Ideal Illusions Part 4

TERRORISM AND THE PATHOLOGY OF AMERICAN POWER.

"Terrorism" is a brilliant propaganda word, a grim corroboration of Montaigne's warning that "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know." It blinds even as it appears to illuminate. It energizes leaders, bureaucracies, and the media, and it cows critics. Who, after all, is for terrorists? The very notion is rife with ugliness: innocents murdered, body parts in the marketplace, the burning twin towers. Even more than "Communism," "terrorism" is a label that simplifies. Panic lurks beneath. The dread is no longer of an insidious penetration but of chaos and pathological acts committed by barbarians. Communism was at least a corruption of the good, a cynical manipulation of Enlightenment ideals. Terrorism is the perversion of humanity itself.

The George W. Bush administration fused the aims of democratization, human rights, and regime change with a "War on Terror" to create the most formidable fighting faith since anticommunism. Not since the late 1940s had there been such an emotionally charged enemy to mobilize national security leaders. For more than half a century, such mobilizing efforts had accompanied appeals to "reshape the global order" in a "new era"; Truman, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan all made them. So when Bush, once again, said, "History has given us a unique opportunity ... to restructure the world toward freedom,"1 he was drawing on standard national security rhetoric.2 Yet his administration was to push much further the Clinton administration's ideas about "total penetration," involvement in failing states, promotion of regime change (in the color revolutions in Eastern Europe), and humanitarian intervention. Its soaring rhetoric of freedom and transformational diplomacy was a good fit with the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq: on one side, American "universality" and the "civilized world"; on the other, the barbarity of suicide bombers.

Terrorism became the new paradigm quite abruptly after 9/11. The great simplifier of national security matters is typically the president, and on this score Bush did not disappoint. Terrorists, driven by "an ideology of hatred and fear,"3 were "demented, fanatics," "men without conscience," "parasites," "cold blooded killers who despise freedom, reject tolerance and kill the innocent." "Evil but not insane,"4 they had not yet "taken control of a great power," but "they share a vision and operate as a network of dozens of violent extremist groups around the world, striking separately and in concert."5 The terrorists were "not protesting our policies. They were protesting our existence"6 in "a clash between civilization and those who would destroy it."7 Their strategy "glorifies the deliberate killing of innocents."8 Their "radical visions-having little to do with policy and much to do with a blinding will to power-reek of fascism, n.a.z.ism, and totalitarianism."9 We were no longer dealing with civilized human beings but with "killers who have made the death of Americans the calling of their lives."10 Of course, "terrorism" and "terrorists" had long had a place in Was.h.i.+ngton's ideological a.r.s.enal. Truman lambasted "terrorist" attacks by Communists against the Greek state,11 Eisenhower warned of the Communists' "highly organized world campaign of deceit, subversion and terrorism";12 Johnson denounced the NLF "terrorism" that targeted "school teachers and school administrations, health officials, village leaders, schools, hospitals, research stations, and medical clinics."13 "The evil scourge of terrorism" was one of Reagan's favorite phrases; he often alluded to "state supported" terrorists who "intentionally kill and maim unarmed civilians, often women and children...."14 During the Clinton years nonstate actors, too, became guilty of "terrorism," though the term remained just one code word competing with others.15 Terrorism's rapid acceptance as a paradigm following 9/11 owed something to another context as well. After the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964, several conferences in Tel Aviv and Was.h.i.+ngton had propagated a definition of terrorism as violence targeted at innocent civilians for political purposes, a definition that quickly spread among influential policy makers. National security professionals in Was.h.i.+ngton and Tel Aviv well knew that since the beginning of the UN there had been competing views over whether struggles for independence and self-determination and resistance against occupations involved terrorism. Amnesty International had long argued that agreement on how to relate issues of terrorism to such struggles was unlikely to be reached. The Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers on Terrorism added in 2002 that any legitimate struggles ("resistance to foreign aggression and the struggle of peoples under colonial or alien domination and foreign occupation for national liberation and self-determination") had to be differentiated from acts of terrorism-thus rejecting "any attempt to link terrorism to the struggle of the Palestinian people."16 This Gordian knot was cut by simply ignoring the complexity and endless legalistic debates. "Beyond all nuance and quibble," the administration's new definition made terrorism "a moral evil, infecting not only those who commit such crimes, but those who, out of malice, ignorance, or simple refusal to think, countenance them."17 This might not be a legal definition or one that appears in the OED-but it was a compelling moral position and excellent propaganda.

MAKING PROPAGANDA OF THE INNOCENT.

Historically human rights groups have always focused on protecting innocents-noncombatants, abused women, suffering children. They have marketed their message, raised funds, and galvanized const.i.tuencies on this basis. They have produced graphic accounts of the wounded and the dead, rife with images of body parts and limbs torn asunder. These groups also speak of the complex interrelations.h.i.+p of economic, social, legal, democratic, cultural, and civil rights; they espouse such concepts as the laws of war, the rights of noncombatants, the responsibility to protect. But underlying it all has been the sanct.i.ty of the innocent victim, and nothing could be a more flagrant a.s.sault on this notion than terrorism. Deliberately killing and maiming civilians "is terrorism pure and simple," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared in 2005, in a phrase widely quoted by human rights leaders.18 No complex legal a.n.a.lysis is required to reach this conclusion. It's what human rights is all about. Terrorism is antihuman rights-its veritable opposite, emotionally, legally, and morally.

Terrorism is an attack on innocent civilians: the obvious nature of this equation is exactly what makes it such an evocative instrument of propaganda warfare, a perfect instance of the way specific truths can obfuscate more complex understanding. Over the decades, the focus of human rights had evolved-from prisoners of conscience to the rights of noncombatants to democratization to humanitarian intervention. But nothing quite so emphatically reinforced the individual-centered vision of the first current as the fight against terrorism. As a result, human rights groups found themselves in alignment with Was.h.i.+ngton, coming together in a shared language. But by making the targeting of civilians the core of their own definition of terrorism, they unwittingly added ammunition to Bush's War on Terror. The protection of innocent civilians that had been their mobilizing call was subtly turned against them.

Was.h.i.+ngton adeptly packaged itself as the very antipode of those who targeted civilians, especially women and children. Terrorism is not a particular regime, or rogue state, or religion, Bush said; it is the "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents."19 Or as the National Strategy for Combating Terrorists put it, terrorism is "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents."20 Bush propagated this new paradigm relentlessly. Targeting innocent civilians is wrong, always and everywhere.

