26 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

THE COLLAPSE OE OBJECTIVITY:

LOOKING AT RECENT BOOKS ABOUT TERRORISM
Anis Shivani

F
EW among the explosion of books following the 'War on Terror'
achieve objectivity. There is a sheen of ex post facto rationalization
informing the best-known analyses by current and former spies, dip-
lomats, govemment officials, and investigative journalists. A totally different
narrative about the dimensions of terrorism prevailed just before 9/11 than the
day after. Such an abrupt tumabout in historical reasoning cannot be justified
by the weight of already existing facts. If there is a book of fiction, nonfiction,
or memoir from a liberal perspective that vigorously maintains the goal of
promoting freedom and democracy abroad in a way reminiscent of Woodrow
Wilson, or from a conservative perspective that fully understands the need to
preserve the very freedoms at home for which the war on terrorism is osten-
sibly being fought in the first place, it is still to be written. Nearly everyone
affihated with institutional joumalism or connected in any way with govem-
ment agrees that radical changes must be made to our way of life, and almost
no one from these camps presents a case for the war on terrorism that looks
as if it might be able to withstand the test of time.
Steve Coil's Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars: The Secret History of
the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Septem-
ber 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2004) is the most comprehensive survey so far of
America's exact relationship with Osama bin Laden and his fellow Arab
Afghans in the two decades preceding 9/11. For sheer originality of presenta-
tion and meticulousness of research, including interviews with nearly all the
key people still alive who were associated with the CIA's 1980s AfghanyV/zad,
Ghost Wars has no match among current offerings. Led by anti-communist
zealots like Reagan's CIA Director William Casey, the CIA let Pakistani
dictator Zia ul-Haq's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) funnel money to
mujahideen of its own choosing, and in the process become a behemoth
beyond any state's control (here is the persistent thread of exculpability fol-
lowed by most of the commentators: not the Afghan jihad itself, but the
CIA letting the ISI make funding choices). The Americans assumed that
the more fundamentalist the warrior, the more efficient he was in fighting
the Soviets.
Coll gives a mesmerizing blow-by-blow account of the close relationship
among the ISI, the Saudi intelligence agencies, particularly under Prince
Turki al-Faisal, and the CIA's men in the field such as Gary Schroen and Milt
Bearden, and in Washington, Cofer Black, Richard Clarke, and George Tenet.
In common with other books showcasing the views of former spies. Coll
can't help romanticizing veteran Afghan mujahid and warlord, Ahmed Shah
 THE COLLAPSE OF OBJECTIVITY 27

Massoud - who was assassinated on September 9, 2001 - as almost a tragic

figure. Coll, like the spies who were involved in the Afghan jihad, downplays
Massoud's lack of a broad national constituency, and his own role in the
bloodletting that overcame Afghanistan between the departure of the Soviets
and the arrival of the Taliban. The question has often been raised in current
debate: to what extent was Osama bin Laden assisted by the CIA? This needs
to be reframed. Osama bin Laden and all that he represents are not even con-
ceivable without the American formulation of the Afghan y7/zat/. It wouldn't
be a stretch to argue that the modern idea oi jihad festered and came to frui-
tion more among American policymakers in the first instance than among the
extremists of the Muslim Brothers and associated indigenous groups.
Coll is no determinist: he doesn't mean to imply that global terrorism
would have assumed its present dimensions even if the CIA had made wiser
choices about which mujahideen factions to fund, and even if the US had
not disengaged from Afghanistan as precipitously as it did after the Soviet
withdrawal in 1989. But despite his sympathy for the individual characters
involved in the proxy fight against the Soviet Union, Coll shares the presump-
tion that terrorism is an existential threat to the United States, and obliges us
to rethink our concepts of what constitutes security and liberty. In fact. Coil's
dismissive attitude toward Bill Clinton and his deputy director of counterter-
rorism, Paul Pillar, reveals the fundamental flaw in current analyses. Terror-
ists want nothing more than for us to elevate them to the level of existential
threat, because this in itself will bring about the radical undermining of our
societies that they desire.
The fact remains that 9/11 happened on George W. Bush's watch, and not
on Clinton's; there's more than fortuitous timing involved here. Coll tells us
that Clinton 'defined the broader purpose of his foreign policy as one that
would 'spread the benefits' of global integration and 'reduce the risks' of
terrorism by making 'more partners and fewer terrorists in the future'. Bin
Laden, for Clinton, was 'an isolated fanatic, flailing dangerously but quixoti-
cally against the forces of global progress'. For Pillar, terrorism was 'a chal-
lenge to be managed, not solved'. The metaphor of 'waging war against
terrorism' was for Pillar wrong, since the threat couldn't be eradicated but
only 'reduced, attenuated, and to some degree controlled'. These conclusions
were correct. If one wants to push globalization, and ultimately achieve net
gains in human freedom across the world, one must live with a certain amount
of terrorism. To slow down globalization, as the current approach does by cur-
tailing openness and mobility, is to buy into a cure worse than the occasional
sickness.
To fight an existential fight, you need an existential enemy. Michael
Scheuer's contribution, in Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War
on Terror (Brassey's, 2004), is to construct Osama bin Laden as just such
28 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

