Sense & Senility

NOVEMBER 2001 - One of the more enduring images I can recall of the four week bombing of Afghanistan is the sight of a Kabul street with the de rigueur background of bombed out buildings with no roofs, no walls standing, just a dusty skeleton and in the near distance, a broken wheel cart with its belly turned heavenwards and in the far ground, heavy, black smoke spiraling skywards, proof of the latest air strikes. Everything wears the garb of dust and desolation. There is not a single shrub. Not a flower in sight and no sign of the existence of water. Against these ruins of a city besieged, broken and razed again and again, by the Russians and the Afghans themselves, rides a happy and quite oblivious Afghan, adorned with soiled clothing and the happy, great unwashed look, on a rickety bicycle that defies gravity as it negotiates the many craters that now erupt like a bad case of chicken pox all over the country. What are the Americans scoring here and is this the promised delivery of freedom from terror?

There are increasingly voices of reason rising across the globe questioning the American role in a war that seems to be going nowhere. Bombing Kabul may be a strategically sound decision but what is there to bomb in Kabul? Sometimes they hit the Red Cross, sometimes relief warehouses. Sometimes they kill civilians who have nothing whatsoever to do with this crusade of good versus evil and now and then, they end up killing $5,000 dollar mine-sniffing German Shepherds. The last atrocity is hard to take for someone like me who is an out and out dog person, but it does bring home the senseless and pointless purposeless policy that flows from an outraged America right across the world to a destitute and poverty-ridden people. The dogs were doing a wonderful job in Kabul, sniffing the hundreds perhaps thousands of mines that were gifted by the departing Russians and to which happy list, more additions were made by the many Afghani factions that fought for supremacy after the Russians had gone and who are fighting to this day. But the smart American bombs are not that smart after all and in spite of their advanced technology, they cannot tell a crazy Taliban from an ordinary Afghani or a die hard ‘terrorist’ from a woman who is reduced to begging to survive. When the bombs fall, they maim, kill and obliterate, the just and the unjust with the same ruthless efficiency. We are given to understand that in Kandhar, they bombed a hospital by mistake and later, there was a clarification that it wasn’t after all a hospital, but an old people’s home. If there is an old people’s home in Kandhar, I am prepared to invite Colin Powell and pay for a round of beer in the bar at the Kabul Intercontinental or better still at the Taliban Head Quarters with Osama Bin Laden joining us for the festivities.

A few evenings back, as one fell in with the global ritual of staying glued to the TV screen, watching the broadcasts, there was a report from another front line showing the airport at another desolate and miserable tract of land. The Northern Alliance spokespersons, the ‘good’ guys, were escorting a band of foreign journalists and TV crews and excitedly pointing to the control tower. The funny thing was, there was hardly any tower and certainly it was no longer in any kind of control. In fact from the way it looked, it hadn’t been doing any work for quite sometime. This vital and I guess strategically significant Taliban post had been taken out by the coalition commanders, by remote control as it were. No one was quite ready to admit that there couldn’t have been much to that control tower any way and even if it was half way functional, surely that broken and bombed out terrain which might have been a runway, would have probably sufficed were a tank to come in and land, but no aircraft would have survived the first few feet of the ‘runway’. Now that it was out of commission thanks to half a million bombs dropped on it, how was it going to radically alter the fortunes of the war on terrorism? And so the madness continues with the world’s most inert military outfit, the Northern Alliance, parked firmly at a safe distance from Kabul and all that haphazard bombing runs. These boys are not prepared to move a muscle. They want Kabul delivered ala carte and are not going to risk getting clobbered in a war that they review as a means to an end. What they will do when and if they grab power is not even anybody’s guess. They will do what they did before – rape, loot and kill. Just because they are on the side of ‘good’ doesn’t mean they have changed their stripes. The Taliban have been no great reformers anyway. They have made a mess of their country and if they had 95% of it for five years with the evil west providing 3 million of their Afghan brethren with their daily bread, what were they doing in their spare time? Well we know they were chasing their own weird dream of Islam, breaking statues, shaving heads, killing anybody who disagreed with them and enforcing a system of governance so utterly inhuman, senseless and bigoted that few examples can match what they unleashed in their own country. They should have remained confined to their classrooms and whatever they were pouring into impressionable minds. When Mulla Omar stepped out to settle scores with a warlord, he, without knowing it, brought all this to happen and start a war right in our kitchen. We will pay for this for years and years.

Those who are fighting for Afghanistan in Afghanistan are demented as are those who bomb them daily into some sort of oblivion. Here, an army command, whose worst nightmare couldn’t have come close to what is now daily routine, has to contend with a gathering storm. They said Qazi Hussain with his personal connections with the US wouldn’t come to the big cities but simply make muttering noises from the sidelines. Well the man is on The Mall and screaming and shouting. Whoever doesn’t agree with the government feels it is their right to make their point of view heard in whatever way they deem fit. Those who went on the rampage in Quetta and those who have crippled Karachi day after day are no friends of this country. These people have never done a day’s solid work for Pakistan. They never will. Instead, they continue to hold us hostage, like the tribesmen who block the KKH for a week and claim capturing an airstrip in Chilas. Last week someone commented that my suggestion to clamp down on these elements was ill advised. So what’s happened a week later? Other than all the above, there is a lashkar parked on the borders itching to get into the act and crazed fanatics spray bullets on a congregation of poor worshipping Christians in Bahawalpur and kill 18. Our dearly beloved Qazi Sahib exhorts followers to besiege Islamabad next week. ‘Don’t carry arms,’ he tells them. ‘Carry 10 days food supplies.’ He is planning for the long haul. More similar acts will continue to surface and the sight of a bulldozer crushing a small mound of guns is not enough show of authority by the General. More needs to be done now so that we are not riven from within. The ordering of an enquiry into that shameful act in Bahawalpur is cruel and purposeless. There have been far too many such whitewash dramas with n conclusions and no exemplary punishments. Already the carnage in the church has been relegated to the inside pages. In a few days it will be forgotten like Afghanistan is when the Americans have satiated their desire for blood.