ballot box elixir

The absurd expectation heaped on Afghanistan's election is a fig leaf for leaders seduced by the allure of military power

An excellent article from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian who labels the attitude of western leaders toward elections in Afghanistan as liberal arrogance. I loved he article. Jenkins is saying loud what many of us are thinking. Believe me, this is the obituary of liberalism, and it is such a pity that we should end up emptying our values and most of all our democratic values from their substance just to satisfy our imperial hubris...

Why can't Afghanistan be more like Sweden? It is insufferable that this miserable statelet can reject liberal democracy despite the efforts of 70,000 Nato and NGO staff kicking their heels in Kabul's dust for eight years. We have blown $230bn of US and UK taxpayers' money and left 1,463 soldiers dead. Everything has been tried, from gender awareness courses to carpet-bombing Tora Bora. Thousands of Afghans have been massacred. Yet still the wretches won't co-operate. They even fiddle elections.

That sums up the west's response to the election staged last August by the Afghan ruler, Hamid Karzai. His decision yesterday to run a second round in two weeks has been greeted in Washington and London with an outburst of relieved congratulation. He may have had no option, but he had been raining on Nato's parade.

The abuse and now the expectation heaped on this presidential election are absurd. It is as if Kandahar were a precinct of Boston or a ward of Sutton and Cheam. In a country awash with guns, drug lords, suicide bombers, aid theft and massive corruption, that a few ballot boxes might have been stuffed and returning officers suborned hardly qualifies as indictable crime. The fact that Karzai has been able to win any sort of legitimacy is amazing, with the Taliban controlling half the provincial districts and Nato incompetence reducing turnout in the south to somewhere near 5%.

Nato and the UN were warned well in advance that the election would be rigged, yet their synthetic fury and that of the western media led to the sacking of a capable UN official. The rigging has frozen a decision on reinforcements by Washington's national security council, plunging troops at the front into greater danger. And why? The US would have better deployed its dominance in Kabul by demanding a coalition government rather than another costly election.

Power in a dysfunctional state seldom lies with any representative of the majority. Ever since Washington flew Karzai back to Kabul in 2002, he has received billions of dollars in aid money, which he has shrewdly used to barter deals with tribal chiefs and provincial commanders. Afghanistan has never enjoyed unified central government, but what it has emanates from Karzai's status as agent for the occupying power. If America is content for him to squander money on clinging to power, bribing Taliban and fuelling a narco-economy, why is it so fastidious about election rigging?

The answer, of course, lies not in Afghanistan but in Washington and London. This war, like all hopeless wars, is haemorrhaging popularity. From the moment Obama adopted Afghanistan as "his war" and allowed himself to be led by David Petraeus – that most dangerous of generals, a clever strategist – he was engulfed by the siren call of glory. He is now truly trapped.

Since glory resolutely refuses to show her face, American voters must be given a proxy. It is that they are rescuing the Afghans from their worse selves by "being given democracy", much as Victorian Britons gave them God and the Queen. It was compensation for Kipling's white man's burden, and its "old reward: / The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard".

If Osama bin Laden cannot be found, if the Taliban cannot be eliminated, if troops cannot be withdrawn, if victory cannot be declared, then western leaders must find a reason for soldiers to die. Like Crusaders of old, they are told to die for the sacrament of a holy grail, in this case the franchise. Therefore it must not be desecrated by dodgy registers, fabricated returns and bought voters' lists.

It does not matter to the British people how the Afghans choose to conduct an election. It does not matter how one of the poorest countries in the world chooses to govern itself under the UN charter of self-determination. Few elections outside western democracies bear much scrutiny. We still hold our noses and deal with Iran, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Russia.

The excuse that we are preventing another 9/11 is ludicrously thin. That event, whose plotting and training were in Europe and America, will cause the US to spend what Congress puts at a staggering $1.3 trillion in wars and related security by 2019. And still no one has arrested Bin Laden. It must be the most extravagant punitive expedition to the Asian mainland since Agamemnon set off for Troy.