American human rights groups used the same terminology. There was little disagreement among them that "attacks on civilians" aimed at the "heart of the entire structure of international human rights and humanitarian law" and drove "the current ma.s.sive efforts to deter and destroy terrorist capabilities."21 No cause, no rationale, no act justified doing harm to innocents. "Whatever you believe about anything else," declared Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, "the bottom line should be you never deliberately kill civilians," for it is "the fundamental principle of human rights and humanitarian law."22 This morally impa.s.sioned a.s.sertion was strengthening in its purity. Humanitarianism as a fighting faith had been partly fueled by our uneasiness over the responsibility we bore for a world of unceasing atrocities. Terrorism effectively erased this feeling. The terrorist label brought back full force the conviction that whatever else could be laid at our door; at least we didn't act like them. The great human rights battles of the Bush years-torture, renditions, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib-were largely over the horror of our becoming "like them."

After a half century in which "Communist" had put a stop to critical thinking more effectively than any other word in the American lexicon, some reflection about the consequences of embracing the term "terrorist" might have been in order. But there was little. "Terrorism today poses a serious threat," Human Rights Watch a.s.serted. When the organization warned that violations of human rights were undermining Was.h.i.+ngton's credibility as the "leader of the campaign against terrorism," it was straightforwardly adopting Was.h.i.+ngton's language.23 The "War on Terror" had to be fought with respect for human rights, it insisted, not in violation of them. American abuses provided rallying cries "for terrorist recruiters"; the pictures from Abu Ghraib were "recruiting posters for 'Terrorism, Inc.'" The fight would be won only by extending human rights and thus destroying the "breeding grounds of terrorists."24 There were some trenchant criticisms of the concept of a war on terror from these groups. Was it really even a war? The administration "stretches the meaning of the word 'war'" to give itself "extraordinary powers enjoyed by a wartime government," thus breaking down the distinction between what is permissible in times of peace and of war.25 The "real test of success is whether the administration's approach to terrorism is neutralizing more terrorists than it breeds. Here the available signs are negative."26 But in the end, the goal was n.o.ble even if the tactics were not.

For Was.h.i.+ngton, defining terrorism as the targeting of innocent civilians was a strategic boon. Just as national security managers had embraced the rights of noncombatants as a way to challenge insurgency movements after Vietnam, following 9/11 they seized on the "innocent" to promote certain interests over others, drawing on several handy ideological implications embedded in this definition. A Manichean vision of the world reemerged with a virulence not seen since the height of the Cold War. "We are in a conflict between good and evil,"27 Bush declared, "and America will call evil by its name." This battle required that a clear distinction be drawn between the targeting of civilians and all other acts in which civilians might be harmed. The former was "intrinsically evil, necessarily evil and wholly evil,"28 no matter what the objectives or circ.u.mstances. To suggest that this view might oversimplify a complicated issue was no more than "false sophistication"-the mark of a broken-down conscience unable to distinguish between good and evil.29 From this Manichean vision follows the view that terrorism is the ant.i.thesis of the rule of law and of the entire civilized effort to protect the rights of noncombatants and the innocent. The terrorist respects no code of law established for war or peacetime.30 Violating the prohibition against targeting civilians means "you are left without any norms at all," thus placing all the achievements of the Hague and Geneva Conferences and the entire edifice of the laws of war "in danger of being swept aside."31 Note that the issue is the line between lawful and illegal violence-not peace, but the regulation of war. The "very raison d'etre of al Qaeda is to violate the laws of war by targeting innocent civilians," a.s.serted a former U.S. attorney general.32 As a result, for Was.h.i.+ngton and U.S. human rights leaders defeating terrorism and promoting the laws of war were indistinguishable aims.

A related and equally useful ideological implication is proportionality, a concept that prohibits attacks when the harm to civilians is expected to outweigh the antic.i.p.ated advantages.33 Military operations are to be directed only at military targets and combatants; they may not intentionally strike at civilians or civilian objects. Thus there is no moral equivalence between, say, a stray missile's killing civilians in a town held by insurgents and a terrorist group's suicide bombings of civilians. One is legal, the other criminal; one is morally acceptable, the other is not. The individuals who attacked the World Trade Center meant to kill civilians, whereas Was.h.i.+ngton's aim is to kill only "combatants" and minimize injuries to civilians, whose deaths are "unintentional," "accidental." Innocent civilians may indeed be killed, but they are not specifically being targeted. No debate over means or estimates of expected civilian deaths equates morally with deliberately attacking the innocent. Rarely does one find any notion so pure and simple in war-or in life. But terrorism fits the description: it is radical evil.

Human rights groups, too, often discuss the laws of war in terms of proportionality. Was the collateral damage justified? Were too many civilians killed? Was insufficient care taken? Was a hospital targeted, or a radio station, or an electrical generator? Legal parsing inevitably follows. Didn't clause X preclude attacks on Y targets under Z conditions? Terrorists pose no such complexities. The law regarding them is refres.h.i.+ngly simple.34 They are the other.

"Targeting civilians" has still another useful ideological application: deromanticizing insurgencies and almost all violent acts of resistance. The label "depraved" can be applied to all those who use these methods, and they can no longer be regarded as heroic.35 However contentious the arguments over the definition of "freedom fighters" in earlier eras, most members of the national security establishment now agreed that the contemporary terrorist's central focus on targeting civilians was qualitatively different-particularly when it came to the Middle East and the Palestinians after the establishment of the PLO.