an enemy: rational not mad, driven by specific grievances such as America's

support for Israel and the presence of American troops on Saudi soil. To think
of bin Laden as a crazed fanatic diminishes him as a great enemy for a great
empire; so Scheuer repeatedly lauds him as a great man, a hero, a tribune of
the people that America must accept for his importance before it can have any
hope of defeating him. The savage war with a significant section of Islam is
on, and the West can't opt out of it. But to the extent possible it must fight the
war smartly, not indiscriminately, and without wastage of firepower, and to
this end it must reduce the friction with jihadist Islam, of which bin Laden
is the iconic figure. Do below-market oil prices deserve our support of tyran-
nous Arab regimes, even at the cost of terrorism? Scheuer's stated brief is to
awaken Americans and other Westemers to the reality of the magnitude of
savagery planned for us, while at the same time offering practical solutions
to weaken jihadist forces. At times, he sounds willing to let Islamic countries
fight each other into extinction, as long as this doesn't involve the loss of
American life. Anything is acceptable, as long as America comes away rela-
tively unharmed. In any event, the battle is joined with the rational jihadist
enemy, and he must not be underestimated.
Scheuer presents himself in the tradition of the plain-speaking heartland
American, unafraid to take on Eastem elites beholden to powerful lobbies that
work against broad national self-interest. Typical of this trend in American
thought, he wavers between isolationism and interventionism, in the end
settling for a pragmatic selective interventionism, when the gravity of the
impending threat warrants it. Iraq, in Scheuer's view, clearly was not such
a case, being a deflection from the war against terrorism. But for straight
shooters like Scheuer, making the case that their aversion to political correct-
ness allows them to understand the nature of the enemy, a naivete about
empire betrays their policy prescriptions. In this instance. Coll and others
who have taken up the idea of blowback have a better clue about the disasters
empire inevitably brings in its wake.
Scheuer's attitude toward the magnitude of the jihadist threat borrows
from Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror
(Random House, 2002) and Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
(I. B. Tauris, 2002). These alarmist books depict an extended future of relent-
less battle against the implacable Islamist enemy. They find too much support
for jihadism among run-of-the-mill Muslims, even if at the level of tacit
approval rather than active involvement, for us to rest easy with individual
victories against isolated jihadist factions. The idea behind these tracts is a
radically ambitious, expansionist, unilateral foreign policy that is eager to
grasp the chance to wage another long-lasting cold war, with occasional
hot wars as necessary. Liberals have not yet integrated such an expansionist
policy in their worldview, being uncomfortable with the notion of exporting
 THE COLLAPSE OF OBJECTIVITY 29

democracy. Benjamin Barber's Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism, and Demo-

