October 29, 2001
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S Gopikrishna
Is Bush cunning or a simpleton?
What was common to Dr Henry Kissinger and Indira
Gandhi? The creation of problems to solve existing problems.
By the late Sixties, Indira Gandhi was overjoyed upon finding the perfect
political solution -- create a counterbalance in the form of political
trouble to pull the carpet from beneath the feet of a regional politician
presumed guilty of 'insubordination.' The resulting tension would take up
the latter's time and prevent him from becoming a thorn in Indira Gandhi's
feet.
And thus began the saga of cultivating V C Shukla in Madhya Pradesh to
counter D P Mishra; Devraj Urs to unseat an increasingly belligerent S
Nijalingappa, besides machinations in other states. The system worked fine
until she 'adopted' Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in Punjab. Like the legendary
jinn that destroyed the master after destroying the master's enemies,
Bhindranwale destroyed the Akali Dal, the Congress and Indira Gandhi
herself.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dr Henry Kissinger, US secretary of
state, came up with the most Machiavellian of solutions to counter the
burgeoning influence of the then Soviet Union. 'Build Beijing to counter the
Kremlin from within the communist world,' he decided, beginning the American
love affair with mainland China. The Chinese invasion of Tibet was quickly
forgotten and overlooking human rights abuses in China become de
rigeur.
Upon the destruction of the Soviet empire in 1991, America congratulated
itself as being the world's 'sole superpower' till it stumbled upon China's
potential to challenge the status quo. With technological capital derived
initially from the Americans, China possessed the necessary wherewithal to
challenge the US militarily. With the takeover of Hong Kong in 1997, the
Chinese, it is believed, had the necessary economic capital to fund any
military adventures.
The moral of the stories is the same: Create a problem to resolve an
existing problem now and wait for the created problem to boomerang on you.
Indira Gandhi and Kissinger may have had cunning all right, but sorely
lacked foresight.
This phenomenon has seriously affected various American governments in the
recent past. Smarting under the insults inflicted on the US by Ayatollah
Khomeini in the late 1970s, a very pliable Jimmy Carter built Iraq's
seemingly innocuous Saddam Hussein into a regional power. When Khomeini died
in 1989, Saddam replaced him as the biggest nuisance in West Asia.
Indeed, he may singly take credit for bringing down George Bush, Sr, as
president in the 1992 US election.
Unfortunately, his son, George W Bush, Jr, seems to be incapable of reading
the writing on the wall. He and his cohorts seem to have decided that the best way of destroying the Taleban
would be to cultivate the other bunch of brigands successfully operating in
Afghanistan, namely the Northern Alliance.
The Northern Alliance consists of a bunch of brigands whose crimes obscure
anything done by the Taleban. Indeed, the Taleban's being the lesser of the
evils was what facilitated its victory in the mid-nineties.
Organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have long
recognised the propensity of the Northern Alliance to commit
unimaginably sadistic crimes on 'enemies' unlucky enough to fall into their
hands. 'Allied' by nothing more than a hatred of the Taleban, the Alliance
thugs have been known to scalp a 17-year-old youth in front of the whole
village before machine-gunning all men, not to mention boiling victims live
in water.
With Bush playing conductor, the American media increasingly refers to the alliance as 'the brave,
under-resourced youth ferociously fighting the Taleban.' What they choose to
ignore is that the Taleban also consists of idealistic if ferocious fighters
determined to rid Afghanistan of all perceived evil. The ferocity became a
source of wonderment and the Taleban were compared to Robin Hood until the
'merry men of the Taleban' turned their attention on American targets.
While Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld insists that the US does not
endorse the Alliance, but is exploring ways of using their strengths, the
bottom line is that such efforts will only result in more madness being
manufactured. The Northern Alliance can be expected to counter any moves to
restore power to the erstwhile Afghan royal family even more ferociously
than the Taleban, and interpret the Quran so literally as to make the
Taleban seem moderate.
Any such hare-brained schemes to use the Northern Alliance will only result
in more investment in the heroin trade, the present source of sustenance for
the Alliance, more terror in Kashmir and other places in Asia with Muslim
majorities and imagined atrocities (Southern Thailand being a potential
spot). Unless there is tight monitoring of how the Afghani political
situation evolves, the US will remain a helpless witness to the diffusion of
terror and damage to its interests on its own soil.
The serene confidence placed in the hordes of the now deceased Ahmed Shah
Masood by the US will be sorely tested in winter. With blizzards in northern
Afghanistan throughout winter, the US will have no way of supplying any
realistic assistance to the Alliance. While Osama bin Laden can supervise
terror from his hideout, there is little the US can do during the upcoming
months besides twiddle thumbs and assist refugees fleeing increasingly
inhospitable conditions.
The US should do itself a great favour by calling off the latest of its
Rambo-like jaunts, and indirectly helping in the spread of terror. The winter months may be best used in
defining alternative strategies to contain the Taleban and the
Northern Alliance.
S Gopikrishna
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