than to stay. Maybe so, but more dangerous for whom?