cracy (Norton, 2003) is typical of today's exhausted liberal attitude: demo-
cracy can't be exported on the cheap, or in the short term, without a long
period of groundwork. True enough on its face, this proposition, but the
resounding absence of the enthusiasm that conservatives have appropriated
these days for the sacred mission of exporting American values suggests a
vacuum of thought among liberals.
But are the terms of this debate false? Does America need to intervene to
make Muslim nations more democratic? Or will this process happen on its
own, if allowed to go forward without abrupt impositions from outside?
Are we in a winner-take-all, zero-sum game, a fight to the death, with the very
survival of Western civilization at stake? Olivier Roy's The Failure of Poli-
tical Isiam (Harvard, 1998) exemplifies the route of scholarly objectivity
so frequently abandoned in the aftermath of the fears evoked by 9/11.
For Roy, and for many other scholars writing in the second half of the
1990s, political Islam, including in its radical, jihadist manifestation,
was a waning force. It would have been better to let the Algerian
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) come to power, as the Muslim Brothers were
allowed to share power in Jordan, and as the Turks have followed the path
of letting the religionists take over in that most secular of Islamic nations,
rather than bottle it up to let it emerge as a more threatening force. Iran, if
it's left alone (which everything now suggests probably won't be the case),
will eventually moderate, through sheer exhaustion of the mullah spirit. But
for Paul Berman and others who've been quick to equate 'Islamic fascism'
with its Nazi predecessor, the Egyptian Syed Qutb and his Muslim Broth-
ers are no different from the Wahhabi-inspired Osama bin Laden and al-
Qaeda. All are indiscriminately lumped together, as if calling for a puritan
reformation in the Salafi or Deobandi style inevitably leads to Taliban-
style state takeovers, that will then be forever entrenched. Astute scholars
like Roy don't make such mistakes.
At least for Scheuer specific policy grievances have festered so deeply
that they have ascended to the level of existential threat. For Robert Baer,
in See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on
Terrorism (Crown, 2002), only a litany of complaints against the brainlessly
legalistic, pussy-footing, molly-coddling counterterrorist officials suffices. If
only Baer's superiors in the CIA had let him finish his job of hunting down the
perpetrators of the 1983 attacks on the American embassy in Beirut. (Baer
wants us to think that the trail then would have led to state sponsors of ter-
rorism, particularly Iran.) If only the coup against Saddam Hussein then being
plotted by Ahmad Chalabi and Jalal Talabani in 1995 in the north of Iraq
had been allowed to go ahead without fear of what might follow. If only
George Tenet's declaration in the late 1990s that America was 'at war' with
30 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

Osama bin Laden had been backed up by operational muscle. If only the
energy companies hadn't assumed veto power over American policy in the
Near East during the heyday of globalization, and more traditional, realist
concerns had maintained sway. Clinton's foreign policy advisors, particularly
Tony Lake and Sandy Berger, and before them the cautious career bureaucrats
who had taken over the CIA in the wake of the Senate committee investiga-
tions into CIA abuses, shackled on-the-ground operatives too much. An infu-
sion of human intelligence ('humint' in spy argot) rather than reliance on
signals intelligence ('sigint', or the art of eavesdropping on electronic
communications) is needed. Britain has always been stronger than the
US in 'humint' in the Middle East.
But Baer never asks what intelligence operatives on the ground can
accomplish in the absence of a fair foreign policy? For Baer and for other
spies writing since 9/11, like Richard A. CX&rk&'m Against All Enemies: Inside
America's War on Terror (Simon & Schuster, 2004), the complaint always is
that American politicians are too scared to take on Iran, Saudi Arabia, and
Pakistan as state entities too closely tied to terrorist networks for the sake
of their own survival. Clarke at least recognizes that Clinton, unlike his
two immediate predecessors and his successor, managed the threat of terror-
ism with the seriousness and attention it required. He thinks that the war in
Iraq is an obsession of Bush's most trusted advisors and a net contributor
to more terrorism. But he wonders little if we're doing anything in the world
in policy terms to engender the terrorist response. The entire book is framed in
terms of what one lone ranger, the intrepid and unflappable Richard Clarke,
did to face up to the danger; he seems to have been behind every success in
the history of the modem war on terror, and warned about every one of its
failures. This egocentric attitude is precisely the wrong approach to take
toward a complex and subtle issue such as terrorism; how different, in the
end, is it from Bush's accumulation of power in his own figure as he becomes
the standard bearer of the new Crusade?
All of the spies agree that Congressional oversight of the intelligence
agencies hobbled them too greatly. The Watergate syndrome needs to be
kicked, just as the Vietnam syndrome probably already has in the national
imagination. Yet the restrictions imposed on the CIA and the FBI in the
1970s, in the wake of the revelations of their sordid past, were necessary;
nothing about the world since 9/11 alters that fact. For America to get
involved again in the business of assassination and torture, and indiscriminate
spying on its citizens, even if it were to lead to momentary tactical gains in the
war on terror, would count as a defeat in the long run.
Why was Osama bin Laden hardly heard of before 1998, and al-Qaeda as
an organization per se hardly ever included on official lists of enemies as late
as the late 1990s? Could it be that their importance has been exaggerated.
 THE COLLAPSE OF OBJECTIVITY 31

