Category: self-authored

“I Love the US Republic, and I Hate the US Empire”: Johan Galtung on the War in Afghanistan and How to Get Out – second part of Amy Goodman’s interview with Johan Galtung. Known as a founder of the field of peace and conflict studies, he’s spent the past half-century pursuing nonviolent conflict resolution in international relations. His latest book is The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?: Successors, Regionalization or Globalization? US Fascism or US Blossoming?

watch interview here.

my comments:

i found the galtung interview interesting but i had major problems with how he started off.

the occupation of afghanistan cannot last because colonization has never lasted anywhere. of course afghanistan is even harder to occupy than most countries on account of how afghan society has always been loosely structured, with no strong central govt. we find the same social set up in pakistan’s northern regions and that’s why the pakistani govt had never interfered in their business – they had always been quite autonomous – before and after british colonial rule, pre and post partition. but galtung chooses to focus on islam as the reason why afghanistan cannot be colonized. he talks about muslims all over the world fighting for afghan independence, falling in the common trap of treating islam as a monolith and buying into the class of civilizations. he goes further and uses islamic theology to back up his claims – the followers of “allah” will never capitulate to “infidels”. that is so franklin graham! first of all, christians and jews r not infidels but people of the book in islam. secondly, since when have the followers of jesus or moses liked to capitulate to muslim infidels? the simple fact is that no one likes to have their country occupied. period.

i agree with him on 9/11. i don’t think that al qaeda had much to do with it. in fact, they issued a statement right after 9/11 saying as much (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.binladen.denial/). most people don’t remember that. 9/11 was probably carried out by a small group of disaffected, mostly saudi men. again, i don’t think it was just about an oil treaty or about what the prophet said when he expired. i think the presence of american troops on saudi soil is a huge problem as is american foreign policy.

it’s true that conflict resolution is outside the purview of u.s. foreign policy, that the u.s. might become increasingly irrelevant and that turkey could become an imp world player. i have always talked about the need for more cooperation b/w the islamic world and latin america because they have v similar colonial histories and r still the victims of nefarious post colonial interference. the rapprochement between turkey, iran and brazil seems to be in line with that idea. i also agree with what he says about india – their alacrity to align themselves with america and israel and with the lethal combination of the “war on terror” doctrine mixed together with aggressive capitalism does not bode well. they will end up on the wrong side of the split between the present world order and its eventual replacement.

afghanistan will certainly be another vietnam – it’s self evident. people talk about differences but in fact the similarities r quite stunning. the result will be the same – as soon as we leave the country, the puppet govt we have propped up will collapse and the taliban will take over – they already control most of the country anyway.

also, totally agree about al jazeera being multi-angle. it’s real journalism vs what we have – corporate media where news looks like an advertisement stuck in an endless loop.

galtung is absolutely right that the word terrorism, as applied to national resistance movements, is preposterous.

but then sure enough he returns to his comfort zone of infidels and ummahs. i’m glad he mentions some concrete issues tho. when the west became insistent on crediting al qaeda for 9/11, bin laden did use that opportunity to become a spokesperson for the monolithic islam conjured up by the west. he came out with a statement of issues the muslim world had with the u.s. including palestine, somalia, chechnya, kashmir, lebanon, the devastating sanctions on iraq, jerusalem as the capital of israel, the theft and exploitation of resources found in muslim countries, etc. galtung is right that no effort was ever made to talk about any of these concerns.

his recommendations which include trading for equal economic benefit, pulling out of military bases, creating a dept of peace, putting an end to political arm twisting,
and forgetting about a separate mandate from god in favor of dialogue r all spot on.

In view of two major attacks on Ahmadi mosques in Lahore on March 28, 2010, in which 90 people were killed and more than one hundred injured, a Pakistani American perspective…

In 2003 when Benazir Bhutto was invited to speak at St John Fisher’s College here in Rochester about racial, religious and ethnic tolerance, my husband made it a point to attend the event. He sat patiently through all her vapid rhetoric in order to ask her one single question. In 1974 her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, had bowed to political pressure and declared Ahmadis1 to be non-Muslims, triggering a wave of persecution and discrimination which is still alive and well today. Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and then again from 1993 to 1996. My husband’s question was simple: what had she or her administration done during those two shots at governing Pakistan to eliminate this religious intolerance? Bhutto fumbled for words and launched into a generic speech on the importance of co-existence but she had no answer. Her administration had done nothing to address this injustice.

In a country where the army has penetrated every facet of society to the detriment of civic institutions, where that same military has mounted devastating attacks on its own civilians creating millions of refugees, where the Police Act of 1861 which was drafted by the British to facilitate their rule over the Indian subcontinent still defines the relationship (with minor amendments) between the police and the citizenry, where a small group of venal elite continue to colonize 170 million people, most of whom can hardly scrape a living, what protection can we expect for religious minorities?

When I called an Ahmadi friend of mine to inquire about her family following the horrible attacks in Lahore, she was pragmatic about the state of affairs in Pakistan. “Don’t they kill Shias in mosques all the time?” she said. True. Such mass killings are not limited to religious minorities either – their motivation can be ethnic or political as well. But the fact is that when a religious minority is targeted, it exposes a disturbing truth about the level of intolerance in a society and its inability to use legal safeguards and adequate law enforcement to protect all its citizens.

In a country like Pakistan, which is already torn by sectarian strife, there is no room for blasphemy laws2 which are open to abuse or a constitutional clause that requires Pakistan’s head of state to be a Muslim. Such laws succeed only in exacerbating existing tensions and designating religious minorities as second-class citizens. Pakistan’s government needs to take a stand. Half-hearted condolences will not do, neither will hypocritical platitudes. The perpetrators of the violence must be brought to justice. Discriminatory laws must be repealed. The police force must be trained to protect Pakistani citizens irrespective of socio-economic status, ethnicity or religion. Religious freedom and tolerance must be treated as a national priority.

With Islamophobia being as rampant as it is in the Western world today, who could be in a better position than Muslims to understand the vulnerability of religious minorities? Let’s remember that human rights are universal and not the prerogative of any one select group. We can only be safe when all of us, each and everyone of us is safe.

[1] The Ahmadiyya movement was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889. His followers, the Ahmadis, believe him to be the promised messiah whose return is prophesized by all Abrahamic religions. Mainstream Muslims consider Muhammad to be the last prophet. This creates a divergence of views on the finality of prophethood, one of the central tenets of mainstream Islam. There are 3-4 million Ahmadis in Pakistan but their worldwide population might be as high as 200 million.

[2] Blasphemy laws were introduced by General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s. Under these laws, defaming the Prophet Muhammad or defiling a place of worship or a sacred object can be punished with a fine, imprisonment, even a death sentence.