Earlier freedom fighters, argues one Israeli authority, were bound by certain ethical rules. They "drew a sharp distinction between soldiers and small children, between repressive authorities and helpless women, between governmental agents and ordinary citizens, between a military outpost and a common dwelling place." The contemporary terrorist, by contrast, knows no such distinctions.36 Suicide bombing accepts few if any moral limits on the choice of targets. To the charge that this definition of terrorism applied equally to the Nicaraguan Contras, Senator Henry Jackson retorted that neither the intent nor the logic of their policy was the same, whatever its costs to civilians. Did one not see the moral difference?37 Another ideological tool that the "terrorist" label offers derives from the argument that there are simply no grievances that justify the murder of innocent people, nor should grievances ever be invoked to mitigate the evil of terrorist acts. Human rights leaders fully concurred, even in cases where the grievances were real and urgent. For Was.h.i.+ngton, ideological warfare involved undermining the image of terrorists in their own communities; terrorism had to "be isolated from the context which breeds it" before the grievances that gave rise to it could be adequately addressed.38 American human rights leaders focused more on the moral context of terrorism-the inhumanity, the total corruption of means and ends. While it was "beyond Human Rights Watch's scope to work to address political grievances or the conditions that lead to pathologies that lead groups to attack thousands of civilians," a "terrorist pathology" was what the organization saw at work: "Sympathy for such crimes is the breeding ground for terrorism, and sympathizers are the potential recruits."39 In the end only the mores of human rights offered an alternative. "Let's face it, we're never going to persuade Osama bin Laden to give up and pursue peaceful political change," warned Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, "which means, in the long run, that the war against terrorism is going to be won or lost on the issue of recruitment."40 Terrorism "will succ.u.mb only where peaceful political change is a realistic option."41 Building a culture in which any disregard for civilian life would be condemned rather than condoned was essential for defeating terrorism;41 that was why the "fight against terrorism must be understood as a campaign for human rights."42 Echoing its earlier Cold War position, Human Rights Watch argued that Was.h.i.+ngton needed a "positive vision." It was not enough to be against terrorism; the administration "will have to be in favor of the values that explain what is wrong with attacking civilians-the values of human rights." The United States needed to "look at those closed countries and begin to press for the creation of pluralism, or real political opportunities there," since, after all, repression "fuels terrorism by closing off avenues of peaceful dissent."43 Was.h.i.+ngton was more than willing to oblige. "Ignoring human development is not an option. It is imperative that we encourage and nurture democratization," Bush's coordinator for counterterrorism declared. The "destructive task" of "eradicating enemy networks" had to be balanced by the "constructive task" of "building legitimacy, good governance, trust, prosperity, tolerance, and the rule of law"-wording almost identical to that of various Human Rights Watch reports.44 Calls for democratization were reinforced in the War on Terror, for terrorism was "the cra.s.sest ant.i.thesis of democratic values."45 Where democracies honored the unique value of each individual, terrorism rejected the concept of personal worth.46 That was why attacking individuals was attacking the core value of human rights, and why the "moral narrative" of our time must be about standing against terrorism. Even more than humanitarianism, terrorism brought into sharp focus the individual-centered outlook that lies at the heart of human rights advocacy.

"It has generally been acknowledged to be madness to go to war for an idea, but if anything is more unsatisfactory, it is to go to war against a nightmare," Lord Salisbury stated in 1877. Was.h.i.+ngton had its own idea about what it was going to war for, and human rights leaders found themselves perilously close to propagating the nightmare that was being used to rationalize the War on Terror. Their most cherished concern-protecting the innocent-was being ideologically packaged in a way that was difficult to challenge. The notion of a "terrorist pathology" offered both Was.h.i.+ngton and human rights leaders a potent brew of the diseased, the barbaric, the uncivilized, the not like us-those, in short, at war with human rights. But as James Baldwin once warned, "it is a terrible, an inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminis.h.i.+ng one's own."47 Yet, whatever the propaganda issues, who in the end is not outraged by the supreme injustice of killing innocents? What does it matter if Was.h.i.+ngton or any other power manipulates aspects of such an obvious crime to its own ends? It's still a crime. Examples like the following are simply too awful to justify in any way: "it was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smoldering car ... by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians."

As it happens, however, that is a description of the collateral damage caused by two missiles from an American jet-an unfortunate lapse from President Bush's promise to "protect innocent lives in every possible way."48 It is an example of the proportionality that makes "us" different from "them" because our intention was not to kill these civilians, even if, as a Palestinian journalist has remarked, this is "deliberate killing-killing deliberately by mistake."49 The killing is premeditated "in the literal sense that it is clearly foreseen and contemplated beforehand, with the repeated claim that those killed are the very minimum to be expected ... commensurate with protecting our troops and achieving our military objectives."50 This is the law; this is morality; this is the fine distinction that makes us different from them. Or as one scholar has translated the concept into the legalese of our time, "incidental civilian casualities from proportionate military operations are a tolerated cost of war, but deliberately killing noncombatants-even in reprisal-is unlawful."51 If the public responded as emotionally to high-alt.i.tude bombings or attacks by unmanned drones as it does to suicide bombings, human rights advocates would be putting forth their arguments in a different emotional and perhaps even moral context. In the wake of the My Lai ma.s.sacre during the Vietnam War, antiwar activists raised the question of why deliberately killing unresisting women and children one by one generated more public revulsion than the numerically far more lethal use of bombing, napalm, strafing, and chemical defoliants from what was often an invisible distance. Individualizing (rather than generalizing) acts of terror may render them truly horrifying and personally mobilizing, but whether it captures the deeper truth is harder to say.

Propagandistically, of course, simplicity is essential to the operations of power and was absolutely central to Bush's War on Terror. But it is this very simplicity that has often made American human rights organizations both victims of and unwilling accomplices to the ideological onslaught of their fiercely determined government. The blurring of human rights rhetoric with Was.h.i.+ngton's strategic communications policies undermined any effective human rights response. It was insufficient to criticize the Bush administration for failing to address the pathology of terrorism without bringing an equally sharp focus to the pathology of power. It was too easy to write off the other as hostile to rights while a.s.suming that those in power could simply embrace human rights-if they only chose to. In the end, American human rights leaders espoused a variant of Was.h.i.+ngton's war of ideas-the notion of terrorism as a system of beliefs, att.i.tudes, and feelings that allowed us to lump all "extremist" acts together-even as they mobilized people against the "War" on Terror.

