Operation Enduring Freedom

(Published in Banking Services Chronicle December 2001)

Oct 7 night thrust us into the so-called first war of the 21st century. Operation Infinite Justice. America decided to play God. It ordained that Doomsday would come when America wanted it to. America will say, Let there be darkness, and there will be darkness.

The sole superpower, no doubt, has stars twinkling on its CV. It has been a great nation (though its goodness has often been in doubt) for a long time now. Its greatest achievement: It has conquered Communism. If the colossal USSR could collapse before its might, what resistance would the Taliban be able to offer?

But make no mistake about it, even George W Bush Jr cannot steer his country in isolation. He needs the approval, even if tacit, of the rest of the world for his actions. So his belligerence gave way to sense. Lest America be seen to be posing as greater than Allah, the US decided to rename its campaign as Operation Enduring Freedom.

The operation has now been going on for long. It is about a month since the war started and the end is nowhere in sight. The world is enduring it for the sake of putting an end to global terrorism (read satisfying the US ego). At the end of it the US promises freedom. But freedom to whom? Freedom from what? Ask these questions and you will get at best vague answers. You may even be reprimanded for asking irrelevant questions. Yes, most of us have experienced this as students when we asked something in the class that made the teacher uncomfortable. Because either the teacher was ignorant or the answers were too embarrassing.

But thank God, Allah, Jesus, ... uh! religion breaks me as I search for the politically correct God.... No need to worry, though. We live in India, not in the US. We are a secular nation. And what’s more important, we mean what we say. When we say we are a free country, we are free to voice our opinions. If the case is not so, as happened in the mid-Seventies, we at least candidly admitted that it was an Emergency. This is unlike in the US, where even mentioning Osama seems to be a terrorist act. And yet they are waging the war for freedom.

Since we are free to ask questions, let me raise one that has been doing the rounds: Has Islam finally got its post-modern sword in Osama bin Laden? I think we have to strike at the root of the assumption here. And I don’t know if we have Samuel P Huntington and his Clash of Civilisations to blame for this.

The assumption made is: Ideology is dead. So the two poles we are left with now are 1) The West, represented by Christianity and 2) Islam, the second most populous religion. But this assumption seems to be vitally flawed. Is religion the only alternative to ideology of yesteryears? And if so, what happens to China and India? Such straitjackets certainly do not apply to these two countries. And in today’s world no one can deny the seminal importance they enjoy in geo-politics.

Thus, it’s not a question of whether Osama represents Islam. Let’s not see it as a conflict between religions. Wars will be fought whenever there is a conflict of interests. And the possibility of a major war, if at all there is one, lies between the US and China. The former is an established superpower and the latter is fast emerging as one. India seems to be in no hurry to reach that status, perhaps because we are a peace-loving nation.

Wars will be fought when economic interests clash beyond the point of compromise. WTO perhaps makes much more news than the UN. The Taliban would have continued to enjoy their own rule(s) had they not attacked the World Trade Center, the economic nervecentre of the US. But more than that, the Taliban problem would just not have erupted if the US and the erstwhile USSR had supported the economic uplift of Afghanistan instead of making it an ideological battleground.

Lesson for America: Remember, God said, Let there be light.