The impact on international affairs has been devastating. British foreign secretaries – not least David Miliband – strut the press conferences of the world declaring "what we want to see" in regimes that are no business of Britain. In a BBC interview yesterday, the former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown spoke of what "we" should do in Afghanistan as if it were in his old Somerset constituency. Every inch the liberal imperialist, he seemed to think we owned it.

We need look no further for an answer to the question posed by the American pundit Richard Haass. Surveying the wreckage of the Clinton/Bush/Blair years last summer, he asked why the west had squandered the legacy of its victory over communism. It had shifted Russia from humiliating defeat to chauvinist belligerence. It had antagonised half the Muslim world. It had left Europe squabbling and protectionist. China had risen to astonishing commercial power. America had beggared itself with military spending. In sum, the architects of victory had shot themselves in the foot.

The west is not under any threat that remotely justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians, bored by domestic ills, have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big. That Obama should dash his store of popularity against the mud walls of Kabul is astonishing; no less so that Brown, not a stupid man, should insult his voters by declaring that "the safety of the streets" requires soldiers to die in their hundreds in Helmand.

Western leaders seem unable to resist the seduction of military power. They think that, because they could defeat communism and fly to the moon, they can get any poverty-stricken, tin-pot country to do what the west decides is best for it. They grasp at nation-building, that make-work scheme of internationalism against which any people, however pathetic, are bound to fight. All is hubris. The arrogance of empire has mutated into the arrogance of liberalism.

Rumsfeld's biblical memos

Rumsfeld and co definitely outsmarted Bin Laden with these memos. But Bin Laden had one permanent impact on the US (beside the WTC), he dragged the most powerful country in the world in the abyss of religious idiocy.

Torture and Terror: Bush's and Bin Laden's victories, everybody else's defeat.

''It is worse for a man to inflict wrong then to suffer it''
Socrates

'' All the discourses and commentaries (about 9/11) denote the exaggerated abreaction to the event and the fascination it exerts. The moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are matched by a prodigious jubilation to see the destruction of a superpower or, much better, to see this superpower self destruct at its height. Because it is this unbearable power, which fomented all the widespread violence in the world, that fomented (without willingly knowing it) the terrorist imagination in us .''
Jean Baudrillard in L'esprit du terrorisme (my translation)

In his article, L'esprit du terrorisme (The Essence of Terrorism), published in French less than two months after September eleventh, and two years later in English, Jean Baudrillard, drawing from the first reactions to the events of the World Trade Center, which he depicts as 'a counter phobic delirium to exorcise Evil', argues that by making 9/11 a planetary Event we are creating a symbolism which is uniting the terrorists and ourseleves in an implicit complicity. Baudrillard writes that this complicity is what the terrorists might have expected and taken into account.

How did this complicity come into being ? Baudrillard defends the idea that there is no absolute Good as there is no absolute Evil, that they are in a state of equilibrium inherited from traditional societies and always fluctuating in the same direction. It is naive to think that the increase in Good can completely suppress Evil. Baudrillard explains how September eleventh and our reaction to it are both one and only event that encompasses a great contradiction threatening the traditional equilibrium between Good and Evil; the capacity of the terrorists to transform their deaths into an absolute weapon against a society which abhorres death and whose objective is Zero death. This is not as much a quantitative comparison as it is a symbolic one. Its symbolism is entranched in the fact that the terrorist's death is a different kind of reality, a reality that reaches us through the medium of the virtual and the sensational, the image. With the animated image, we come to feel terror before grapsing the the reality behind it. The reality of the event beocmes then secondary, and the event in itself becomes an overwhelming fiction, more forcefully striking our imagination.

Baudrillard contends that the representation of death through an image medium striking the imagination, and the fascination exerted on us by this image, breaks the previous equilibrium between Good and Evil because the only response to this symbolism is an escalation; more death. Terrorism by the image creates a symbolism which ties death to some sort of 'immoral fascination'. And this death will come to us via self destruction.