looking in the rearview mirror? At the time, American policy sought to coor-
dinate a broad range of interests in the Near East, rather than being single-
mindedly focused on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Terror was rightly seen in
the Clinton years as an element of the overall picture, not the greatest fact
of existence. That was in fact the right policy, and judicious appraisal of the
actual strengths and weaknesses of Islamists and jihadists on the ground will
suggest that it would still be the right policy. Globalization through the pursuit
of American 'soft power', while living with the inevitability of terrorist pin-
pricks - or even dagger attacks - was and is still the best course of action.
Bernard-Henri Levy, in Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville House,
2003), engages in what we might call mystical reportage, or history-on-the-
fly constructed from rumour, speculation, innuendo, and paranoia: the
very mirror image of the thought process that he accuses his fanatic hosts
in Pakistan of performing. Without any real evidence. Levy conjectures that
the Wall Street Journal reporter was on the verge of uncovering a definite
link between the ISI and Osama bin Laden, perhaps involving the exchange
of nuclear arms. In Levy's feverish rendition of contemporary Pakistan -
the 'stench of apocalypse' is for him everywhere in the air - that country
is one step away from a mullah takeover of the nuclear arsenal, and there's
nothing anyone can do about it.
And yet, despite this fear-mongering conclusion. Levy is to be credited
with attempting an imaginative leap into the collective mind of a nation on the
verge of suicide or worse, something most of the chroniclers of ghost wars
and shadow action have little conception of, focused as they are on observable
behaviour and motives. One learns more from Levy's injudicious internal cla-
mour, mixed sympathies, and turbulent analysis than any number of realistic,
detail-oriented memoirs of the region, which seem to capture everything but
the essence of the emerging collapse. After all. Levy risks offending the Pearl
family by looking at Pearl's alleged assassin, the British-born and public
school educated Omar Saeed Sheikh, as being in many ways Pearl's evil twin.
Few these days dare speak so freely.
The norm is more like Ethan Casey, in Alive and Well in Pakistan:
A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (Vision, 2004), whose effort to huma-
nize that country through sudden immersion makes him a mostly uncritical
observer of the greatest follies around him. Similarly, all Ahmed Rashid
can accomplish in Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Cen-
tral Asia (Yale, 2000) is an account of the rise of the Afghan theocrats too
contextualized to hold water. Unocal's interest in a pipeline running through
Afghanistan gets pride of place in this narrative, in what to Rashid is a replay
of the Great Game. Oil explains a lot. Imperialist shortsightedness the rest.
Pipeline politics gets play in the accounts of the former American spies
as well, whose implication is that this was a distraction from the existential
32 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

pursuit of the evildoers, but for Rashid the issue suggests avenues of excusa-
bility. The Taliban, Rashid would have us believe, were never entirely the
creation of the Pakistani state, never fully under the ISI and Pakistani mili-
tary's control. Pakistan was selfishly used and then discarded once its proxy
role in the war against the Soviet empire had concluded. Afghanistan was
similarly abandoned. America is a serial offender in that regard, a runaway
bride who leaves grooms frustrated at the altar of hope. But these excuses
have outlived their shelf-life.
A more blatant whitewashing of the Pakistani state's culpability in
fomenting destructive designs in the region is the civil servant Hassan
Abbas's Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America's
War on Terror (M. E. Sharpe, 2004), which typifies the absolute vacuum of
analysis among Pakistan's military and political establishment. Pakistan is
the little-state-that-could, in this blinkered version of history, rather than an
inflating monster getting too big for its shoes. Levy has a truer read on the
delusions of that country's elite, of which Abbas, and to a lesser extent Rashid
himself, are a part. Musharraf's concessions to moderation are only token and
insufficient, the smiling dictator having himself been the instigator of a near-
war with India in 1999, the very failure of which led to events bringing him to
power. The war on terror has become so twisted in its short-term focus, unlike
the sophisticated worldview of Clinton and his team, that it now creates
everywhere the very surfeits it can later feast on.

