See the video here with the full transcript of his talk here.
Rushdie seems to be playing to his gallery. Of course he is right in his argument that the terrorists’ agenda has nothing to do with justice but with power, and with power of the most obscurantist kind, the kind that would stone woman to death or throw acid on their faces for going to school. But it’s remarkable how much he has chosen to forget, even while trying to be even-handed about Kashmir. For example, the people he now calls terrorists were formerly being called freedom fighters when they were being aided materially by the US in their attempt to give the Soviet Union their “Vietnam” in Afghanistan. The global Islamist terrorist cause – represented by various disparate groups - is now drawing more recruits by the way the NATO forces are killing civilians in Afghanistan, or by the way the great crusade for democracy has managed to destroy Iraq, or by the slow genocide of the Palestinians by the Zionist regime of Israel.
Of course, if the west really did want to liberate the Afghans, they would have stopped killing civilians in the name of fighting terrorists. They would have lived up to their pledges to fund schools and hospitals in Afghanistan, and restore the economy and its infrastructure, so that people need not go hungry and be subjected to violence and insecurity. They would have done much more to create the conditions for ordinary Afghans to live in peace within a viable state and a functioning economy. They would also have been tougher on Musharraf in insisting that in exchange for the massive subsidies doled out to his regime, he must dismantle the refuge and support that his intelligence apparatus was giving to the Islamic extremists among the Taliban. The US could have insisted on Musharraf halting the financing and training he was providing assorted terrorist groups for getting back at India for supporting Bangladeshi independence from Pakistan in 1971. In all of these respects, the US and its NATO allies have failed utterly, because they were focused on the short-term objective of securing the collaboration of the Pakistani leader in their own limited project and meaningless project – the “war on terror”. Not only have they lost Musharraf, the present state of Pakistan is in an even more explosive situation than it has been before. The Pakistanis as a people have been led down the garden path yet again by their elected leaders: while pretending to protest against US brutality as the US forces bomb Pakistani villages in their terminally misguided war on terrorism, its ruling kleptocracy is winking at the US government.
Meanwhile, the Indian government has allied itself with two brutal regimes – the neocon US and the Zionist Israel. It is now in danger of succumbing to the temptation to imitate their callous brutality in the way they deal with those they perceive as their enemies, both within the country and outside. If it does so, we the people of India will continue to pay the price of this brutality.
Comments