Tilting at Windmills in Afghanistan and the Future of Globalization

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  In recent years the American intelligence community has agreed that the threat of Al Qa’ida is precisely that it has no organization and that it is merely an idea and a diffuse movement of alienated young people.  It includes a few professional agitators, who exploit the common idea throughout the world that America is a powerful agent of injustice, and that proof of this is that America is waging war against everyone who seeks justice. 

  This is a circular argument, but among the committed believers its illogic merely confirms its truth.

  In fact, there is indeed immense injustice in the world and it is stoking the fires of blind resistance.  The injustice does not result from any American conspiracies against Muslims or anyone else but from the structure of the world economy, which is based on institutions that concentrate wealth and create a highly visible wealth gap within countries and among them based on a banking system that is based on past wealth and therefore assures that the ownership of the trillions of dollars of future wealth will be ever more concentrated.

  The war of conspiracies produces a blindness on both sides to obvious solutions, developed, for example, for decades in books and articles by the Center for Economic and Social Justice.  This blindness to alternatives leads to such theories as democratic capitalism, which was concocted to prove that the existing institutions are effective in producing wealth and therefore ipso facto are just.

  The fact that Al Qa’ida as an identifiable actor or even merely a top-down coordinating force in world affairs has never existed is precisely the threat we face.  American commitment to combat a figment of the imagination is like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, while all the time the threat increases and spreads.

  The Wikileaks show a consensus that for some years the maximum number of Osama bin Laden’s followers in Afghanistan has been at most fifty.  The Taliban, dangerous as they are to basic human rights, would gladly hand Osama over after their country is no longer occupied, because they know that even the figment of Al Qa’ida as the orchestrator of global terrorism is the cause of all their perceived problems.  Immediately after 9/11 the Taliban offered to turn Osama bin Laden over for trial in a neutral country merely to get rid of him without violating the obligation to honor one’s guests.  President Bush rejected this and called for capturing Osama bin Laden dead or alive. 

  This precipitated the figment of Al Qa’ida as a major force in Iraq, and now we have Al Qa’ida in the Maghrib (North Africa) and everywhere else in the world, including sleeper cells in the United States, supposedly with the sole intent of destroying America.  Riding the tail of an imaginary Al Qa’ida is good strategy for any insurgent against any felt injustice.

  The Taliban consider all foreigners as intruders in Central Asia, including the Arabs, even though they were once useful against Communist occupation, but increasingly the Taliban are becoming Pushtun nationalists who have absolutely no interest in America or anywhere else in the world. 

  Unfortunately, the Taliban serve a foil for China to assert its influence over the rich hydrocarbon and mineral resources in Central Asia by supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, which, in turn, requires India to do the same, which requires Pakistan to support the Taliban in self-defense.  From the Pakistani national security perspective the only real threats are India and the United States;  India because it would like to cut Pakistan down to size, and America because its opposition to Taliban nationalism (actually Pushtun nationalism) is radicalizing the entire area and threatening the very existence of Pakistan as a state.

  Meanwhile American strategists argue that “victory” is possible if only we do more of the same, which is precisely why victory in any sense other than American withdrawal is impossible.  All the time, the major powers in Asia are gloating over the decline of America as a global power, which they see as the major threat to globalization on their terms.