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Afghanistan Hijacked

By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 8, 2001, at 5:57 PM ET

On Sept. 11, agents of the al-Qaida terrorist network hijacked four planes and used three of them to kill 5,000 Americans. The fourth plane crashed short of its target. Afterward, U.S. officials disclosed that if the fourth plane had made it to Washington, D.C., they would have shot it down. They were prepared to kill some civilians, if necessary, in order to prevent the terrorists from killing many more.

A similar scenario is now unfolding in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida and its Taliban agents have hijacked a nation, making it a base of operations for mass murder and terror. They're using the civilian inhabitants of this base as human shields. If we refuse to attack the terrorists, many more civilians around the world will die. So we have attacked, and some of our bombs have killed innocent people. Each of those deaths is terrible and tragic. But we're no more responsible for them than we would have been for shooting down that plane full of innocent Americans. We didn't put the lives of Afghan civilians at risk. Afghanistan's hijackers did.

The killing of Afghan civilians, followed by worldwide outrage against the United States for those killings, is central to Osama Bin Laden's long-term strategy. In a videotape released over the weekend, Bin Laden declared, "The entire West, with the exception of a few countries, supports this unfair, barbaric [military] campaign, although there is no evidence of the involvement of the people of Afghanistan in what happened in America. The people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with this matter. The campaign, however, continues to unjustly annihilate the villagers and civilians, children, women, and innocent people."

So far, Bin Laden's strategy is working. Pictures of dead civilians are pouring across TV screens and newspapers, turning Muslims and Europeans against the bombing. "We cannot accept what we see on the screen every day, hundreds of innocent civilians dying," Syria's president told British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Malaysia and Indonesia have called for a halt in the campaign, protesting that it has "taken so many innocent lives." Leftist parties in Germany, France, and Sweden, along with civic and religious leaders in Norway and Scotland, have followed suit. Polls in Britain, Spain, and France show support for the campaign slipping. The killing of Afghan civilians could lead to "an explosion of anger in the Muslim world," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told Le Figaro last week. "Innocents shouldn't pay for the guilty."

The essential theme of this worldwide reaction is moral equivalence. "As long as the U.S. keeps killing civilians, it will not differ from the organizations it is fighting against," a Turkish editor told the New York Times last week. Venezuela's president punctuated a televised speech by showing his countrymen a picture of dead Afghan women and children. "This has no justification, just like the attacks in New York didn't," he declared. "You can't respond to terror with more terror."

It's true that in Afghanistan, as in New York, killing civilians is wrong. But beneath that pattern lies another. In each case, only one party has believed that killing civilians is wrong. In each case, the other party has exploited that belief by putting civilians in harm's way. And in each case, the ruthless party has been al-Qaida and its agents. What's happening in Afghanistan isn't the reverse of what happened in New York. It's the same thing.

In recent years, al-Qaida has moved into Afghanistan, bought the Taliban's allegiance, set up terrorist training camps, and made the country its headquarters for organizing attacks on civilians abroad. After engineering the slaughter in New York, Bin Laden went underground in Afghanistan while his Taliban protectors surrounded themselves and their weapons with human shields. The testimony of Afghan refugees on this point is overwhelming. One told the Washington Post, "Now the Taliban come at night to the houses of the people and bring their equipment into civilian places." Another said the Taliban had parked 10 tanks at a mosque in Kabul. A third told Time that Taliban soldiers had positioned anti-aircraft guns on the roofs of houses in Kandahar. A fourth told the Christian Science Monitor, "Now the Taliban are taking their guns to the residential areas, and when they fire at the [U.S.] planes, the planes see them and drop bombs on them. That's when the innocent people die." If you don't trust the American press, you can find similar accounts in foreign papers such as London's Independent. Or you can consult the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, which reported on Oct. 27 that many refugees at the Afghan border have expressed fear of "being used as human shields by the Taliban."

