NP? A fairy tale at Christmas

[Doug Millison]

It's worth re-reading that stunning Advent passage in Gravity's Rainbow,
too, which does a fine job of probing the nuances of  war during the
holiday system while avoiding the black hat/white hat Good vs. Evil view of
the world espoused by Bush and too many other cheerleaders for this war...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,619859,00.html

A fairy tale at Christmas

Coverage of this war has played down the civilian deaths and 4m refugees,
feeding a new US doctrine of terror

Madeleine Bunting
Monday December 17, 2001
The Guardian

It's all settled then - this really does seem likely to prove a war that
ends before Christmas. Any day now Bin Laden should be blown up in a cave,
and then we can settle down to our turkey and Christmas pudding. We can
send cards and sing carols about peace and goodwill without a chorus of
daisy cutters in the background. Christmas is a time when, above all else,
we like to feel good about ourselves; we give to charities, we give
presents, we offer hospitality and we remember those lonely old relatives.
If it works, the objective is to feel expansive, warm-hearted and generous.
So all good wars must end before Christmas.

Indeed, this one is shaping up in every respect to having been a jolly good
war. It is fitting all the criteria for what a modern war should be - very
neatly. It's been short; it's been successful; and we've had right on our
side. Not a day is going by without another al-Qaida bomb factory or terror
manual being discovered; and now an Advent goodie, the smoking gun himself,
Bin Laden, chortling as only an evil genius would do over his handiwork.
Even the ascetic Mullah Omar comes in for demonisation as his vast compound
in Kandahar allegedly exposes his corrupt egotism while his people suffered
in poverty (worst of all, it appears, he had execrable taste in interior
decor).

So this year, as we pull the crackers, we can happily reflect on the fact
that those dear Afghans are now flying their kites and listening to their
screeching music (though it's a mystery as to why they would want to) once
again, thanks to us. To top it all, feeling really good usually requires
some measure of feeling superior; so round off that seasonal glow with some
gloating at the idiots who opposed this war.

All so neat, just too neat, and I don't buy it. The coverage of this war
raises more questions than any other war I can remember (and I'm not even
talking about the video tape). Of much more concern has been the way the
coverage has been heavily skewed towards the military conflict: it's been a
boys' war. We've followed planes and bombs, we've watched plumes of smoke
from distant brown hills, we've seen picturesque Afghan fighters hanging
about in mountain hideouts - and now it has culminated in a grand finale, a
mountain shoot-out. It's been as gripping and as plausible as one of the
black-and-white westerns we'll watch this Christmas, only fewer dead
bodies. Very occasionally, we've glimpsed that people are getting killed -
the images of the castrated Taliban fighter pleading for his life before he
was shot, and the massacre at Qala-i-Janghi. But our sympathy for these
near-feral wildmen is limited - they got what they deserved, they were
Taliban after all.

What has been strikingly absent is the humanisation of this war. Unlike in
Bosnia and Kosovo, our screens and newspapers have not been filled with the
terrible trauma of recognisable individuals and their families. The cameras
haven't hovered on the faces of shocked tearful children, and the impotent
anguish of their parents and grandparents. On a few occasions, reporters
have reached a bombed village, but it's hard to tell the rubble from the
hovels, and estimates of the dead are always circumspect; there has been no
sense of outrage about these atrocities. Yet the number of Afghan
non-combatants reported killed (how many more do we not know about?) in
this war is edging close to those who died in the World Trade Centre. The
latter has provoked global outrage, the former is accepted with an
astonishing equanimity as a necessary price to pay for two very uncertain
prognostications - Afghanistan's peaceful future and ridding the world of
the evil al-Qaida.

But the even bigger story that has barely surfaced in recent weeks is the
huge dislocation the war has caused to the entire population. The World
Food Programme estimates that as many as 3m-4m people have fled their homes
because of the bombing. Médecins Sans Frontières claims that Maslakh - a
name that should be on every newspaper front page - is the biggest refugee
camp in the world. The few aid workers there haven't even been able to
assess its population, which is believed to be somewhere between 200,000
and 800,000 and growing; new arrivals have recently shot up from 20 a day
to 1,200. It is one of five refugee camps around Herat, but the route there
is too insecure for western journalists. They are largely sticking to the
main cities and Tora Bora (there are a few notable exceptions, such as the
Sunday Telegraph's Christina Lamb, who sent a horrifying report from
Maslakh).

But it's not even those dusty, cold refugee camps that are the WFP's
biggest headache, according to its Rome spokesman: at least it knows where
they are. It is the refugees who have fled into remote rural areas, many of
whom could die - or may already have died - a bitter death from starvation
and cold this winter.

Part of the explanation for why we are not hearing this is the
unprecedented danger of reporting this war, in which as many journalists as
western combatants have been killed. Partly it's because journalists always
depend for help on local participants in a war who want to use the western
media to advance their cause. But the only Afghans helping western
journalists are the Northern Alliance, and they have no interest in
shocking a western public with the suffering caused by the bombing.

Meanwhile, the Taliban were hopelessly ignorant. They always buried the
bodies too quickly for western cameras. Just compare them with the Kosovo
Liberation Army, which ensured a storm of western moral outrage at Serbian
ethnic cleansing by taking the cameras to remote villages to show them the
dead bodies. Nor did the Afghans flee into Pakistan in sufficient numbers
to provide the kind of disaster footage always inexplicably described as
"biblical".

All of this has conveniently dovetailed with the west's pursuit of this
war. So we've been left with a straightforward moral narrative: good
triumphs over evil. It's been this kind of easy moralising that kicked me
into the idiots' camp from the start. The US may have wanted to exact
revenge, but it was never something anyone could claim to be morally right.
The Americans have unleashed a principle of foreign policy - it is
legitimate to fight terror with even greater terror - that is causing havoc
in the Middle East, could cause more havoc in Kashmir and is being used
from China to Zimbabwe to warrant brutal repression.

The fact that it hasn't yet caused the kind of havoc feared in Afghanistan
(such as a protracted guerrilla war) is small recompense when we choose to
overlook that we are not getting anything like the full picture of the
suffering it has caused in this most tragic of countries.