Fiction and memoir predictably try to do more to humanize the other side,
but often end up sugarcoating the pill that needs to be swallowed. The veteran
war correspondent Dan Fesperman, however, in The Warlord's Son (Knopf,
2004), shows an admirable breadth of understanding about the conflicts in that
part of the world leading to violence and terrorism, unlike American writers
often replicating the media-generated fear and trauma experienced by ordin-
ary people in the wake of the cataclysmic events. Fesperman's flawed heroes
are Skelly, an American reporter with a chance to get one last big story cover-
ing a war zone, and Najeeb, an educated young Pathan who's been disinherited
by his warlord father and who carries on a dangerous affair with Daliya, a col-
lege-age girl. They all end up in Afghanistan in the early days of the American
invasion in 2001, and not everyone returns alive.
The American reporter, a worthy update of the jaded Fowler in Graham
Greene's The Quiet American, is looking for an escape in the thrill of the
investigative chase, a contrast to his dismal married life in the suburban
Midwest, while the young Pathan lovers are seeking a more physical escape
from the contrived restrictions around them. The difficulty of escape in both
cases, but not its impossibility, suggests that the continued erosion of freedom
in that region of the world is by no means inevitable, even if it will take a lot
 THE COLLAPSE OE OBJECTIVITY 33

to remove the weight of tradition and religion. Fesperman conveys a nuanced

sense of the day-to-day overcoming of arbitrary authority, the chipping away
at millennia of superstition and ritual, balanced by the ubiquitous threat that at
any moment the individual and collective project of liberty may collapse alto-
gether. This balance is often missing from the recent nonfiction on the subject.
Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead, 2003) includes the onset
of full-fledged brutality in the hero Amir's childhood nemesis, Asif, a cruel
boy from a secular and prosperous family, who turns in adult life into a
Taliban enforcer. Amir becomes a successful writer in America, having been
forced to move to Northern California after the Soviet invasion, and having
lost an idyllic, though motherless, childhood in Kabul to the emigrant's hard-
ship. The tragic event in Amir's life is not saying anything about the brutal
rape of his servant and playmate Hassan (who will turn out to be his half-
brother) at the hands of Asif The code of silence, then, enforced in many
cruel guises, informs the onset of social dehumanization. Hassan is demeaned
because he is from the minority Hazara group, in a Kabul dominated by
Pathans. Amir's father, Baba, takes the secret of Hassan's parentage to the
grave. Brutality is a cancer liable to metastasize from relatively harmless
growths, but its origins can always be traced, in individual acts of omission
and commission. But is it really that linear? What explains entire civilizations
suddenly tipping over into mass cruelty, despite their genteel traditions?
It seems that Hosseini is avoiding some of the harshest truths. Amir's
transformation into an enviable writer in America seems too easily earned,
particularly since it comes along with his marriage to an angelic wife,
the daughter of an exiled Afghan general. The novel is too personalized.
Hosseini's narrator doesn't seem to wonder about the Americans' role in
creating the Taliban monster, from its origins in the mujahideen movement.
The Russians came, and that was that: you had to do what you must to recover
national sovereignty. Hosseini's actual Afghan community in northern Cali-
fornia probably remains Reaganite in its violent hatred of the Russis; the
Afghan diaspora still may not think the creation ofthe Taliban too high a price
to pay to kick out the Soviets, just as Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter's
National Security Advisor) holds on to a similar belief in recent statements.
But the Taliban are only a step forward in the state of perpetual war inherent
in the ideology of jihad. Who really raped Afghanistan, first and foremost?
What about the responsibility of Hosseini's class as a whole, his beloved Baba
included, who held back Afghan social progress to such an extent before the
1970s that a violent socialist revolution had to occur?
Even the best fiction, it would seem, has a difficult time assigning
responsibility for the onset of mass brutality. Repression creates its own
vicious cycle, but how do you break the circuit? There are no easy answers.
Marjane Satrapi, in her graphic memoir Persepolis 2 (Jonathan Cape, 2004),
34 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

