War on terrorism or war on the Third World?

October 17, 2001
Issue 

BY RENFREY CLARKE

In a cave in a remote valley of the Hindu Kush, a bearded man is holed up. He is the person responsible, more than any other, for the worst outrages of modern terrorism. He must be located, captured, killed.

How to find him? He is protected by a regime of crazed fanatics. This regime must be subjected to the most intense kinds of political pressure and military threats. If necessary, it must be overthrown through direct invasion. Then the hunt for the terrorist mastermind can proceed in earnest.

Once the chief instigator of international terrorism has been brought to justice, the war on terrorism will have advanced a long way toward victory. Ordinary citizens will be able to return to their office blocks and airline flights, free from fear. The civilised world will again walk tall.

The story bears the character of a fable, or of a computer-game scenario. The television and newspapers pump it out day after day, to the point where scepticism seems somehow indecent. Some people believe the story implicitly. Many more feel a vague sense that something in it is amiss, but cannot think what this might be. There is a disinclination to speak out, an urge to seek reassurance in the thought that the people in charge must know what needs to be done. If everyone keeps the faith, the hope becomes, the dark hour will eventually pass.

War on terrorism?

For people who cannot be reassured by fables, the implications of the situation are horrifying. Go to war on one of the poorest countries on Earth, where eight million people have already been displaced by famine and civil chaos? Try to score victories against experienced, fiercely motivated guerilla fighters in remote mountain regions? And even if Osama bin Laden were killed and the Taliban government of Afghanistan were overthrown, would that stop terrorism?

The airliner attacks of September 11 are estimated to have cost no more than about US$200,000 to stage, and involved no dramatically elaborate technology or organisation. Probably no more than a few score people were involved in the planning and execution. Analogous attacks are more or less endlessly reproducible, from numerous points around the globe, regardless of whether bin Laden and the Taliban leaders survive or perish.

Unless the wealthy countries are sealed off hermetically from the rest of the world, security measures will not block more than a few of the avenues for such assaults.

Rather than defeating terrorism, the military attacks now beginning on Afghanistan seem guaranteed to multiply it. At present, the world undoubtedly contains thousands of angry, despairing young people ready to strap explosives to their bodies and walk into crowded discotheques. There seems no way that the carnage and trauma of the coming war will not turn these thousands of people into tens of thousands, at least.

Where, then, will be the decisive victories that "secure the world against terrorism"? Will it be necessary to accuse more countries of "harbouring terrorists" (when the US has proved so inept at locating terrorists, it seems churlish to expect Third World states to do better), and send special forces groups to scour their territory? Lists of supposed terrorist havens are already being published — Sudan, Libya, Syria, Cuba...

The "first war of the 21st century" seems fit to last a century. As it continues and escalates, the fact that it began as a "war on terrorism" will come to seem almost irrelevant.

It is simply inconceivable that the governments of the developed capitalist countries, and the media chiefs who support them, do not understand these points. But the media overwhelmingly have kept silent on these issues, and to the extent that First World leaders have reacted to queries of the official fable, it has been to damn the questioners.

How dare anyone ask why terrorists would commit acts of violence, New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani fulminated to the United Nations at the end of September. Addressing the British parliament soon afterwards, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was equally vehement and closed-minded.

The facts that underlie terrorist attacks, however, will force themselves to the forefront whether our rulers like it or not.

Why is there terrorism?

If close to half the Earth's population lives in misery on less than US$3 a day, while a small minority lives in luxury on more than US$1000 a day, the resulting sense of injustice is going to be bitter and widespread. Historically, gross social injustice has been quite sufficient to spur violent revolt, not just on an individual but on a mass scale. In our own time as well, there is no reason to expect that the world's poor will passively accept their fate. On this level, the existence of terrorism is no mystery whatever; the mystery is that the world's rich can pretend to be shocked when it occurs.

Poverty, of course, is far more psychologically crushing when you have the sense of being trapped in it. This is the dilemma of well over a billion people in the Third World, whose countries experienced no significant increase in per capita incomes (or saw an actual decline) during the boom decade of the 1990s. In light of this, the surprising thing is that the incidence of terrorism has been so small.

Poverty, of course, does not automatically impel individuals to violent revolt. Responses to economic injustice are mediated through a wide variety of social, cultural, ideological and political phenomena. It is fair to say, however, that anger at economic injustice is especially likely to become intolerable when it is combined with a sense of comprehensive cultural affront.

A sense of cultural affront is, of course, widely felt by people in Third World societies who are not themselves poor; combined with anger at the injustices suffered by compatriots and co-religionists, this helps explain why many of the people linked by US authorities to the September 11 attacks are or were from middle-class (or in the case of bin Laden, upper-class) families.