Two days after Sept. 11, Frame Game argued that the chief weapon of terrorists is "their willingness to defy moral expectations. If you can't imagine that they'd target children, they'll target children. … If you can't imagine that they'd fly your plane into the World Trade Center, they'll fly your plane into the World Trade Center. Your conscience is their cover." That principle is no less true today. If you can't imagine that al-Qaida and the Taliban would hide behind children, they'll hide behind children. If you can't imagine bombing a residential neighborhood, they'll shoot at your planes from a residential neighborhood. Your conscience is their cover.

As Britain and the United States launch their public relations campaign to defend the war, they must take this message to the people and national leaders whose discomfort with civilian casualties is driving the global outcry for a bombing halt. The conscience of the world is the cover of terrorists. That's just as true when we attack terrorists as when they attack us. Americans hate killing civilians. But we were prepared to pull the trigger on Sept. 11, when the civilians in the crossfire were our own.

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Notes From The Fray Editor:

Ah q and Hedgehog argue it out in a good thread that starts here. They both also joined in Marylb's thread, "America hijacked by our own civility"--again, an excellent tour through the issues, with reasonable but widely-opposing views coming head to head.


Comments:

It is important for us to understand why Islamic terrorists may hate the West enough to act violently against us. It is also important for us to understand that our enemies can be, in fact, capable of hating for simply no good reason. While we cannot pretend such hatreds have been eradicated in the West, it is true that when extremist groups express them, a strong negative reaction commonly occurs from other sides. This is the so-called political correctness that many often disdain. Our desires to end bigotry and value diversity are noble. However, it would be folly to fail to recognize that bigotry does exist and often serves as a major motivation for both our actions as well as the actions of our enemies.

When a politician or pundit has made a statement along the lines, "They hate us for our way of life"; many observers have quickly repudiated their point of view. A very common response has been to point out past foreign policy mistakes by the U.S. in the region. These are very valid and worth bringing to light. The problem, as I see it, is that Arabic/Islamic hatred of us is a mixture of both a little justified anger and a little unreasoning bigotry mixed. We are effectively trying to learn about the former but not allowing ourselves to recognize the valid existence of the latter. It is noble for us to bow to "the better angels of our nature," as President Lincoln once so nobly termed the American spirit of compassion. However, we are doing a disservice to our ability to understand and thereby effectively deal with those who oppose us, if we cannot examine all of their motivations with open-minded and honest detachment.

--The Bell

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


It's hard to read moral blame-assigning articles--either Frame Game's or those he assails--without wincing at the belief that there must always be some way to blame one side or the other. Why not both? What is so wrong with our moral discourse that we cannot even comprehend the idea of shared responsibility?

The Afghan government pursues certain policies. So does the United States government. So does al Qaeda. At the end of the day, people are dead. As the lawyers would say, the policies of each were "but-for" causes of the deaths--in some hypothetical Tort Court in the Sky, you could make a decent case that all are responsible. To argue over whether the person who dropped the bombs or the person who made it necessary that the bombs be dropped should be considered morally to blame is to force too easy a simplification on a complex and ugly situation.

Frame Game is quite right to point out the hypocrisy of the Taliban position that the United States is purely and solely responsible for the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan. But that the Taliban's position is wrong doesn't, by itself, make the opposite position right.

--James Grimmelmann

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


There appear to be some people in the world, and even in The Fray, who argue that the U.S. is morally no better than Al Quaida, in that the U.S. is willing to kill civilians to achieve its ends.

Those people are correct. They should keep this in mind, however: Uncle Sam is the biggest, baddest "terrorist" on the planet. Osama may claim to have nukes, Uncle Sam certainly does. Also aircraft carriers, night-vision goggles, and the factories to produce more.

So the U.S. has this advantage: if we grant the "moral equivalence" nonsense, and accept that this is merely a war between two different kinds of terrorism, then the outcome becomes even more inevitable.

If you really think Uncle Sam is a "terrorist" just like Bin Laden, which terrorist's side do you really want to be on?

--Tony Prentakis

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


(11/12)

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