I did not see the images of the World trade Center attacks because we don't watch TV, we don't own a TV. Recently I saw 'United 93' on video. I felt a great unease, a moral shock in face of the terrorism we see as reconstructed in this movie. It was a new sort of moral shock for me, something I never felt before, something that I could only relate to what I felt when I saw images of naked AbuGhraib's prisoners and read accounts about Guantanamo's 'porn' method interrogations. Suddenly, it occured to me that the kind of moral shock I was feeling could be related to the moral shock someone feels when watching porn. This new kind of terror meant to strike the imagination through images which are taboos exploit the same human basic emotions, fascination shrouded in disgust and reprobation.

I have come to understand that terror on the screen is the porn of death. Sadly, for some, seeing porn does not evoke reprobation but only fascination and so this is actually the case with the overreaction to Terror, with the new legislation on Torture. Torture is the answer to the fascination of death infused into our imagination by the terrorists and their images.

With this new legislation, the Bush administration's reaction to 9/11 has gone beyond Bin Laden's best expectations. Not only this death porn director and his followers actors have been given the stature of world statesmen but they have been given also our liberties and our moral principles on a sacrificial altar, the altar of security. Because it is we, in the first place, who will have to deal with this new legislation on Torture which is changing irreversibly our moral standards.

How many declared and potential terrorists suicide bombers are there on the Planet that we feel obliged to bow to such radical changes in our rules and laws in their names ? Rules and laws that have been carefully constructed with a certain idea of Humanity, itself carefully crafted over the years by cultural progress and so many humanist struggles. Just as the Patriot Act was more about legalising a posteriori Bush's domestic spying program on American citizens, the new legislation on Torture is about legalising a posteriori the dangerous breaches to Human Rights which have been going on in outsourced and extraterritorial American prisons worldwide.

The effects of the new legislation on Torture are not going to be confined to AbuGhraib, Guantanamo and some obscure CIA prisons in some obscure eastern european countries. They are going to shake the foundations of Human Rights, freeedom of expression and honest dissent inside the United States and worldwide. Because the moment a discussion is started on what is acceptable and not acceptable in Torture, this moment marks the acceptation and the admission of Torture as a practice. Judgments about Torture should never go into these sinister details: how much inflicted suffering amounts to Torture ? Is suffering without organ failure considered a Torture ? Can our best intentions accompany our worst practices ? The debate on Torture should not go into details of the practice, it should be at the level of the general principles. Human dignity is not a vague concept, it is only vague in the minds of illiterate in humanist matters like Gonzalez and Bush. Pain and suffering are degrading and should not be accepted in any form as a way to treat human beings.

Our society abhorres pain and suffering in all its forms for ourselves and yet, at the same time, we let our leaders inflict them on others. Or maybe we consider that these others don't have the same level of humanity. The discussion on Torture and the fact that a majority of senators and congressmen in the US voted for accomodations on Torture imply a more worrying fact, the fact that our society and our media can hold a discussion on Torture and its accomodations without raising eyebrows. It is worrying because it means that we have all already abandoned the fundamental principles of human dignity and its meaning. This is a dangerous path because it degrades not only the humanity of others but our own humanity.

The new legislation on Torture is already degrading our own moral standards as a society. This is the Terror inside, the terror we have watched on our TV screens, imagined fascinated, and feared. It is now inside our imagination. With the terror inside, not only Bin Laden have won, but also Bush. With the new legislation on Terror, every US citizen can fear for his dignity, his freedom and his life. New York Times journalist William Rivers Pitt has an imaginary and moving account on the implications of the new legislation on normal people, not terrorists. Editorialist and blogger Pierre Tristam writes about the negociations that preceded the 'deal' on Torture: ''Either way, the example the administration and its once-again pliant Congress are broadcasting to the world is that of a nation step by step debasing law and its own foundations of liberty.''

I am really depressed by the situation and I wish I can hear more voices from normal people around me reassuring me that this is just a nightmare and that we are all going either to wake up or to rise against our despots and Bin Laden's fellows in terror, those who have the guts to turn the morbid and disgusting fascination for terror into a powerful political tool against our Democracies, Human Rights and moral values, ultimately leading us into a self destructive and suicidal path.

We are already standing on the edge of a moral abyss but we are unable to see it because we are watching behind us, way behind, into September eleventh and the day we have lost our imagination to terror.

Mark From Ireland has a post on a 15 year old boy resident of Guantanamo, Rolling Stone has the source article.