Newsletter: October, 01

Table of Contents:

[Living in a Time of Terror] [Peacekeeping and Retribution] [The Ghosts of Afghanistan] [The Only Path] [Voices of Freedom: Imbecility]

Editor’s Remarks

On September 11^th, I sat in the CBC building in Toronto, doing my "talking head" bit as information (and misinformation) flooded in. It was not easy to keep composed. When the second tower collapsed I ‘lost it’, as the saying goes, for a while. At the time, it seemed like as many as 35,000 people might be dead and the barrage of attacks also appeared to be continuing. I know Manhattan fairly well, and have schoolmates who worked in the World Trade Centre (all safe now).

I was not unique in ‘losing it’, for a lot of the CBC personnel ducked aside for a minute or two and returned with red eyes and tightly set faces. A couple of technicians said they observed Peter Mansbridge’s lips quivering and eyes brimming — when the camera in front of him was off.

Grief gave way to rage, an emotion I still haven’t fully suppressed, but have matched it to resolution although my resolve is cheap. I am not an American, am no longer in the military (though many of my friends are), and my chances of striking a direct blow or of willingly hazarding my own life are non-existent

President Bush’s call for a war on terrorism is the correct action, but he is right to state that it will be a long and difficult fight. It is also a very necessary decision… after years of "someday" predictions terrorists have found a way to kill thousands of people and destroy $billions in property. Terrorism on this scale is warfare, and wars must be fought.

The purpose of terror is terror. Ultimately, the terrorist -- regardless of his or her ideology, politics or culture -- is an individual and uses terrorism for personal gratification. Much of that gratification is for reasons of the ego. In effect, the terrorist uses violence to say "Be afraid of me -- I can do this to any of you and none of you can stop me." This also means that the terrorist is someone who badly needs to be able to say this.

In a time of terror, most of us can do little to fight it directly. The asymmetric relationship that characterizes terrorism -- where the terrorists are elusive and few in numbers while society is huge and vulnerable -- means that most police and security officials are unlikely to encounter a terrorist. Few of us are even likely to become direct victims -- the attacks of September 11th killed less than one in 50,000 North American residents and more people die every day for more everyday reasons.

Yet the terrorist knows that he generates fear and anxiety and takes pleasure from it. While all of us believe we are the main characters in our own "brief hour upon the stage", the terrorist is someone who feels that he must be heroic and important -- and uses violence as a shortcut to achieve this. The cause that ‘allows’ the terrorist to act is mutable; most of those who would be likely to commit terrorism will find a cause of some kind or another. Their stated motive is of little consequence, and addressing it can be very much like blaming your runny nose for giving you a head cold.

The Islamicists behind the World Trade Centre bombing believe (somewhere in their forebrains) that they are punishing the United States because of its support for Israel, or for propping up Arab governments with which they disagree. Yet even if Israel didn’t exist, or their perverted view of Islam had never been articulated, they would have bombed somebody for some other reason as those disposed towards terrorism would have found some other ideology that allowed them to express themselves. Terrorism is a constant in civilized life, and is easy to perpetrate in a democracy. There will always be some around, although attacks on the scale of September 11th cannot ever be tolerated.

Many peoples in other nations have had to learn to cope with terrorism, often under severe circumstances. Where people do learn to live with it, there are a number of simple principles that allow ordinary people to fight terrorism... and to make a significant contribution to defeating it. The rules are clear:

1) Never, ever, show your fear -- and certainly not to the news cameras. Seeing your fear is a reward to a terrorist, it feeds his sense of power and it encourages those who contemplate the same course.

2) Try to live normally. Don’t change your daily life any more than you have to. This is not the time to cancel travel plans if you don’t need to, and be prepared to accept the small changes and delays imposed by routine security arrangements. Behaving normally is the best revenge that most of us can manage.

3) Show grief when it is time to grieve, but remember that the terrorist may also be savoring your emotions. Harness your grief to resolve and determination -- he or she will find this less sweet.

4) Restrain your rage, most especially to those from the same cultural background as the terrorist. In fact, the terrorist will often hope that the victim’s rage will polarize his society and force people to extremes. The lowbrows who feel they are ‘avenging’ the World Trade Centre bombing by harassing Muslims (or Sikhs or Hindus -- a most revealing characteristic) are doing the political work of the terrorist.