AVOIDING THE USE OF "TERRORISM"

The use of the term "terrorism" is not uncontested in the human rights world. Amnesty International has explained that it steers clear of the word-it is "simply not an acceptable term of use given that there is no internationally agreed definition of what the term means"; it "has not been subject to the rigors of jurisprudence nor is there a broadly accepted definition under which we may systematically evaluate governments' application of the terms and the actions they seek to justify under protection of its rubric." The issue is "not merely semantic." The problem is that the label tends to be applied only to individuals and nonstate groups, while the fight against "terrorism" has been used by states to "cloak actions that would otherwise be exposed as illegitimate."52 When, the organization demands, "was it ever agreed that the state cannot be said to have committed acts of terrorism?"53 Those who argue that terrorism includes state terrorism have consistency and the weight of evidence on their side.54 According to Edward Peck, deputy director of Reagan's White House Task Force on Terrorism: In 1985, they asked us ... to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and in each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities.... One of the terms, "international terrorism," means "activities that," I quote, "appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by ma.s.s destruction, a.s.sa.s.sination or kidnapping." [...] Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another.55 But no leading human rights organization has ever charged Was.h.i.+ngton with state terrorism. Amnesty's refusal to enter this minefield by avoiding the word altogether is a pragmatic response to the inability of human rights organizations to cope with issues of state terrorism by Western powers but a principled stance as well: for one must apply it to both sides or to neither.56 Amnesty chooses neither. Human Rights Watch continues to choose one, arguing that the U.S. government's "single overriding goal since September 11 has been to defeat terrorism." Yet to speak thus is to acquiesce to Was.h.i.+ngton's loaded definitions.57 Was.h.i.+ngton deftly defines "terrorism" so as never to include its own actions; U.S. state terrorism is, by its definition, an oxymoron.

Media organizations have faced the same set of problems. The BBC's guidelines for its reporters state that their "credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments" and, further, that there is "no agreed or universal consensus on what const.i.tutes a terrorist or a terrorist attack." The word "terrorist" itself can be "a barrier rather than an aid to understanding," since it is "a difficult and emotive subject with significant overtones" that is "regarded through a political prism." Loaded words "can imply judgments where there is no clear consensus about the legitimacy of military political groups." "Terrorist," in brief, implies an a.s.sessment of "the merits of the different perpetrators' causes, the acts of the different Governments against the perpetrators, or even the value of civilian lives further from home. We must be careful not to give the impression that we have come to some kind of implicit-and unwarranted-value judgment."58 Other words "can be used with precision to convey the awful consequences without needing to resort to labels," the BBC guidelines continue. Thus "'bomb attack' conveys more information more quickly than 'terrorist attack;' similarly 'suicide bomber,' 'bomber,' 'a.s.sa.s.sin,' 'gun man' help fill in the picture." As an example, the BBC offers its Northern Ireland correspondent report in the wake of the Omaha bombing in 1998: There should have been a carnival here, instead there was carnage. Sat.u.r.day afternoon shoppers here because it was safe, crowded together away from a bomb scare. Instead the bomb was in their midst.

It killed three generations of one family ... a 65 year old grandmother, her pregnant 30 year old daughter and her 18 month old daughter. A litany of the dead,... of the slaughtered innocents.

"It is worth asking yourself," concludes the BBC, "what the use of the word 'terrorist' would have added to that simple but powerful statement of what had happened."59 Reuters agrees. "As part of a policy to avoid the use of emotive words," the global news service has explained, "we do not use terms like 'terrorist' and 'freedom fighter' unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions, ident.i.ty and background so that readers can make their own decisions based on the facts."60 "LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES"

"We actually misnamed the War on Terror," President Bush told an audience of journalists. "It ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."61 The joke drew laughter.

But why should terror shake the conscience of the Free World? There's the rub. For beneath the ugliness of terrorism smolders ugliness of another kind: the harshness of the political and economic structures that Was.h.i.+ngton is well aware sustain and "breed" it. The issue for national security managers is more complex than terrorism; it is "extremism" of all kinds, often rooted in what they term legitimate grievances. Its causes are not simply fanaticism and the pathology of the fanatical mind but rather despair, opportunism, radicalism, the revenge of the weak against the plundering wealthy. Internal national security a.s.sessments employ a language far franker than the one the American media uses-a language that often acknowledges oppression, radicalism, resistance, the downtrodden, inequalities, opposition to U.S. military presence, and so on. To effectively wage propaganda warfare requires an understanding of resistance groups, exploitation, the appeal of martyrdom, the weakness of moderate forces. "Terrorism" is good propaganda but a weak a.n.a.lytical tool.

Administration leaders occasionally considered moving beyond the term, as when Donald Rumsfeld and other Defense Department officials spoke of a "war on radical extremism."62 Bush himself resisted the s.h.i.+ft but not the policy focus on "extremism of all kinds." Within the national security establishment, distinctions were drawn among those considered extremists of one sort or another, but for public consumption "terrorists" provided an accordion label-and human rights advocates often picked it up. Revolution became "insurrectionary terrorism"; attempts to overthrow colonial regimes, "liberation terrorism"; the focus on a single cause, "loner" or "issue terrorism"; efforts of a religious or ethnic group to gain independence for a subordinate part of a state, "separatist terrorism"; efforts aimed at driving out an occupying force, "occupation terrorism"; efforts aimed at humiliating a global power, "global terrorism."63 Presidential statements usually employ a sanitized vocabulary that explains unrest in terms of "underlying conditions"-poverty, corruption, religious conflict, and ethnic strife all create "opportunities" for terrorism.64 National security a.n.a.lyses are much more candid. "New cla.s.ses of haves and have nots" confront each other across a desperate chasm of wealth and power. For the first time in human history, "a majority of the world's population will live in cities," where the have-nots are already seeking "distributive justice, equality, and social harmony." The era of rural-based guerrilla warfare may be coming to an end, but huge cities portend acute problems of governance, highly disparate incomes, fierce ethnic and religious conflicts aggravated by periods of economic crisis. Change will no longer be linear but "logarithmic," building up, slowing down, and then bursting forth unexpectedly-much like terrorism.65 For the national security managers, the fight against terrorism justified intervention in other nations as no other ethos had since the fiercest days of anticommunism. The kind of preemptive strikes undertaken covertly throughout the Cold War now could be made openly. Deterrence was useless against terrorists-"When they're willing to commit suicide to further their agenda, what do they value that we can place at risk?"66 asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The challenge was acute: "a weak power can overcome a strong nation's designs."67 Throw in weapons of ma.s.s destruction and "you have a case where relatively weak actors may have access to lethal power that rivals what the strongest nations have."68 Was.h.i.+ngton's response to this "new era" was to call for an ad hoc "coalition of the willing" on various issues.69 The War on Terror required a "grand global realignment," with the United States leading a world in which the "great powers see themselves as falling on the same side of a profound divide between the forces of chaos and order."70 National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that the War on Terror opened the way to a more "fluid and complicated set of alignments than anything we have seen since the formation of the Atlantic alliance in 1949."71 In this new era, the United States was "unique" in its capacity to "build partners.h.i.+ps," to "lead the fight," to "adapt old alliances" while "bringing in new partners," and "aiding failing states."72 For the first time since the seventeenth century the great powers could compete in peace instead of continually preparing for war-as long as they accepted the premise of U.S. centrality. While "frankly speaking of dissuading any potential adversary from challenging American military power" might seem "impolitic," Rice said, "surely such clarity is a virtue here."73 Terrorism was thus inextricably intertwined with U.S. primacy-indeed, for some Was.h.i.+ngton a.n.a.lysts one explained the other. To be the world's center, they noted, was almost inevitably to be the focal point for widespread unease and popular resistance and thus to become the target of angry "extremists" of all sorts. Numerous populations were "excluded from the benefits" of the global economy; a billion people were malnourished; local autocrats rigged politics to their own ends; the "daily lot may be hunger, disease, displacement." As the young grew "increasingly dissatisfied," many had come to believe that "radical solutions are the last remaining choice." Large areas of the world were becoming "hard to govern lawless zones"-veritable "no-man's-lands" where "extremist movements find breathing s.p.a.ce to grow and soft havens are created."74 Compounding the problem, "terrorists" were using the media and the Internet in highly effective ways: the pain and injustice of the "oppressed" were becoming more and more visible on television and the web all over the world. At one time attacks on Palestinians had been widely but not pervasively reported. Now, as one former CIA official noted, Israeli actions were being replayed on television every hour.75 Was.h.i.+ngton knew very well that the "enemy" could not be reduced to either the pathological individuals nor the cultist groups that were convenient for public diplomacy. As the political scientist Robert Pape argues in his controversial study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, most "suicide terrorists" are local "patriots" responding to collective injustice-above all the humiliation of foreign occupation, particularly one in which the occupier appeared to be imposing an alien religion or value system.76 Much intelligence work concurs. As Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out, "missing from much of the public debate is discussion of the simple fact that lurking behind every terrorist act is a specific political antecedent."77 But those antecedents were best left to debates among the professionals.

