Volume 7, No. 11, November 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Who bears responsibility for the present situation? To understand this question, it will help to contrast two situations, that after WWII and that after the Cold War, and compare how the question of responsibility was understood and addressed in two different contexts.
In spite of Pearl Harbour, WWII was fought in Europe and Asia, not in the US. Europe, and not the US, faced physical and civic destruction at the end of the war. The question of responsibility for post-war reconstruction arose as a political rather than a moral question. Its urgency was underscored by the changing political situation in Yugoslavia, Albania, and, particularly, Greece. This is the context in which the US accepted responsibility for restoring conditions for decent civic life in noncommunist Europe. The resulting initiative was the Marshall Plan.
The Cold War was not fought in Europe, but in Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, and Central and South America. Should we, ordinary humanity, hold the US responsible for its actions during the Cold War? Should the US be held responsible for napalm bombing and spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam? Should it be held responsible for cultivating terrorist movements in Southern Africa, Central Africa, and Central Asia? The US’s embrace of terrorism did not end with the Cold War. Right up to September 10, 2001, the US and Britain compelled African countries to reconcile with terrorist movements. The demand was that governments must share power with terrorist organisations in the name of ‘reconciliation’ – in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Angola. Reconciliation turned into a codeword for impunity, disguising a strategy for undermining hard-won state independence. If terrorism was a Cold War brew, it turned into a local Angolan or Mozambican or Sierra Leonean brew after the Cold War. Whose responsibility is it? Like Afghanistan, are these countries hosting terrorism, or are they also hostage to terrorism? I think both.
Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, a million died, another million and a half were maimed, and another five million became refugees. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half have gone clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world.19 Afghanistan was a brutalised society even before the present war began.
The US has a habit of not taking responsibility for its own actions. Instead, it habitually looks for a high moral pretext for inaction. I was in Durban at the 2001 World Congress against Racism when the US walked out of it. The Durban conference was about major crimes of the past, such as racism and xenophobia. I returned from Durban to New York to hear Condeleeza Rice talk about the need to forget slavery because, she said, the pursuit of civilised life requires that we forget the past. It is true that unless we learn to forget, life will turn into revenge seeking. Each of us will have nothing to nurse but a catalogue of wrongs done to a long line of ancestors. But civilisation cannot be built on just forgetting. We must not only learn to forget, we must also not forget to learn. We must also memorialise, particularly monumental crimes. The US was built on two monumental crimes: the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans. The tendency of the US is to memorialise other people’s crimes but to forget its own – to seek a high moral ground as a pretext to ignore real issues.
What is to be done
Several critics of the US bombing of Afghanistan argued that terrorism should be dealt with like any criminal act. If terrorism were simply an individual crime, it would not be a political problem. The distinction between political terror and crime is that the former makes an open claim for support. Unlike the criminal, the political terrorist is not easily deterred by punishment. Whatever we may think of their methods, terrorists have a cause, and a need to be heard. Notwithstanding Salman Rushdie’s (2001) claim that terrorists are nihilists who wrap themselves up in objectives, but have none, and so we must remorselessly attack them, one needs to recognise that terrorism has no military solution. This is why the US military establishment’s bombing campaign in Afghanistan is more likely to be remembered as a combination of blood revenge and medieval type exorcism than as a search for a solution to terrorism.
Bin Laden’s strength does not lie in his religious but, rather, in his political message. Even a political child knows the answer to Bush’s incredulous question, “Why do they hate us?” When it comes to the Middle East, we all know that the US stands for cheap oil and not free speech. The only way of isolating individual terrorists is to do so politically, by addressing the issues in which terrorists ‘wrap themselves up’. Without addressing the issues, there is no way of shifting the terrain of conflict from the military to the political, and drying up support for political terror. If we focus on issues, it should be clear that 9/11 would not have happened had the US ended the Cold War with demilitarisation and a peace bonus. The US did not dismantle the global apparatus of empire at the end of the Cold War; instead, it concentrated on ensuring that hostile states – branded rogue states – not acquire weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the US did not accept responsibility for the militarisation of civilian and state life in regions where the Cold War was waged with devastating consequences, such as Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Central America and Central Asia; instead, it just walked away.
In the first weeks after 9/11, the leaders of the US and Britain were at pains to confirm aloud that theirs was a war not against Islam, nor even just Islamic terror, but against terrorism. To be convincing, though, they will have to face up to the relationship between their own policies and contemporary terrorism. A useful starting point would be to recognise the failure of the US’s Iraqi policy, and to pressure Israel to reverse its post-1967 occupation of Palestinian lands. It is the refusal to address issues that must count as the first major hurdle in our search for peace. For their part, Muslims need to break out of the straightjacket of a victim’s point of view. This, too, requires a historical consciousness, for at least two good reasons. One, only a historical consciousness can bring home to Muslims the fact that Islam is today the banner for diverse and contradictory political projects. It is not only anti-imperialist Islamist movements but also imperialist projects, not only demands to extend participation in public life but also dictatorial agendas, which carry the banner of Islam. The minimum prerequisite for political action today must be the capacity to tell one from the other. The second prerequisite for action is to recognise that just as Islam has changed and become more complex, so too has the configuration of modern society. More and more Muslims live in societies with non-Muslim majorities. Just as non-Muslim majority societies are called on to realise an equal citizenship for all – regardless of cultural and religious differences – so Muslim-majority societies face the challenge of creating a single citizenship in the context of religious diversity. In matters of religion, says the Koran, there must be no compulsion. Islam can be more than a mere religion – indeed, a way of life – but the way of life does not have to be a compulsion. Islamist organisations will have to consider seriously the separation of the state from religion, notably as Hezbollah has in Lebanon. The test of democracy in multireligious and multicultural societies is not simply to get the support of the majority, the nation, but to do so without losing the trust of the minority – so that both may belong to a single political community living by a single set of rules.
Notes:
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The writer teaches at the Department of Anthropology and International Affairs, Columbia University, New York.
CourtesyAmerican Anthropologist
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