5) Do not dwell on the ‘reasons’ for the attack -- fundamentally, there aren’t any. Moreover, opening discussion of whatever excuse the terrorist used to justify his behaviour only feeds his sense of self-importance. For example, stating that the United States has to accept that its overseas conduct and policies are the reasons behind the attack is an agreement with the "fore-brain" excuses of the terrorist and feeds his sense of self-worth. Blaming the attack on the limited socialization of terrorists generally is both more accurate and less rewarding to the architects of the attack (A clinical dissection of Osama bin Laden’s personality on CNN would be quite educational).

6) Remember, always, that terrorists lie. A century ago, Lenin argued that the revolutionary must ignore "lesser" truths to advance his "greater" one. The resulting practice of constant deception has become second nature with most insurgents -- who learn to lie to the wider society and to themselves so thoroughly that many of them cannot remember what the truth is. It takes years of self-conditioning to come to the point where the terrorist believes that vaporizing women and children is a valiant act.

7) Retain a sense of perspective. No security arrangements are perfect; everything cannot be guarded all the time and nobody is always vigilant. There is always going to be some threat, but trading fundamental freedoms away for an illusion of security is a profound error.

8) Be alert, but please don’t be paranoid. The development of a proportional sense of security awareness is a difficult undertaking for most people, but the simplest maxim is to rely on observation and repress your imagination. For example, every abandoned suitcase or parcel is obviously not a bomb waiting to go off, but you would do well to report in a potential bomb when you see someone deliberately leave an attaché case on a subway platform.

9) Remember that terrorists usually have sympathizers -- who are often skilled political activists with agendas. Communications of the "I-deplore-the-attack-but-understand-why-they-did-it" variety frequently come from such sympathizers. Weigh their statements accordingly and don’t attach much value to them.

10) Finally, know that most of us are far better human beings than any terrorist. We matured while they always remained angry self-centred children; we developed our senses of empathy and compassion while they nursed their rage; and we have never convinced ourselves that inflicting death and destruction on the innocent is a heroic act. We all know better than that.

Those friends of the Institute who have read an argument along these lines before in our newsletter are asked to forgive its repetition. The point is one worth making again.

Real peacekeeping is bloody and violent, and that is just what the United States is preparing to unleash — albeit with an unusual degree of precision. Whatever else transpires as the American-led coalition sallies forth to "bring justice to the terrorists"; the ancient contest between the Warrior and the Soldier is about to be waged again.

For Westerners who remain convinced that warfare is really only something fought between states, and that conflicts with non-state actors somehow don’t count; September the 11^th provided a graphic reminder that non-state actors can present a significant threat to entire nations. Our customary reluctance to regard terrorists, organized criminals, and small insurgent groups as proper opponents for soldiers will have to be discarded. For those who think this is unnatural or unusual, history is full of examples where states have fought private organizations.

In his disturbing study War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley pointed out that man is exceptionally violent in his natural state; and that primitive societies are — proportionately -- far more violent than civilizations are. Keeley, an American anthropologist found that Rousseau’s old view of the simple life was hogwash, and that Hobbes’s view of uncivilized life as "nasty, brutish and short" is the truer picture.

Keeley also pointed out that the "Warrior", the undisciplined fighting man of an uncivilized society, can be very dangerous when fighting on his own terms. In comparison to the warrior, the soldier is the disciplined man of arms found in the employ of civilizations and nation states.

Another disturbing book by the Israeli Military Historian, Martin van Crevald, pointed out that in the 1990s, the soldier would be far more likely to be fighting warriors than other soldiers. Although van Crevald’s The Transformation of War was published on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, his predictions were dead right. Warriors include non-state actors such as terrorists, guerrillas, political militias, tribal levies, criminal gangs and such. Soldiers remain as they are, but the soldiers of many nations have been busy confronting warriors since the end of the Cold War.

When real peacekeeping fails, massive death is the inevitable result. The soldiers who were kept reined in by the UN at the start of the Rwandan conflict could not prevent the massacre of 800,000 people. The failure to send peacekeepers into the anarchy that followed in the Congo/Zaire has meant the deaths of over 2.7 million people since 1997. In the vicious ethnic feuding that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, almost 200,000 people were killed until the forceful NATO intervention of 1995. While the Kosovo intervention didn’t solve one problem and helped create another, the presence of NATO troops has kept the carnage down.