Human rights groups are well aware, of course, of the fury U.S. policies elicit in many parts of the world. But along with their mantra of taking no stand on war or the occupation in Iraq or military operations in Afghanistan or the territorial issues in the PalestineIsrael question, they have a tendency to suggest that a more open political process would diminish the violence-"Terrorism will succ.u.mb only where peaceful political change is a realistic option,"78 and so on. Meanwhile, the CIA and other national security groups are quite capable of recognizing the legitimate grievances and the grounds for bitterness and "hatred" in various societies. Accounts of Hezbollah recognize its appeal to the "poor and downtrodden" (it is "the first party to oppose deprivation," "the champion of the peasants and the farmers, the laborers and the poor, the oppressed and the deprived, the workers and the homeless")79 without questioning policies directed either against it or against other groups born out of "legitimate grievances." The national security establishment seeks to understand those grievances with some accuracy-so as to enable Was.h.i.+ngton to ride roughshod over them if necessary.

CHANGING THE ISLAMIC WORLD.

American human rights reports on the Middle East follow the same pattern as human rights reports about every other area of the globe: praise for Was.h.i.+ngton's principles followed by criticism of its operational polices. To cite one example, in 2006 Human Rights Watch lauded President Bush for engaging Arab countries "on a range of human rights issues, something no past U.S. administration has done,"80 for deploring "sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom" in the Arab world, and for calling on the United States to commit itself to a new "forward strategy of freedom."81 Was.h.i.+ngton's pressure had "helped create more s.p.a.ce for some dissidents and genuinely independent political and civic organization."82 The report then chastised Was.h.i.+ngton for inconsistency; as usual, Was.h.i.+ngton had failed to carry through on hopeful possibilities. Having spoken of democracy, it had still supported countless autocrats in places like Saudi Arabia, "a veritable wasteland when it comes to respect for fundamental human rights."83 As the war in Iraq raged on, U.S. human rights reporting became more forceful: the "promotion of democracy" had become tarnished by its a.s.sociation with "regime change through military force." The disconnect between Was.h.i.+ngton's rhetoric and its policies was stirring up deep suspicions of democracy promotion, weakening reformers and democracy advocates everywhere-"Hollow oratory only corrodes perceptions of U.S. credibility in pursuit of its principles."84 And yet as often as not human rights reports on the Middle East read remarkably like Was.h.i.+ngton's own strategic communications doc.u.ments. Their explanations, their vocabulary, their vision of networks and civil society, their conviction that without external pressure the human rights situation would deteriorate, their very depiction of global processes all echo Was.h.i.+ngton's.

If human rights groups pointed to declining American credibility in the area of human rights, some twenty government task forces were even more alarmed. According to a typical report, Was.h.i.+ngton had "no credibility" left; its power to persuade was in a state of crisis, because American policies were seen "by the overwhelming majority of Muslims as a threat to the survival of Islam itself."85 What we were calling terrorism was to Muslims a "renewal of the Muslim world," not simply a "religious revival."86 Moreover, "Muslims do not hate our freedoms, they hate our policies." Support for Israel, the occupation of Iraq, and war in Afghanistan all evoked "legacies of Western colonial att.i.tudes." Arabs held the United States responsible for propping up the "tyrannies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan, and the Gulf states," creating for it a "strategically awkward-and potentially dangerous-situation."87 What Was.h.i.+ngton and human rights groups saw as a commitment to "universal values" Muslims saw as a war against their faith. They were nothing like the oppressed Eastern Europeans who had turned to Was.h.i.+ngton during the Cold War; they wanted liberation from the "apostate tyranny that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends."88 They wanted freedom from us. Was.h.i.+ngton's task was to fas.h.i.+on the "war of ideas" so as to sustain policies that it had little intention of changing-a conundrum that inevitably led to contradictory tactical maneuvering and the usual charges of "misperception."

