Futility of War : Natasha Walter
A LEGACY OF LOSS
Sea of bullets, Afghanistan, 2002. Photograph: Simon Norfolk, courtesy: The Photographers' Gallery
The war on terror is also a war of terror.
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IT HAS OFTEN been said that every army in every war tells itself that it has a god on its side. Wars are rarely fought for wholly cynical reasons. And many politicians in Western countries who are trying to win over their people for this new war, the war on terror, do have a real belief in the moral value of the war.
This is, we are told, a war to end terror, and it is also a war to liberate oppressed people. So we were told many times in the build-up to the campaign in Afghanistan that the war would entail not only the removal of the threat from al-Qaeda, but also the liberation of the people of Afghanistan. Similarly, the war on Iraq is justified not only because it promises to deal with the threat that Saddam Hussein poses, but also because it is only through war, it is said, that the Iraqi people will be liberated. But when we talk about war and its potential benefits we tend to forget other truths, one of which is that war is itself terror, which leaves a long legacy in the bodies and minds of those who experience it. This war on terror is also a war of terror.
Last summer I travelled to Afghanistan to see for myself something of the effects of the war on terror as it touched ordinary women in Kabul. One woman I will certainly never forget, although I will almost certainly never see her again and I wonder, often, if she is still alive. I met her one day at the offices of the Ministry of Women in Kabul. I went there to interview women who were moving into political roles in the new administration, but as I walked through the building, I saw a group of women in ragged blue burkas sitting in the corridor. An official shooed them away from my path, but I followed them into the dusty courtyard and asked them who they were and why they were here.
One of these women, Khandijal, a painfully thin woman with a drawn face,
stood slightly apart. She told me that she was five months pregnant, although
her bump hardly showed on her skeletal frame, wrapped in its blue burka.
Five months earlier, a US bomb, aimed at destroying the Taliban regime,
fell on her house on the outskirts of Kabul. It had killed her husband
and injured Khandijal's leg.
Although it was now painful for Khandijal to walk or stand, every day
she walked to the Ministry of Women's Afffairs to beg for work from the
new regime.
"For four months I have been coming here every day to beg for work," she told me. "There is no work for us." Khandijal already had five daughters, all younger than twelve. "Every day I go back home," she told me, "and my children cry out, 'Where is the money? Where is the food?' I have nothing for them. My children are starving and nobody will help me."
"What do I feel about the future?" Khandijal searched for words, pausing as she looked at me, a well-fed stranger who could have no conception of what she was living through.
"My house has been destroyed. My husband has been killed. My children are hungry. I have no hope for the future." I asked her what she felt about the Americans and the British. "What can I say?" she said again, despairingly. "My husband had no kind of a life before the American bombs came. But now he has gone with the American bombs. They have taken everything." She began to weep, standing there in the brilliant sunlight.
This was just one woman's story, but it brought home to me how hard it is for any Westerner to comprehend the extremes of suffering that exist in a place like Afghanistan. To live with five young children dependent on you, utterly alone, without any form of state or foreign aid, mourning your husband, an invalid yourself, with no medical care, no money, and with your new child about to be born into such a bleak future - this is a life that we can hardly imagine. Now that she has been condemned to such an existence, is it surprising that Khandijal could not see the American and British troops as liberators?
We in the West are so good at mourning our own kind, we sympathise so emotionally with the terrible toll that the cataclysmic attacks on the Twin Towers had on the people of New York. And yet we are so bad at seeing that every person killed in Afghanistan - and some studies of the dead in Afghanistan suggest that more civilians died during the American bombing than in the Twin Towers - means at least an equivalent toll of mourning and despair to that of a person killed in Manhattan. Just because these people are far from us does not mean that if their husband or child or mother is killed they do not suffer just as we would. Indeed, given the pressure of fear and hunger and violence around them, their suffering is endlessly compounded.
If you meet any bereaved individual in Afghanistan you find the same truth: that the war on terror has also brought terror with it, into ordinary people's lives. And although they removed the Taliban from power, the participants of the war on terror have still not attempted to break the cycle of violence that was started in Afghanistan so long ago. I was surprised, when I spoke to women in Afghanistan, to hear how much bitterness they felt about the fact that the West has now allowed individual warlords to consolidate their hold on power in their country. They knew very well that the international community had armed these warlords in the first place, as rivals to the Soviet occupation. Some women I spoke to were surprisingly outspoken about the fact that, as they saw it, those warlords are not much better than the Taliban. "Who broke all the buildings and kidnapped all the women?" asked one female politician, Tajwah Kakur, when I interviewed her, referring to the mujahedin's previous record in Kabul. "They are just Taliban in ties," one woman teacher told me in Kabul.
The Afghan people I talked to were also very aware that the West had promised to help rebuild their country after dropping their bombs on it, and many of them were articulate in expressing their disappointment that this help remains minimal. Indeed, it is true that the interest of the West in the problems of Afghanistan is already waning. The cities are still destroyed, the roads impassable, the children hungry, the women oppressed by fear. Aid workers were already expressing their concern last summer that Afghanistan was dropping off the international community's radar and assistance was becoming harder to find. The example of Afghanistan shows us that our leaders, who have so much appetite for war, have little appetite for the long slog of peacemaking and nation-building.
A COMMITMENT TO war, without any commitment to the aftermath of peacemaking, is not calculated to make the world a safer place. Even if we can harden our hearts to the toll it takes on ordinary civilians, maybe we can afford to wonder whether it is also dangerous for ourselves to continue this cycle of violence. Survey after survey is showing that the people of other countries, especially those in the West, are now feeling more, not less, hostile towards America. Among the people in Afghanistan that I talked to, I heard bitterness and disappointment more often than hostility, but elsewhere hostility is on the rise. In one recent poll of public opinion internationally that surveyed the opinions of 38,000 people in forty-four countries, it was found that wherever comparisons could be found, hostility was increasing. Only six per cent of Egyptians polled, for instance, now say that they have a favourable opinion of the United States. This should give our leaders pause for thought, because the threat to ordinary people in the West today comes not from other nation states but from individual disaffected extremists. Does this atmosphere of increased hostility mean that terrorism is likely to decrease? Western leaders seem to believe that we can silence the anger and bitterness of every individual in a country so long as we have a compliant administration that will bend to the will of the West. But whether that compliant administration is in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Iraq, that is no guarantee that the individual people in the country will fall into line behind their governments and love us too.
It is hard to speak out against war without being called naive. And yet it is important to ask now, who is really being naive - those who believe that war is a route to peace, or those who can see that war is always, irreducibly, war. It is easy to talk blithely about the possibility of quick benefits and easy payoffs that accrue from war. But there are no easy payoffs from war. As soon as we intervene violently in another country's situation, killing its civilians, destroying its buildings, making children go hungry, forcing families to pack up and become refugees, then we take on the most enormous responsibility. We still seem to believe that we can sidestep that responsibility. And so it seems likely that we will leave many, many more widows and orphans wondering what kind of liberation it is that drops from a war-plane. o
Natasha Walter is author of The New Feminism (Virago).
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