The essence of civilization is stability -- creating a state of affairs that lets people plan their future with a reasonable degree of confidence. Always beyond the bounds of civilizations have been the "barbarian" areas -- regions where this stability does not exist and life is short. Civilizations can live beside barbarian regions (or even contain them), but normally pay them little mind so long as commerce is maintained and relations are largely peaceful. But when elements within Barbarian regions represent a threat to a civilization, it is time to act.

"Barbarian" is an unfair term to apply to the ordinary people who live in regions like Afghanistan or Zaire… most of whom would be delighted to live quiet, prosperous lives and be certain of the same thing for their children. But circumstances around them have created a barbarian environment that, in at least one case, sheltered the warriors who planned and executed the attack on civilization by destroying the World Trade Centre.

Historic civilizations, from Pharonic Egypt to Han Dynasty China to Imperial Rome to Victorian England, attempted to keep the barbarians under constraint by using frontier defences, trade, negotiation, or by arming other barbarians (which can result in your own weapons being used on you when alliances shift). When all else fails — it is time call up the captain of chariots, summon the legions, or send the Redcoats out into the wilderness.

Barbarians are where you find them, and not all of them have lurked beyond the frontiers of civilized states. Other tasks for soldiers (and sailors) that have pitted them against non-state actors include the suppression of piracy, the European campaign to end slavery in African Kingdoms, hunting bandits and quelling severe rioting. There have also been times when former soldiers have escaped discipline in the aftermath of prolonged conflicts and formed private bands of mercenaries that also had to be brought under control.

All these tasks are the very essence of "peacekeeping", peace making by force, and are as old as civilization.

A civilization that grows disinterested, unwilling, or unable to send its men out into the barbarian reaches is on the cusp of decline — something that is also true when it refuses to tackle piracy, brigandage or mobs. Spending money and the lives of troops on stability is vital, and it is a constant responsibility -- one we neglect (or forgo) at our peril.

As the Americans and their Allies focus on Afghanistan, a series of editorials have warned of the dangers of venturing into the area. The Afghans are said to be stubborn guerrillas and deadly in their native haunts… Except that this really isn’t entirely true.

Many commentators remember the heroic resistance by the Afghans to the Soviet occupation of 1979-1989, but forget that that was in the context of a complex wider civil war that began in 1977 (and had actually started sputtering into life a few years before that). The Soviets lost about 15,000 men during the decade they were there and experienced several debacles at the hands of Afghan guerrillas. However, the Afghans lost 1.5 million dead during the same period -- it was a vicious civil war and the Soviets were ruthless. While Western audiences rejoiced at the seeming hardihood and prowess of Afghan guerrillas, they did die in droves when fighting against Soviet conscripts and second-line troops. Moreover, during the 1980s, the best Soviet troops were all to be found in Central Europe poised against NATO.

While Afghanistan was not the graveyard of the Soviet Army, it was a black hole for Moscow’s finances when the USSR was teetering on the edge of complete economic and political collapse. Considering that the Soviets had lost more troops quelling Post-War Ukrainian and Baltic nationalist guerrillas then they did in Afghanistan, the Afghans didn’t represent much of a drain on their military resources. In short, political and economic implosion in Moscow, and not guerrillas, dragged the Soviet military out of Afghanistan — although many observers were not willing to concede this point at the time.

It is interesting to note that the Soviet withdrawal was largely unmolested, and many Soviet conscripts in the final years of their occupation have told stories of deliberately letting the guerrillas go by them to attack Afghan government troops. The Taliban (and Osama bin Laden) were not present at this time, but the latter was engaged in some heroic posturing in southern Afghanistan while the Soviets were departing the northern half of the country.

Other commentators remember the British Army that marched into Afghanistan in 1839 and that only one man staggered out in 1842. However, the Army of 4,500 troops (mostly Indian sepoys) and 12,000 attendant camp followers stunned the Afghans when it roared into Kabul in August 1839. It was an efficient army by the standards of the time, but had the misfortune to have Major General William Elphinstone appointed as its new commander in 1841. Elphinstone is stripped bare in Norman Dixon’s classic study "The Psychology of Military Incompetence" as an example of irresolution and stupidity.

