Dr. Tariq Rahman

A Nightmare World

The planet Earth has never been a good place to live in for most human beings but during the late nineteenth century, at least in the West, it was a place of hope. They thought education would bring enlightenment and create more wealth and all problems would be solved. Religion, ethnicity and parochialism were considered a legacy of the past. Two world wars dampened our faith in progress but it is only now that it seems to have received a mortal blow. The events of September 11 and then of October 7 seem to have created a nightmare world in which people will live with fear of flying and fear of each other---possibly for ever.

The worst development is the division of the world in ideological camps: The West versus Muslims. For no matter how many reassurances leaders give on the T.V., ordinary people in Muslim countries have started feeling as if the West, led by the U.S.A, is against them. Moreover, the American President has emphatically squeezed out the possibility of being neutral by saying: ‘if you are not with us; you are against us’.It also appears that in America at least, among ordinary people, the stereotype of the ‘Muslim’ has come to replace the stereotype of the cold war ‘Commic’ (Communist) of the 1950s when Mc. Carthyism was at its height. This is happening because, despite the fact that the unit of action in international relations is the ‘nation-state’, the United States has always used larger and ideological categories for the ‘other’. First it was the ‘Communists’ and now it is the ‘Terrorists’. For the U.S media, the Soviet Union was the ‘Evil Empire’ and the ‘Terrorists’ are congenitally evil i.e their nature is evil and their acts are the outcome of thier essential self and are not reactions to policies and events which they consider evil. What is left unspoken is that ‘Terrorists’ are Muslims. This method of categorization is generally associated with the medieval would when the crusaders thought of the ‘other’ in religious terms. This medieval, and basically ‘fundamentalist’, method of categorization was not used only by Huntington is his well-known ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. It was used earlier too, notably by Charles Foster Dulles and Senator Mc Carthy, in their ‘we-them’ characterization. On one side was the ‘free world’ and on the other was the ‘evil empire’. The nation-state was not the unit of American rhetoric; it was always a civilizational unit. Nor was this civilizational unit defined in demonstrable, non-judgmental ways as Arnold Toynbee used in his famous Study of History. No: in American rhetoric it was always the ‘good guys’ versus the ‘bad guys’.

The apologists of this method of classification have argued that moral categories are appropriate because the Communists did impose a tyrannical system upon human beings in which people were not free. Likewise, the Bin Laden kind of terrorists take the lives of innocent human beings and spread fear causing trauma and lasting psychological damage. By all universal standards of morality these are evil things and, therefore, America is right in claiming that it is fighting against evil. These arguments are only partially correct. What they ignore is the fact that during the Cold War the U.S.A propped up tyrannical regimes, whether in Iran or Latin America or Africa, to gain power against the Soviet Union and not to help the cause of liberty in these countries. Indeed, those who aspired for freedom were jailed and killed with American connivance in these nasty and brutish regimes set up by the U.S.A.

Similarly, the present struggle against ‘terrorists’ is presented in moral terms but one does not find what standards of morality justify the relentless bombing of Afghan cities. That which is called ‘collateral damage’ means death and destruction of innocent people---as innocent as those whom the terrorists killed on 11 September. Moreover, the threat to use force against other states smacks of no morality except, of course, that of the arena of war. So, no matter what the rhetoric, the present war of America against the ‘other’ is no more moral than its other wars in the last half century.

What is really disturbing about this emphasis upon morality is that honest difference of opinion gets transmogrified into ‘evil’. After all, some people (as in Vietnam) honestly believed that Communism was a moral system. Similarly, some people oppose Western values out of conviction and not because of innate depravity. A moralistic, judgmental attitude creates resentment and hatred. One of the golden principles of liberal humanism has always been relativism---the ability to differentiate between that which is evil from universally acceptable criteria from that which is wrong from mere in-group norms. These days a number of commentators on the CNN do use in-group (American) norms to condemn the ‘other’ and are, in reality, as ‘fundamentalist’ as the Taliban themselves. In short, the most frightening aspect of the nightmare world of the future will be that fundamentalist, opposing groups with in-group and intolerant values will hold us all to ransom.

The only country which has the power to ensure that this does not happen is the United States. It may still not be too late even after more than a week of senseless bombing of Afghanistan. America must stop the bombing and the threatening if it wants to stop the world in its slide into a perpetual nightmare. The present hysteria and xenophobia in America would not have been there had the American government and media not started playing up Osama Bin Laden and ‘Muslim’ terrorists. If they had accepted the condolences of the world, including those of Muslim countries, and waited patiently for the evidence to come in they would not have alienated anybody. If the evidence, if it was really convincing, had been shown on T.V and presented to an international court of justice life would have gone on almost as usual. If the U.N and not the U.S. had talked of international norms of behaviour, that would have seemed neutral. Indeed, then the Taliban would have been under great moral pressure to change their ways. As it is, the hysteria created by the U.S. made America itself a nightmare society: Muslims under attack; everybody afraid of flying and skyscrapers; recession looming; the prospect of a long drawn, uncertain war against unknown and elusive targets; death suspected in every packet---was this the American dream? The American reaction to violence has not been to find out the causes of the hatred against it. It has been to drop bombs and bullying threats. This means that the anger will grow; the Osmas will multiply; the war will not come to an end.

Afghanistan is the prime target but it may be Pakistan which may end up suffering even more. As the bombs fall, more and more Pakistan turn against the United States. The regime is doing the best it can to keep order but if this goes on too long, who knows what will happen. It is not true to say that either one is with the United States or with the terrorists. Most decent, liberal, democratic Pakistanis are against both terrorism and the bombing of Afghanistan by America. The facts that one condemns war does not imply that one approves of all the policies of the Taliban. Ordinary people do not like the Taliban but they do like justice. Even liberal intellectuals, despite their aversion to despotic rule in the name of religion, are goaded by their conscience to condemn the unleashing of terror by American planes in an unequal contest.

All this creates pressure on the regime which bodes ill for the future. The regime has been arm twisted to support the Americans but the Americans should now ensure that too much pressure is not used on the regime to continue this unpopular support. It must be realized that a moderate leadership in Pakistan is the only hope against the Talibanization of Pakistan which would not be in anybody’s interest. If the moderates fall Pakistan will be destablilized; indeed, the whole of South Asia will be destablized. This will help turn the world into more of a nightmare than it is. An American poet, Robert Frost, talked of ‘the road not taken’ years ago. Ten years from now, if the world is still at a vicious nightmarish war, how many of us will say that on 11 September we wish that the road the Americans had taken was different?

Dr. Tariq Rahman