A guest post by Ross Eventon, responding to this article on openDemocracy. 

“The Taliban regime” contend David Held and Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, scholars at the London School of Economics, “harboured Osama bin Laden while he planned and orchestrated the atrocities of 9/11.” The subsequent attack on Afghanistan began “with broad international support,” which “provided the campaign with initial legitimacy that was enshrined through United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1378, 1383, 1386, 1401.”  Here ends their “discussion of the legal aspect of the war.”  

No source is cited for the claim that Bin Laden orchestrated the September 11 attacks because, however reasonable such suspicions may be, no substantive evidence exists.  Held and Ulrichsen see no need to consider why conventional forms of justice – apprehension of the suspect – were shunned, and why Taliban offers to hand over Bin Laden if evidence could be produced were flatly rejected, other than as an, albeit over-zealous, attempt at retribution.  “The underpinnings of the ‘War on Terror’” can be explained solely through quotations of the then President Bush: ““we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.” This is a useful method of ascertaining the underlying determinants of foreign policy decisions, negating the need for any actual research or scholarship; although, given the state of the political sciences, blind acceptance of the proclamations of leadership may be the most fundamental aspect of what is called scholarship.

They authors quote Hew Strachan, who “questioned whether freedom could ever be a strategy in itself,” and warned that “the conflation of words like ‘war’ and ‘terror,’ and of ‘strategy’ and ‘policy’…contributes to the incoherence of the response that followed 9/11.”  US foreign policy since 9/11 has been anything but incoherent, following conventional objectives thinly veiled in a familiar ideology.

The source for the claim of “broad international support” is not provided.  An International Gallup Poll taken at the end of September 2001 found that respondents “strongly favored diplomatic-judicial measures over military action.” (cited in Noam Chomsky; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.)  The dates of the Security Council resolutions are also important.  All are from at least a month after the initial bombing began on October 7th.  Lacking a resolution, the bombing was an act of state terrorism designed, according to British Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, to punish Afghans “until they get their leadership changed.”

The initial strikes involved the use of cluster bombs on one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. Cluster bombs are weapons that disproportionately affect children who tend to pick up the unexploded munitions.  In September this year, Afghanistan was applauded by Human Rights Watch for signing the Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning their use in the country, “despite heavy pressure from the US not to.”  A month later, the US failed in a bid to push a new protocol through the UN that would sanction the use of cluster munitions made after 1980. 

The attacks went ahead despite aid groups warning millions may die as a result of the restricted access for humanitarian supplies.  By May 2001, the Guardian reported, “As many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention.”  None of this, of course, could even slightly tarnish the image of the “Right War,” that picture only being challenged now the US appears to be committing the greatest crime of all: losing. 

Curiously, “NATO continues to bomb Afghanistan even after the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.” (my emphasis)  This may suggest the "War on Terror" has a separate agenda.  Declassified documents recently revealed that on September 30 2001, the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote to Bush advising that he attempt to install a new regime in Afghanistan.  Of the forthcoming attack, he wrote, "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim.”  A year earlier, Rumsfeld co-authored a report along with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, arguing that, “[w]hile the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

It is a “terrible irony,” conclude Held and Ulrichsen that “attempts to resist terrorist violence in the decade after 9/11 have ended up weakening the very structures of law and constraints on the use of force that have formed the cornerstone of the international system and bedrock of global security since 1945.”   Aside from the act of international terrorism that laid the foundation for the invasion, “attempts to resist terrorist violence” also include the engagement in wars that, it was understood at the time, would increase the threat to domestic populations as well as the continuation of military aid that “encourages terrorist groups to attack Americans.”  Afghans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Colombians and others enduring US backed “use of force” in the decade after 9/11 can testify further to the extent of these terrible ironies.

Ross Eventon is a writer and researcher based in Bogota, Colombia.  He was previously the Samuel Rubin Young Fellow at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam where he focused on Afghanistan

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