After encouraging the Afghans into rebellion with his displays of irresolution and uncertainty, Elphinstone attempted to march out of Kabul in mid-winter. However, his characteristic dithering and sketchy logistic preparations added new burdens to his troops and most of them quickly died from exposure while Afghan snipers picked off the rest. After this debacle, the British sent another Army into the country in 1842. It reached Kabul once more with great ease. The British sent expeditions into Afghanistan on a couple of other occasions and always secured their military objectives. While the Pathan rifleman on the hillside remained an opponent for British soldiers right up until World War II, he was invariably more of a pest than a menace.

Other conquerors have also found Afghanistan an easy country to invade. Alexander the Great romped through it, so did a variety of Persians, Huns, Indians, Arabs, Chinese and Mongols. Indeed, Afghanistan’s history is one of conquest, and many of its people are the descendents of those who fled conquerors into the high hills. In one example, the high mountains in the eastern "tail" of the country shelter a population of Dravidian Animists who have been hiding out since Aryan charioteers bounced into the Indus Valley sometime around 1400 BC.

In short, Afghanistan is easy to occupy but staying there is another matter. As a high cold desert, interspersed with jagged mountains, there is little to entice outsiders into staying. The Soviets realized no great material advantages for occupying it, nor did the British — who thought the financial cost of garrisoning the place to be prohibitive. As for the Afghans, like many other hill-peoples elsewhere in history (such as the Scottish Highlanders, Appalachian Hillbillies or the mountaineers of the Caucasus), their relative isolation and bitter poverty has left them with a fierce pride and stubbornness — they really have nothing else.

After the Soviet departure, the Civil War continued until the early 1990s; with the defeat of the Kabul regime a new one sprang up between the different peoples and factions of the country. Since 1977, Afghanistan had been so fought over that almost nothing remained… and so came the next set of conquerors. In 1997 the Taliban took Kabul and the remaining cities of the country, imposing their fanatically austere version of Islam on the surviving population.

While the Taliban contains many Afghans (mostly Pathans), much of its strength is drawn from northwest Pakistan. The Taliban has also been able to draw volunteers from elsewhere in the Muslim world, and commands financial support unavailable to other forces in the country. Yet a coalition of the survivors of the Civil Wars and Soviet occupation (the Northern Alliance) continues to oppose them — albeit with an army of old men and young boys. Elsewhere, the Taliban is resented as an alien party.

If the US and its partners do enter Afghanistan — and act with restraint -- many Afghans might welcome them, but the Taliban might not be much of an enemy to reckon with. As for the famed Afghan guerrilla… much of the fame is unwarranted, most of the guerrillas of recent wars are dead, and the few survivors might welcome the US with open arms rather than open hostility.

Anti-Racism and Human Rights are all very nice as concepts, but neither construct is a good concept for the running of an entire society. Those who aspire to build a better world had better look at what really works — the rule of law.

The 2001 World Conference on Racism held in Durban South Africa largely proved to be what any intelligent person feared — a waste of paper that might have been better used for traffic tickets, disposable diapers or in magazines about pop idols. As a meaningful contribution to human peace and security, this conference was only marginally better than the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928 (another waste of paper in which a number of countries including Germany, Italy and Japan renounced aggressive war).

Inviting delegates from all nations was bad enough, as seeing democratic nations being hectored about ethical behaviour by Cuba, Libya or the Sudan is bound to be educational, if nothing else. By letting in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that were concerned about racism, xenophobia, etc, the conference threatened to prove as helpful as a disarmament gathering attended only by salesmen from weapons manufacturers. NGOs that make a living off of fighting racism are usually bound to discover lots of it around — just as ‘Anti-Racist’ politicians can smell burning crosses where none are. Anyway, the NGO’s solid ability to focus on distorted historical grievances while overlooking urgent and very real modern problems speaks much about their abilities, as did the conference’s solid condemnation of the only democratic nation in the Middle East.

One can only hope that the Durban Fiasco might put an end to professional anti-racism, although this is too much to hope for. In any event, ‘Anti-Racism’ has been hijacked and that cause seems forever discredited -- although professional anti-racists will continue to leech money out of the public trough for some years into the future.

Anti-Racism as a cause has been utterly discredited and the same thing happened to that other fine old warhorse for the cause of humanity: Human Rights. The concept of ‘Human Rights’ was a good one when first described, although the Soviet Bloc did manage to clutter the notion up with extraneous "rights" in the early years of the UN.