Was.h.i.+ngton was also far more blunt about what it means to handle the "processes of change." "Imagine a large map of the world," said the chairman of the National Intelligence Council. "Let's say we stick a pin in every country that had a low per capita income. And another for a high rate of infant mortality. Another for a sizable 'youth bulge'... And another pin to mark an absence of political freedoms and partic.i.p.atory government." What have you got at the end of this exercise? "A large number of vulnerable states-many in the Muslim world."89 As one task force commented, "the United States is not seeking to contain a threatening state/empire, but rather to convert a broad movement within Islamic civilization to accept the value structure of Western modernity-an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a 'War on Terrorism.'"90 Democratization, in short, was a code word for support of "secular moderates linked to us-an admittedly scarce breed in the Arab world." According to a Council of Foreign Relations study, to "reduce the possibility that the Islamist movement will overwhelm more open Middle Eastern political systems, Was.h.i.+ngton should promote const.i.tutional arrangements that would restrain the 'tyranny of the majority' to trample the rights of minorities." This was a shrewd reservation: in the name of those minorities, Was.h.i.+ngton could safeguard against any political system unfriendly to its reforms.91 By and large, American human rights leaders have been sympathetic to this argument. "If you go from zero to a hundred in two seconds, you may well be worse off," noted Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch. "If you try to democratize all at once, without taking any of the preliminary steps needed to allow genuine civil society and the rule of law to emerge, then the mere holding of elections might well make you worse off and allow extremists into office."92 Though human rights groups rarely talk about cla.s.s and social forces in the Islamic world, national security managers certainly do. Secular business people and middle-cla.s.s professionals are the "strongholds of opposition to extremism ... the first building blocks ... that could be the basis of a democratic cadre and an indigenous force for nonviolent change."93 Policies thus should focus on reaching, sustaining, and building local Muslim "networks" (the precursor to "civil society"), and promoting local NGOs in order to "extend our reach into the core of the societies and help us to find allies who share our pa.s.sion for wider partic.i.p.ation in society and the economy with special concern for the inclusion of youth and women."94 "Radical Islamists" and "radical and dogmatic interpretations of Islam" may be few, but they hold the advantage largely because they have "developed extensive networks spanning the Muslim world and sometimes reaching beyond it, to Muslim communities in North America and Europe."95 Moderates simply "do not have the resources to create these networks themselves; they may require an external catalyst." Was.h.i.+ngton thus looks to Muslims outside the Arab world, particularly in Indonesia, Turkey, and Europe, to promote a moderate, secular alternative. Their familiarity with Western societies, their exposure to liberal democratic values and the wealth of the West, and their success in maintaining their Muslim ident.i.ty in a pluralistic society are all to be drawn upon. Once again "civil society" provides prophylaxis from "extremists," "radical" ways, and "violence."96 Was.h.i.+ngton, in short, sought "the development of a new cla.s.s that could change the political and social balance in these countries" by fas.h.i.+oning an individualist ethos into a culturally seductive package. The focus was not on the nation or the civilization or the faith but, rather, on "personal control, choice, and change, personal mobility, meritocracy, individual rights (and particular women's rights)."97 Zeroing in on their likely const.i.tuents, Was.h.i.+ngton identified the "so-called secularists of the Muslim world: Business people, scientists, non-religious educators, politicians, public administrators, musicians, artists, poets, writers, journalists, actors, and their audiences and admirers"98 as the most "moveable" targets. Among these the "priority targets" were liberal secular Muslim academics and intellectuals, who tended to gravitate to universities and research centers, as well as young moderate religious scholars uncomfortable in the mosque. Women's groups engaged in gender equality campaigns were another natural const.i.tuency. Finally, moderate journalists and writers needed help with broadcasting their work back into their own countries and, via the web, throughout the Islamic world. All these moderates had "political values congruent to the universal values underlying all modern liberal societies,"99 but again empowering them as a cla.s.s might "require an external catalyst."100 As elsewhere, they needed money, organizing, ideas-and a pan-Islamic context to counter the radicals' advantage in organization, religious funding, and the centrality of the mosque in the local community."101 They also needed "conceptual systems to guide and navigate" them toward American ways of thinking102-a far cry from the free flow of ideas Was.h.i.+ngton supposedly defended. Attention, not information, was key. In the words of a Defense Department task force, "What's around information is critical. Reputations count. Brands are important. Fifty years ago political struggles were about the ability to control and transmit scarce information. Today, political struggles are about the creation and destruction of credibility."103 Once again, local leaders could be quietly supported, invited to conferences, praised in the media, given awards and academic appointments, their reputations nourished. If they were abused, they could be spotlighted as human rights fighters; their plight movingly told, their families taken care of. In all these domains Was.h.i.+ngton appreciated the contributions of human rights-its workers, its honors, its support for NGOs fit with its own agenda well enough.

Was.h.i.+ngton launched a wide-ranging attack on radical Islamic credibility, seeking to create an "international database of partners (individuals, groups, organizations, inst.i.tutions, parties) whose work is to be watched and coordinated."104 To determine if a group was truly "moderate," a "reasonably complete picture of its worldview" was necessary.105 Had it ever condoned violence? If it supported democracy, did it do so "in terms of individual rights?" Did it protect freedom of religion and uphold the right to change religions, the separation of church and state? "Does it support internationally recognized human rights?" Did it challenge Shari'a by advocating "non-shari'a options for those who prefer civil-law matters to be adjudicated under a secular legal system?" Did it support or receive any funding from "radical groups?"

At the same time, a frontal a.s.sault on radical Islam posed the risks that Was.h.i.+ngton might be seen as "anti-Islamic" even by some of its closest Middle Eastern allies. The approach to Shari'a is a case in point. As the European Court on Human Rights concluded in 2003, "Shari'a is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy"; it "clearly diverges from conventional values, particularly with regard to its criminal law and criminal procedures, its rules on the legal status of women and the way it intervenes in all spheres of private and public life in accordance with religious precepts."106 But the Department of State preferred a more nuanced approach, quietly leaving to human rights workers less diplomatic attacks on Shari'a. Some human rights organizations called for encouraging feminists and a new generation of Islamic scholars to find alternatives within Shari'a, deepen their Islamic legal expertise, create stronger links with other women in the region, and rely less on criticism based on shaming, a highly counterproductive way of censuring religious conduct.But many more human rights professionals, having interviewed hundreds of individuals who had been flogged, accused of blasphemy, denied freedom of speech, punished for being gay, or condemned to stoning as adulterers, see little hope for protection of rights under Shari'a and a nonsecular state. As one Human Rights Watch commentary encapsulated the problem, "when religion is merged with the state, human rights suffer."107 Was.h.i.+ngton agrees, but prefers to speak just of women's rights, which provide the perfect wedge issue for challenging radical Islam and transforming Muslim societies. As Laura Bush herself said in a 2001 radio address, "The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists.... Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control."108 Human rights leaders heartily concurred.

