Endgame in Afghanistan

There are two endgames to be played out in Afghanistan in the next year or so.

The first endgame involves the US Army, its special troops and the Bush Administration.  That endgame centers around Osama bin Laden and his organization of dedicated terrorists/guerrilla fighters/Islamic Resistance Movement...pick your own term.

The second endgame involves the United Nations, a very diverse set of tribal leaders/bandit chiefs/warlords/freedom fighters (pick your own term), as well as Russia and a number of former Soviet satellites vying for position in an oil rich region.

In the best of all possible bin Laden endgames, The US Army would fold up the entire organization and/or it would collapse of its own weight much as did the Soviet Union when key supports failed it some 12-14 years ago.

In the worse of all possible endings from the view of the Bush Administration and, indeed from the point of view of a peaceable future, the bin Laden organization survives intact; or more likely, independent cells survive to make much mischief with little progressive social change in either the Islamic world or in the Global economy within which such movements are born.

In this endgame, a serious of tragic events are engineered by such cells at key points in any one of the Big Seven or Big Twenty countries which benefit unequally from a global division of labor and increasing stratification of wealth and power in the global economy.  These events; larger or smaller in scope that the embassy bombings or the catastrophe at the World Trade Center, remain part of the worse possible unfoldings of the 'war on terrorism.'  Whether one is a dedicated capitalist happily pursuing lower costs and higher profits or a fundamentalist Islamic warrior aspiring to eternal life in Islamic paradise, this endgame is terrible; it exacts a bitter toll on innocent and minor players on either side.

For those corporate CEO's who run the transnational corporations engaged in production, distribution and enlargement of market share, it pushes the world into a spiral of economic chaos.  For political leaders and political parties in the 20 wealthy capitalist countries, someone has to pay the price of ever more elaborate surveillance, ever more sophisticated technology and it has to be the taxpayers who have discretionary income in North America, Europe or Japan.  With an increasing share of national income going to police capacity, programs of social justice atrophy, tax payers grow surly, corporations move to avoid taxation and the valuable freedoms of democracy are pushed aside.

For those in the Islamic world and sympathizers around the world, concentrated in the poorer countries in Africa, Asia, South America and eastern Europe, Islamic terror brings the risk of systematic military action complete with bombs, invasive Co-Coalition forces, cynical use of ancient enmities and death to innocent peoples unable to avoid proximity to targets selected by high tech guidance systems and low grade intelligence.  The US has already identified some 50 to 80 such countries suitable for targeting after the US endgame is deemed achieved by the Bush Administration.   For those countries, new endgames await; new plans for UN salvage of the debris of the war on terrorism emerge.

In the best of all possible endgames in Afghanistan, the UN does succeed to put together the kind of political framework that achieves peace, economic development and progress for the women and men of Afghanistan from both the brutality of Islamic extremism as well as the brutal indifference of transnational commerce after the oil in the region.

But, if one thinks about the task of rebuilding one country after another; countries in which bin Laden cells exist amidst greater or lesser acceptance by political leaders and/or peoples at the lowest strata of the global stratification system, then the best possible endgame played out in Afghanistan becomes successively ever more difficult despite the best intentions of progressive members of the UN.

There is a larger, more productive endgame that could be adopted.   It will not be adopted since it is hostile to the interests of those in Europe and the Americas who benefit from present patterns of economic exchange in the world centers of trade.  And there are wealthy and intransigent strata in the exploited countries of the world who align themselves firmly with the USA in its moving fight against terrorism.  Islamic princes in Saudi Arabia, Latino elites in South America, ethnic elites cum war-lords in former soviet countries as well as emerging gangs in disrupted countries around the world; all these align themselves against social justice, strong democracy, egalitarian economics and ethnic peace.

That larger endgame involves reduction of foreign debt, improvements in education, honest and popular elections unfettered by wealth and/or election fraud; these are basic to an endgame which strips terrorists of their social base and which ends the cycles of violence by rich and poor alike in the global economy.  Also essential to an endgame adequate to the task are elements of a Bill of Human Rights available to all citizens of the world and supported by the United Nations.

At this globalized endgame, substitution of the Big 6, the Big 7 or the Big 20 for the United Nations in the creation of endgames, is hostile to the goals at hand; peace with justice in all parts of the world.  Hegemony in the definition of terror, in the determinations of strategy, in the control of endgames by the USA alone is equally hostile to world peace.  There is much in America to be admired and to be emulated; foreign policy is not often part of that which makes America great.  This is a hard lesson for Americans to accept informed as we are by a complacent media, an educational system hand-maiden to class and ethnic elites as well as a political system funded by those who had ambitions in the global economy hostile to peace with social and economic justice.

It is a sad thing to watch these narrow and inadequate endgames put in place and, one after another, fail to change the larger social and economic environment which breeds violences.  Yet we must work for better and more effective endgames else we accept an endless cascade of terror, counter-terror and the terrible price paid by the innocent of the world.