a less gripping follow-up to the first installment of her memoir, describes the
ennui and narcissism among her adolescent friends in Austria, where she's
sent by her well-off Iranian parents to study in 1984. Her alienation in Europe
all but forces her to adopt a strong Persian identity, making her return to her
roots. A nationalist identity seems always to be a reaction to external pressure,
as is a hypemationalist identity (of which terrorism, both state and freelance,
is the extreme version). Satrapi's Austrian characters have their counterparts
in Iranians of her class and background, who adopt various forms of denial
and escape to deal with the tyranny of the fun-hating theocracy in the late
1980s and early 1990s.
Iran may have a long road ahead of it to attain a humane society, but is it
perhaps too convenient to hope that it might already be on its way, barring a
calamitous intervention by the US? A little more faith in the power of huma-
nist ideals to trump fundamentalism wouldn't hurt at this historical juncture,
and it may lead to some necessary calm, but it's revealing that a person of
Satrapi's relatively prosperous background closes her novel at the onset of
adulthood, before she might have to make any irrevocable choices about work
and livelihood in Iran.
Western writers of memoirs have had a tendency to romanticize the
rugged, tribal areas of the Indian subcontinent more than the civilized urban
terrain. Historically, Afghanistan seems to have claimed the greatest adora-
tion in memoir, followed by Pakistan's unruly Frontier province. The moder-
nist clamour of a Karachi or Bombay doesn't evoke the same affection. The
praise of Afghanistan always is that it has never let itself be subjugated by a
foreign power; well, the Taliban have been the latest in that chain of rebellion.
Both Afghan and Saudi tribal rigidity were imported into puritan Islamic
ideology to concoct a deadly prescription for social order. Members of tribes
are only nominally free; all too often the star-struck Western chronicler
doesn't see this contradiction.
Christina Lamb's The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years
(HarperCollins, 2002) is an account of her journeys to that country around
the time of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and again during the American
war in 2001. Lamb celebrates her love of the rugged Afghan land and the
manly tribal code. Where does manliness shade over into bestiality, however,
and how should we feel when a tribal society reacts like a disturbed hornet's
nest at the least incursion of global humane values? Must we leave them
alone? That would no longer seem to be an option in an interconnected world,
while intervention in any form seems only to invite greater disorder, an accel-
eration of the potentiality of the failed state. Afghan writers have not yet
claimed Afghan ownership of the Taliban (it's a Pakistani export), and neither
have Western writers of memoirs. Meanwhile, some Pakistani political com-
mentators claim the Taliban as their own in gestures of grandiosity.
 THE COLLAPSE OE OBJECTIVITY 35

On her last visit. Lamb tracks down a young woman, Marri, who writes
to her with hope that schools for girls will reopen and she'll be able to teach
again. She ends up tutoring privately; the hope is partially fulfilled. But for
how long? Much of Afghanistan is again in the grip of warlords. Won't
Afghanistan be jilted again by its American paramour? Like Azar Nafisi's
Reading Lotita in Tehran (Random House, 2003), Saira Shah's The Storytet-
ter's Daughter (Michael Joseph, 2003), and Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick
Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran
(PublicAffairs, 2005), the hope for female liberation in Lamb's memoir seems
to be conveniently disconnected from the rigours of the masculine codes of
honour and retribution that partially earn nostalgic approval, or at least the
codes of orderly relationships in some prelapsarian state of the nation before
the fall into revolutionary upheaval.
You can't have your cake and eat it too; the respectful gaze toward the
noble savage is perhaps more responsible for the long-bearded Taliban enfor-
cer of virtues and morals than we care to admit. Was the order under King
Zahir Shah so praiseworthy after all? Or was it a feudal leftover that couldn't
hold up against the first onslaught of egalitarian liberalism? One ofthe crimes
of the Afghan socialists in the early 1970s that most riled up the conservative
element - the royalists and the mystics alike - was female emancipation.
There is little cause-and-effect analysis in contemporary memoirs such as
Lamb's; one thing seems to follow another as in the days before scientific
history. Perhaps the shock of confronting medievalism provokes a pseudo-
history of primitivist fetish in the bemused Westerner.
What is the future, then, for all of us, in a world where terror is an accepted
fact? It would seem to be one of severely compromised freedom, where
we become the mirror image of how we view the terrorists operating - yet
another instance ofthe child spawning the parent it loves to hate. The 'enligh-
tened' view seems to be that the enemy is not reformable; better leave it
alone to fester in its own misery, because intervention might cause greater
harm to existing prosperity. Cheap petrol at the pump might be threatened
if we take the mission of democratizing Islam too seriously. In Christopher
Buckley's Elorence of Arabia (Random House, 2004), American agent Flor-
ence Farfaletti devises a subversive plan to spread democracy in the Arab
world by starting a progressive television channel in the relatively open King-
dom of Matar. Predictably, the women in Matar, and its more intolerant neigh-
bor Wasabia, end up worse off when Florence's plan backfires. Buckley's
farce is not far from the current liberal view toward the Islamic world.
If democratization is out, because after all the terrorists of 9/11 were
middle-class and educated, and not born of poverty and frustration, then hunt-
ing down the worst among them, putting aside all politeness (read, human
rights) may be our only option - just as the liberal and conservative consensus
36 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