But do arguments like this offer much perspective? Are there progressive voices in the Arab world other than the ones that so closely echo Was.h.i.+ngton and the leaders of the human rights community? Apparently there are, for recent polls suggest the opposite of what Western leaders like to think. They show little support for American and European interference in the internal affairs of Arab states; the respondents appear to want freedom and democracy without our support. Not surprisingly, "radicals" don't expect the United States to allow local populations to fas.h.i.+on their own political futures without direct American influence; more surprisingly, perhaps, a large number of "moderates" agree with them. Most notably, it is the politically radicalized Arabs who most strongly favor moving toward democracy, free speech, and elections; moderates tend to focus on education and gradual improvement.109 Polling further indicates that Middle Eastern conceptions of women's rights may be less clear-cut than human rights reports and Was.h.i.+ngton's public statements suggest. Arab women do not see Islam as inimical to their getting the vote or driving privileges, or to democracy or education. They see a place for Shari'a as a part (but not the whole) of the law. They see Islamic tradition as diverse and do not link it with genital mutilation. (The practice is almost unseen in Egypt.) "While expressing a positive perception of women's legal status in the West and a.s.serting that this should be the case," very few women believe that "developing Western values will help their progress"; they also express unease with the "disrespect" men show women in the West, polls report.110 What Arab women say they least admire about their society is not all that different from what Arab men say-lack of unity, political and economic corruption, extremism, and dependence on outside power. They speak of human rights as part of a greater struggle against poverty, political repression, war, and the Western policies that reinforce them.111 In an age of information flow and an increasingly literate Arab world sensitive to historic injustices, there is little possibility that the Middle East will be isolated or that alternative roles for women will remain undiscovered. Where human rights reports speak of inconsistency in Was.h.i.+ngton's policy, many Arabs see a long-term consistency; where they speak of hypocrisy, Arabs see a long-term strategy. The reports separate out problems rather than placing them in the broader social contexts that must be fundamentally changed in order to solve them. They promote the idea that Was.h.i.+ngton's primary aim is democratization rather than acknowledging that it pursues its own interests. While the polling results in the Middle East suggest that the two currents of human rights are very much interwoven in popular responses, human rights groups still go along with Was.h.i.+ngton as it turns them against each other in its ongoing "war of ideas."

AFGHANISTAN.

If human rights organizations take no stand on war itself, the invasion of Afghanistan shows how they can nevertheless end up rationalizing one. They may refuse to consider the issue of aggression while tacitly supporting counterinsurgency strategies-in the name of international law, the laws of war, and NATO's "responsibilities."112 In Afghanistan, they echoed Was.h.i.+ngton and NATO's rhetoric of "nation building" as though this aim truly underlay the policies. They constantly talk about the limits and dangers of state power, yet their response to the war in Afghanistan revealed their belief in the capacity-and the right-of foreign states to manage, guide, shape, and channel the most intricate affairs of other countries. The alternative, they argued, was the return of the Taliban and ever more "breeding grounds" for terrorists. Indeed, by 2002 Afghanistan had become "the primary focus of anti-terrorism efforts" for Human Rights Watch.113 Following the usual pattern, the optimistic appraisals soon gave way to dire warnings by national security professionals. The "security situation" was "deteriorating." Once again U.S. "credibility" was on the line; a "major defeat for the U.S. war on terrorism"114 would "make it far more difficult to obtain international support in dealing with similar crises in the future," a 2003 Council on Foreign Relations study warned.115 Human rights groups offered a parallel rhetoric: "The people of Afghanistan are teetering on the edge of the abyss again,"116 but with "U.S. leaders.h.i.+p and support," they could "still hope to live in peace and security," though the "window of opportunity is closing fast."117 Once again a shortsighted Was.h.i.+ngton was betraying its true interests by taking the easy way-relying on local warlords and downplaying human rights concerns, thus slowing "the pace of progress."118 The task of the human rights community, argued Kenneth Roth, was to "convince the public that the situation is intolerable and ultimately, to mobilize public pressure on the Bush administration and its European allies to take the security steps that are needed to deliver on the promise of greater peace and security for the Afghan people." Human Rights Watch accepted Was.h.i.+ngton's claim that the United States and NATO really were committed to creating "a new Afghanistan," that they would bring "a lawful, rights respecting government to that troubled country." Since there could be "no reconstruction without security" and "no security without reconstruction," they endorsed the "integration of military and economic reconstruction efforts" that could showcase the efficient way the "international community" dealt with "post-conflict situations."119 The Pentagon's Defense Science Board copiously a.n.a.lyzed the lessons of the "stabilization and reconstruction efforts" under way in Afghanistan (and Iraq) "to ensure stability, democracy, human rights, and a productive economy."120 Similarly, human rights leaders commended a government that, even more than Ngo Dien Diem's in Vietnam, owed its power to foreign allies. In another eerie parallel to the nation building strategies that led to Vietnam's devastation, they embraced abstract can-do social science models, speaking about "effective governance," "paving the way for reconstruction," "inst.i.tution-building," promoting "rights." They applauded their own detailed research as a "major contribution to public understanding of the situation on the ground"-as though pointing to rights abuses offered any understanding of local histories, cultures, or conflicts.121 Long ago, Afghanistan animated British colonial nightmares of falling dominoes. There is still a whiff of this fearfulness in human rights ways of thinking. If the "community of nations" failed in Afghanistan, all those "dedicated to the machinery of global order" would suffer a defeat.122 NATO, "whose own credibility is on the line," had to demonstrate that "Afghan warlords, while they have thousands of armed men at their command, can hardly stand up to a serious western military force, as amply demonstrated by the much-vaunted Taliban's rapid dissolution in the face of sustained force." For NATO, Human Rights Watch warned, "failure would mean losing a raison d'etre in a world without a Soviet threat.... Failure in Afghanistan would be a signal of the global community's impotence and insincerity in transforming failed states."123 With critics like these, the Defense Department hardly needed advocates.