The original set of rights was focused on the fundamental freedoms that are so often taken for granted in Western nations: freedom of speech, worship, association, etc. The Soviets also included such rights as the right to shelter, to eat, and to work … but these rights were not included out of any sense of compassion or moral superiority. Rather, the Soviets hoped that criticism of individual freedoms inside the Soviet Bloc could be deflected by pointing to violations of these extended "freedoms" in the West. There are always the hungry, the homeless and the unemployed, and in Western nations it is not difficult to find some examples (particularly if one looks for vagrants) as the deeply impoverished are always with us.

The Soviet Bloc was always rife with poverty and deprivation of the bitterest kind, but knew it could always sweep the evidence under the carpet of total censorship and would then be able to wax indignant about any suggestions of famine and want.

For example, the famines that attended Collectivization in the 1920s were seldom discussed in Soviet history — and the Famines of the 1930s (which killed millions) were always hotly denied. But the Soviet press was usually well up to speed on Southern poverty in the US. In contrast to the Soviet famines, it is worth remembering for those who still worry about hunger in Western nations that we have not known famine since the invention of the railway. Moreover, ‘normal’ housing in much of the old Soviet Bloc would pass for shameful slums in most Western nations.

In any event, Human Rights — although a useful cause at times — was weakened by the Soviets. However, the funeral for this cause came in early 2001 when the US was voted off from various international human rights committees and panels in the UN by a combination of states that included China, Cuba and the Sudan.

If totalitarians can re-write concepts of anti-racism and human rights to further their own ends, then we need to resort to another method to measure the importance and value of human life that cannot be so easily perverted. The concept we need exists, and its roots extend back for many centuries. Fundamentally, it is the stock from which "human rights" and "anti-racism" were extracted and it remains intact for contemporary use.

The concept of human rights and anti-racism all stem from the rule of law: That system by which laws are public, binding and fairly enforced. Their development has not been even or trouble-free but can be traced back to when the Tables of Roman Law were written down and placed in the market for all citizens to read. The Magna Carta led to the next growth spurt, and the continued evolution of the Parliamentary system in Great Britain and then the United States during the 18^th Century advanced the cause further. While the Rule of Law is nowhere perfect (and can’t really expect to be perfected either) it’s halting and oft-interrupted progress can be easily traced through history.

The elements of the rule of law are simple: Everyone — leaders especially -- is accountable and has specific duties and obligations in return for living in a functioning society. In return, they have the guarantee that they can reasonably expect to keep what they have legitimately acquired and will be relatively safe. Under the rule of law, property has value and individuals have rights.

The Rule of Law is a poison pill to totalitarians and the various Presidents for Life that infest the developing world. Public laws that cannot easily be amended or by-passed for expediency force them to compromise with or accommodate peaceful political opponents. Their own vulnerability to prosecution if they break the law is a brake to temper tantrums or corruption. As for property rights — there is no better way to guarantee development and prosperity.

The facts speak for themselves. At independence, a number of African nations were wealthier than many Asian nations. Yet property rights alone guaranteed prosperity for the often-troubled democracies of South Korea and Taiwan. Singapore’s rise to prosperity has been meteoric. But in Sub-Saharan Africa, where virtually every new nation has been subjected to a "leader for life" (usually supplanted by the next "leader" after a coup), the pace of development has been catastrophic and often regressive. To blame the woes of the people who live under these leaders on slavery and racism is fatuous. The expectation that human rights alone can solve their problems is like giving a plant without roots.

The Rule of Law is the peg on which all human rights and constructs of equality must hang. It must become the only criteria by which nations are judged or offered assistance. Anything else is a waste of paper.

Stupidity is a fairly common human trait, but perhaps it reaches its apex when the Western World’s activists hold forth. "Social Activist" interpretations of the World Trade Center Bombing reveal the shallowness of their world-view.

"In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right."

"What I fear is a combination of mis-directed military response and domestic repression."

"September 11 has created a blank slate for the global domination of the Bush agenda of militarism and global capitalism."

Perhaps the most bone-headed response comes from a woman who had not even become a Canadian citizen when she took over the reigns of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Although she was fulminating about the US, her remarks win the prize for sheer idiocy…

Besides the Islamicists, let’s not forget another group interested in shattering our lives and economies…

"We shut it [Seattle] down and I don’t care what anybody says… when you get a taste of a win like that you just never lose the taste. There’s no question that this isn’t going to stop."

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca