Anwar Ahmad

As the incessant US bombing blasted the way for Northern Alliance's triumphal return to Kabul, an American journalist asked his gung-ho Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, if the US proteges would not reenact their barbaric past? It would not be the bloodiest war the Afghans have ever seen, assured Rumsfeld. He may turn out to be right because most victims of the deadly US ordnance have been so finely ground to dust that they haven't a hope of figuring in a body count. Nor is one likely.

For those butchered by US allies, few witnesses will live to testify - not that an inquiry is likely, plaintive calls of the Amnesty International and UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson notwithstanding. Of the 500 to 800 PoWs - who had surrendered in Kunduz and were being interrogated by the CIA inside Rasheed Dostum's Qala-e-Jangi (fortress) - killed by their Uzbek captors, their US-UK advisors and, mostly, the US bombers, the 'Coalition' spokesman in Islamabad said it wasn't a massacre, no complaint has been received and, therefore, no inquiry.

Yes, it was a "slaughter of prisoners," but no need of an inquiry because it wasn't "some easy Western circumstance," British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, told the BBC. Rumsfeld told CNN it was premature to call it a slaughter. British premier Blair prefers to withhold judgement. They are obviously having trouble turning a horrific butchery into civility. But no consciences there to be troubled, no selves to answer to. With the American people seduced by the media, their warriors are on a fly-swatting picnic. Rumsfeld says he has no regrets, and isn't even bothered because, remember, those "evil" men had killed innocent Americans. End of discussion.

Still, Rumsfeld's assurance of the least bloody Afghan war notwithstanding, historical comparisons are being made. How many people did Changez Khan's hordes burn and buthcher as they swept through Afghanistan? One view is that human arms get fatigued and the swords blunted. Not so the B-52s and their endless carpet-bombing runs, or the 15,000 pound `Daisy-cutters' pushed out of the indefatigable C-130s, and God knows what else. It seems an unfair comparison, but Rumsfeld may still be right.

Even so, merely being counted alongside icons like Changez Khan, Halaku Khan, Tamerlane should be an "honour." If some psyches are being seared and some consciences still not sedated by the Western electronic media, nothing more can be done. After all, the non-massacre (or non-slaughter, or whatever) at Qala-e-Jangi barely made the TV screens. As indeed, had not the earlier massacres of hundreds of Taliban holed up in a Mazar-e-Sharif school, and in Kunduz? The carnage in Kandahar will be similarly sanitized.

Time magazine's Alex Perry, witness to the Qala-e-Jangi "battle," reported that "The mission by the Americans and Northern Alliance is to kill every single one of them." And, the media verdict is that the PoWs had revolted, killed their CIA interrogator, grabbed arms and fought (back?). It was a typical "Afghan situation" and received a typical "Afghan response," Jack straw would say and Rumsfeld would agree. Where do the Geneva Conventions or Western values come into it?

Quite right. And, even the comparisons with Changez Khan aren't so fair. The Mongol never spared an opposing general who betrayed the besieged fortress to facilitate its pillage by his ferocious hordes. The more savvy Americans work by buying desertions. Then, Changez Khan raised pyramids of decapitated heads. The Americans abhor such grisly rituals. They prefer to bomb and burn from far away, and let the ICRC bury the few stubborn bodies that remain intact - but only after their Uzbek allies have duly removed the black cloth with which many of the dead "rebels" of Qala-e-Jangi had their hands tied. Leave no evidence, justice in case.

But Changez Khan was no maniac. There was a method in his madness. Changez Khan's name came to evoke such terror that his enemies fled before his advance, and fortress sought surrender. Word of the bloodletting in Kabul, Kunduz, Mazar-e-Sharif and Qala-e-Jangi must surely have reached the besieged and outgunned defenders of Kandahar. The message: turn over the non-Afghan comrades for slaughter, or share their fate.

There is a strategic reason as well why Rumsfeld said the US was not into negotiating surrenders or taking prisoners, and the Nobel laureate Kofi Annan said the UN couldn't either. It is critical that the Arabs, Pakistani and Chechen (would they be integral to the mantra had Russia not joined the Coalition?) fighters be blasted to the last man by US warplanes. Even more important that they be killed like rats, as a distraught Arab journalist stuck in an unfriendly Kabul described it, by their co-religionists.

This is the American way of slaying the Frankenstein called `Jihad International' which the CIA had so cleverly disinterred from 400 years deep in Muslim history to do its dirty work against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The now rehabilitated `Mujahideen' of the Northern Alliance (including the former Soviet collaborator, Rasheed Dostum) are happy to do the honours. The haunting images of captured "foreign Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters" being brutalised, the terror of death on a blanched face, the victors stomping on dead faces and, horrors of horrors, pulling out a gold tooth from a dust-caked carcass were deliberately put out by an otherwise violence-shy media. The stark message: no international fraternity against American interests will be spared.

This was also the chilling warning Changez Khan had sounded in those barbaric times. He never bothered with the guilt or innocence of his victims, or distinguished between soldiers or civilians. And, it worked for him. No reason why the old recipe shouldn't work as well for the defenders of modern civilization.

The US will win, surely. But will it also live happily ever after is another matter, a separate subject. For the moment, an epitaph is being written of the post-World War-II vision of a world free of war and states submitting to the majesty of international consultation, consensus and justice. Robert Fisk (The Independent) reminds us that Winston Churchill, taking "the Bush view of his enemies," preferred "straightforward execution" of the Nazi leaders.

But even though they had caused 50 million deaths - 10,000 times more, Fisk reckons, than the victims of Black Tuesday - the Nazi murderers were given a trial. Why? Because US President Truman felt that "Undiscriminating executions or punishments without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."

What a sublime start to America's journey to lead the world! And, what has it come to? A Reagan, a Clinton and the Bushes. Thrown into the trash is the UN system, even the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners. Based on the World War horrors, these Conventions are among humankind's most noble endeavours, excluding from its worst moment - war - the basest instincts of crime and barbarism.

However, the death knell of the post-World War-II dream was sounded well before the warriors took to the air by their economic counterparts. The World Bank-IMF had succumbed to corporate interests and dispelled the notion of international, or even national, equity - speedily so after the eclipse of the communist alternative. Globalisation is completing the job, and paving the way for the last war the US-West will fight - around the world and, more importantly, at home.

Beginning with the US-UK imposition of the no-fly zones over a destroyed Iraq through the US-Nato assault on Kosovo-Serbia to, finally, the disdain with which the US informed the UN of its open-ended war against undefined terrorism, the international architecture raised after the trauma of World War-II has come crashing down. Another great loss is likely to be the International Criminal Court. It needs another 17 ratifications to become operational and independently probe, try and punish modern day Changez Khans. Too risky for Uncle Sam.

This American century - or millennium, depending on one's presumptuousness - will be a cruel one for the weak. The Afghan catastrophe could be a blood-soaked blessing if the Muslim world finally realises that the challenge it faces is not simple and physical, but sophisticated and intellectual. And, that education, enlightenment, scientific advancement, economic strength and democracy are the tools of honourable survival, not obscurantism and obsolete weapons of war.

The writer is a freelance columunist

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