in America now holds. Tom Clancy's The Teeth of the Tiger (Putnam, 2003) is
fiction that has already become reality, as the 'new kind of war' (a term of art
for tyrants throughout history) requires abandonment of the girlie adherence
to the rule of law and due process in pursuit of suspected terrorists and
criminals (the wall between these two categories has totally collapsed in
the administration of justice). In Clancy's novel, not the CIA or FBI or
NSA (National Security Agency) or any official intelligence agency that
we know of can pursue terrorists in the new world, but only an entity whose
existence no one will admit and which is beyond all legal restraint.
Hendley Associates operates in suburban Maryland as an investment
firm, but is actually the blackest of spy agencies, getting the benefit of the
'sigint' the NSA and the CIA aren't quick enough or smart enough to act on.
'The Campus', as it's known, recruits soldiers and cops who've shown the
willingness to act as trigger-happy vigilantes. These include a rookie FBI
agent, a Marine captain back from the war in Afghanistan, and the former Pre-
sident's son. When a Middle Eastem terrorist named Mohammed joins forces
with a Colombian drug cartel to infiltrate the US with suicide killers, our
gung-ho recruits are only too glad to kill Mohammed's associates one by
one by sticking a poison shot in their behinds that leaves no trace. The first
premise is that to win against the terrorists, you must play on their own turf
and follow no legal rules, and the second is that the way to end their threat
is to kill them one by one, as if there were a finite number of them after which
there will be no more. Both are false propositions, and both are now official
US policy. There's no need for 'the Campus' when torture and assassination
have been officially endorsed at the highest levels of government.
The road to war crimes leads straight to the very top, as Seymour
M. Hersh, in Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
(HarperCollins, 2004), has documented. The abuses at Abu Ghraib and other
prisons originate in special orders given by the President and approved by
Donald Rumsfeld. Panic becomes its own best argument, as crimes against
humanity matching the terrorists' worst instincts proceed in silence - for it
is still a deafening silence, relative to the scale of atrocities being committed
at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, and wherever else we can put detainees
beyond judicial oversight, as in the act of 'rendition' to countries that routi-
nely perform torture. In Lorraine Adams's Harbor (Knopf, 2004), a group
of illegal Algerian immigrants in Boston is mistaken for terrorists; but who
can blame the FBI and others for being over-vigilant, even hysterical, in their
pursuit of the thinnest leads, when the possibilities for inaction, we're told,
include a mushroom cloud over an American city? And can we really get
upset over govemment snoops reading our every email and listening to our
every phone conversation when the stakes are so high?
 THE COLLAPSE OE OBJECTIVITY 37

In Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping

(Random House, 2005), by Patrick Radden Keefe, we learn that for more than
three decades, the English speaking countries - Britain, the US, Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand - have had the ability to monitor just about every
communications signal sent out on earth, and for much of this time they seem
to have been reading these signals. The NSA, charged with monitoring com-
munications, is by far America's largest intelligence agency in staff and
resources; other vast bureaucracies with many thousands of employees,
whose very existence was officially denied until recently, exist at satellite
bases like the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) in Britain
and the DSD (Defense Signals Directorate) in Australia. Does such an omni-
potent surveillance system as Echelon exist? The evidence seems to be that
it's been operational for a long time. It also seems that all phone conversations
everywhere in the world are being electronically monitored, the suspicious
ones picked out for human analysis.
Keefe has in him something of the giddy, geeky endorser of surveillance
technologies that Matthew Brzezinski recently manifested in Fortress
America: On the Frontlines of Homeland Security An Inside Look at the
Coming Surveillance State (Bantam, 2004), welcoming to some extent the
necessity of 24/7 surveillance in the new world where the old rules of privacy
are claimed to be antiquated. These books self-consciously position them-
selves outside the realm of what they carefully ward off as conspiracy theory.
They bend over backwards to present the views of government officials who
assure us that they're only taking away our privacy to keep us safe; no ill
intent is involved, and we must simply trust them. The code word for them,
as for all the private and governmental entities that want to eviscerate privacy,
is the necessity for 'balance'. Whenever they say that there needs to be
balance between security and liberty, we know that they're about to take away
one more constitutionally guaranteed zone of privacy.
If Coil's Ghost Wars is the one indispensable book for a guide to the past,
when it comes to what we did in other countries - a book that makes you
exclaim over and over. Did this really happen? - then its counterpart for
the future, when it comes to what we're going to do in reaction, is fellow
Washington Post staffer Robert O'Harrow, Jr.'s No Place to Hide: Behind
the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society (Free Press, 2005). Most
Americans would be stunned to learn about the extent to which private
surveillance corporations like Acxiom, ChoicePoint, Seisint, and Lexis-Nexis
have accumulated gigantic databases, which are the resource for 'data
mining', sifting through incomprehensibly large amounts of individual daily
actions, to arrive at preemptive conclusions about criminal or terrorist activ-
ity. O'Harrow's key idea is the growing and irreversible alliance between
38 CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

these existing holders of databases and government agencies charged with

identifying wrongdoers.
The remarkable fact about the destruction of privacy, the very framework
for citizenship in a liberal democracy, is the extent to which public legislative
discussion only seems to happen after the fact, when the real action - such
as the frequent use of the Matrix (Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information
Exchange) system by the intelligence agencies, and progress toward the intro-
duction of biometric identification cards - has already irrevocably occurred
at the lower administrative levels. The Blair govemment in Britain is trying to
bring in a national ID card although they may drop the plans for it to have
biometric aspects. The public perception is that CAPPS II, the airline profil-
ing system. Matrix, and convicted felon John M. Poindexter's TIA (Total
Information Awareness) were killed by Congress or the states. In fact, every
one of these programmes is moving along, in different versions that might be
even more sweeping than the originals. Because the technology and storage
capacity for real-time data mining exist for the first time, following Moore's
law which predicts the doubling of computing capacity every year, they will
be used. But the fact remains that all of this surveillance apparatus was unable
to stop 9/11, and officials all but admit their inability to predict another catas-
trophe on that scale, or even greater. The sacrifice of liberty, it would appear,
is for no real gain.
The tragedy is that it remains unfashionable for liberals to believe today
that all people are equally capable of self-government. Terrorism cannot
destroy America; only America can destroy itself. A tactic has been misinter-
preted as an ideology. Exaggeration of the threat of the other is a staple among
the leading minds of empire, always and everywhere. When out-of-control
fear turns inward, however, that is a sign that the lessons of terror have not
only been taught too well to subservients abroad, but have reemerged as
pacification strategies for domestic populations too spoiled by prosperity to
undertake common sacrifice. That is when to be truly afraid. Joseph Conrad's
The Secret Agent (1907) and Orhan Pamuk's Snow (Faber and Faber, 2004)
teach us that terror is overcome by rational minds in control of perspec-
tive and historical insight. In their absence, the tragedy of terror becomes
self-fulfilling.

Anis Shivani's novel-in-progress. Intrusion, deals with an American anth-

ropologist researching a squatter settlement in contemporary Pakistan. He
has just finished his new collection, Anatolia and Other Stories, grappling
with the paradoxes of multiculturalism.