Acts of Third World revolt may also be a response to quite specific foreign policy outrages. Why, for example, would the slaughter by the US and its allies of thousands of defeated and fleeing Iraqi troops at the end of the Gulf War, or the many thousands of civilian deaths that have resulted from the embargo kept on Iraq ever since, not inspire enormous anger among Arabs?

There are, consequently, powerful reasons why members of Third World societies would want to strike blows against the world's rich. But to manifest itself as action, this impulse to revolt has still to be mediated through a range of political factors. Only these will finally decide whether the anger of the oppressed manifests itself in individual (or small-group) terrorism, rather than alternative forms of struggle.

Small-group terrorist actions such as those staged on September 11 tend to be cheap to mount, and can make a spectacular impact. But there can be no gains from these attacks for the Third World poor. Scores of thousands of Afghan civilians are likely to be killed in the coming months or to die from the hunger, disease and general chaos that will result from the war.

Meanwhile, opposition in the developed world to huge military appropriations, and to the use of armed force to crush almost any show of Third World independence, has been driven back to levels not seen since the early 1960s. Small-group terrorism, in short, has a devastating flaw: those who gain from it are generally the very people at whom it is supposedly targeted.

In regions of the world where capitalism has a long history, workers and other oppressed groups have almost always learned to reject terrorism as a strategy. Instead, militants have learned to rely on the methods of mass political struggle, which oppressors find much more difficult to combat.

If angry young people in the Third World embrace terrorism, this reflects the weak economic development of the global "south" — for which, ultimately, the capitalists of the First World must answer — and to some degree, a political failure by the international working-class movement to spread the lessons of its experience.

The building of strong workers' organisations in impoverished Third World regions is not the work of a few months or even years. Meanwhile, the raw anger remains. Does this mean that further waves of terrorist attacks are inevitable, and that Bush's "war on terrorism" has a certain justification?

It is, in fact, quite within the power of the First World ruling groups to take steps that would not kill anyone, and would make terrorism a rarity within a relatively short period. If these rulers were really hostile to terrorism, they would pursue such policies — policies that wind terrorism down, instead of ratcheting it up.

How to really end terrorism

A first move to end terrorism would be for wealthy states to stop threatening poor countries militarily. According to a recent count, the United States had military bases in 19 countries outside its territory; this is aside from the persistent offshore prowling of carrier attack groups. The continuing presence of US military forces in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War, it may be remembered, was reportedly a key reason why bin Laden turned against the US.

A second move would be to fundamentally reconstruct the world trade and credit systems, so that they functioned to help the world's poor instead of locking them in poverty. Specific steps here would be the cancellation of the third world's enormous burden of debt, and the removal of First World tariff barriers that discriminate against Third World products.

Another vital move would be to impose a tax on the First World rich, and in particular on their speculative operations, to relieve misery and fund development in the Third World.

It may be objected that these moves would not stop fanatics from continuing to hijack or blow up airliners, and that the cost would be exorbitant. But "fanatics" will not be stopped by going to war; quite the reverse. Meanwhile, implementing the measures outlined above would bring major and quite rapid improvements to the lives of the Third World poor. What degree of support and popular protection would fanatics then enjoy, even supposing that their own thinking was not affected?

As for the cost — how would this tally with the cost of waging war on country after country of the Third World, with no end ever in sight?

Could the wealthy elites that control the political process in the countries of the First World really implement such measures? Of course they could. Will they do it? Of course not. In the weeks since September 11, the ruling groups have made their choice crystal clear. Alternatives, so far as they are concerned, are not even up for discussion.

Still, it is correct to raise demands such as those listed above, in order to break the spell that has masses of First World residents gripped by the idea that the coming war will be necessary and just.

Might the effect of putting demands on governments be to raise illusions in what is possible? People for the most part are not so simple. Despite the propaganda, they fear that there will be no end to the cycle of war and terror, and will give a hearing to any cogent alternative. And once people are listening, the chance will be there to explain why the ruling groups act as they do.

As the war unfolds, the critical demands will be for an end to hostilities against the Third World, and for all military forces to be brought home. A mass anti-war movement must be built on this basis.

There must be no compromising on these key demands of the anti-war movement, no acceptance that the war is in any sense justified. This will not be a war on terrorism. It will be a war on the Third World, fought to ensure that the dramatic division of the Earth's population into rich and poor — the ultimate reason behind the September 11 attacks — remains exactly as it is.

The bombs that fall on the Third World will not protect First World residents from terrorist attacks. Almost certainly, they will increase the dangers.

Meanwhile, the rulers of the developed capitalist countries refuse even to discuss the kinds of moves that could lift the threat of violent death from people in their own and Third World countries alike.

You need Green Left, and we need you!

Green Left is funded by contributions from readers and supporters. Help us reach our funding target.

Make a One-off Donation or choose from one of our Monthly Donation options.

Become a supporter to get the digital edition for $5 per month or the print edition for $10 per month. One-time payment options are available.

You can also call 1800 634 206 to make a donation or to become a supporter. Thank you.