Some humanitarian groups were appalled by such att.i.tudes. "Let's keep the issue of competence in mind," a Doctors Without Borders official told an interviewer. "Humanitarian actors know how to provide aid, but they are not diplomats or military strategists. We are not the best suited to arbitrate among various political and military solutions."124 But he was in a minority. While the human rights abuses in Afghanistan (brutal shortsighted counterinsurgency methods; civilian casualties from air strikes; support for bloodthirsty warlords; revolting prison conditions and the torture of prisoners) were all well doc.u.mented in reports, nowhere did the issue of a foreign occupation appear front and center. "There is no evidence suggesting that coalition or NATO forces have intentionally directed attacks against civilians,"125 Human Rights Watch reported mildly-as though intentionality were the issue, as though the problem were one of misjudgment and proportionality.

The reports tend to depict an Afghan population thankful for the ousting of the Taliban and instinctively drawn to international human rights groups and local NGOs, a people only asking for the United States to live up to its promises with more a.s.sistance. They rarely cite Afghans opposed to the American attacks, like RAWA, a progressive women's group that insisted the Taliban should be overthrown by Afghanis because there was "not one example in history where a foreign force can bring freedom to another nation."126 They do not quote Malalai Joya, a member of the Afghan parliament who argued that "as long as these troops are in Afghanistan, the worse the war will be." Eight years ago, she recounted, "the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan under the banner of women's rights," but now it's simply "h.e.l.l in most of the provinces. Killing a woman is as easy as killing a horse." The occupying forces, she declared, must leave: "My people are caught now between two powerful enemies, and they are being crushed. From the sky, the bombs of the occupation forces are falling, killing civilians. And on the ground, there is the Taliban, and also these warlords. So we have three kinds of enemies. But the withdrawal of one enemy-these U.S. occupation forces whose government sends them for war, and that also supports the corrupt mafia system of Hamid Karzai with more money and guys-will make it much easier to fight the enemies that are left."127 Such views are far removed from Amnesty's tepid complaint that "the international community and the Afghan government have not met their pledge to provide the Afghan people, particularly women and girls, with better security, more responsive governance, and sustainable economic development."128 That U.S. backing may fuel support for fundamentalists and the warlords is hardly a view unknown to U.S. clandestine warriors. As one former CIA senior manager for covert operations in Afghanistan warned, "the Soviet Union tried to denigrate the Afghan mujahadeen by calling them bandits. This did not help the Russian cause. Americans are confronting a foe that is playing down and dirty-but remarkably effectively-on his own turf. Yes, there are criminals and foreign terrorists among them, but the Pentagon seems to understand little about the ident.i.ty of its enemy beyond that." He added, "There were two stark lessons in the history of the 20th century: no nation that launched a war against another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded."129 Human rights leaders often appear baffled by suggestions that a foreign occupation is under way, that the regime in Kabul might be seen as foreign dominated, that resistance to foreigners has any public credibility except in fanatical fundamentalist minds, that some Afghans working with the "international community" are viewed as collaborators, and so on. They seem taken aback that a growing number of Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the operations of NATO and the behavior of its troops that they are willing to take up arms against the quasi-occupation. Their reports continue to recycle much the same arguments: that insurgents disguised as civilians were carrying out "perfidious" attacks in violation of the law; that the "excessive deaths" attributed to the U.S. air campaign were not just the fault of Was.h.i.+ngton, that "the Taliban and al-Qaeda bore major responsibility for civilian harm during the air war" because in some cases they "used the civilian population to s.h.i.+eld themselves from attack, a practice prohibited by international humanitarian law."130 The list of innocent civilians on whom attacks would const.i.tute war crimes was long. No civilians who sided with the occupying power could be targeted. Afghanis who worked for foreign armed forces and government personnel (drivers, cooks, translators) were protected, as were Afghanis holding government posts or seeking to join the police or armed forces, workers in international NGOs, journalists, professionals, women, non-Afghan nationals-the entire civilian infrastructure of the occupation was off limits by law. (The contrast with the language the Reagan administration used to denounce Russian civilian advisors as part of an occupying force is worth noting.) Attacks on these groups fed the apocalyptic tone of the Bush administration's depiction of a Taliban fostering the "type of ideology and society the extremists want to impose on others throughout the world."131 More and more, Afghanistan appeared as a "totalitarian nightmare," in George W. Bush's words-"a land where women were imprisoned in their homes, men were beaten for missing prayer meetings, girls could not go to school, and children were forbidden the smallest pleasures like flying kites."132 Under the Obama administration, human rights leaders continued to call for investigations into bombings of civilians, urged the promotion of women's rights, demanded that the United States break off ties with corrupt warlords, and reported on violence and fraud in elections. The Bush administration had articulated "many bold aspirations," Human Rights Watch wrote to President Obama in March 2009. "Scaling back" its ambitions for Afghan democracy now with an eye to more "achievable aims"133 would be a terrible mistake. As usual the organization took "no position on the efficacy of an increase in US and NATO troops to fight the Taliban and other insurgents"-but then it took no stand against it, either.134 Amnesty's views were much the same.135 Many of Was.h.i.+ngton's own a.n.a.lysts did not see the Taliban as anything approaching another Khmer Rouge. It is not that human rights leaders need to be geopoliticians-quite the opposite. But when they become proponents of an either/or range of options, they can end up propagating a kind of crackpot geopolitics, as the sociologist C. Wright Mills once called such simplifying thinking: either NATO-led forces pull off the reconstruction of the country or the Taliban in all its terror returns to power.

Comparing Was.h.i.+ngton's situation with the Soviets', a former CIA senior manager for clandestine operations in Afghanistan warned: We paid a great price for demonizing the Taliban. We saw them as evil because they didn't let women work, but that's largely irrelevant in Afghanistan. They provided nationwide law and order for the first time in 25 years; we destroyed that and haven't replaced it. They're remembered in Afghanistan for their harsh, theocratic rule, but remembered more for the security they provided. In the end, we'll lose and leave.136 IRAQ.

Unlike the war in Afghanistan, the one in Iraq led to a full-scale occupation-and a startling extension of human rights language and law into American counterinsurgency operations. In the West, the legality of the occupation proved far less controversial than the legality of the war had been. Human rights groups embraced the occupation as another step toward protecting the rights of civilians and noncombatants. While the UN did not at first sanction the occupation, in May 2003 the Security Council did so-insisting only that the belligerent force fully acknowledge its obligations as an occupying power.137 For human rights leaders, the occupation proved highly useful for elaborating upon the relations.h.i.+p between human rights and the laws of war-a pr