Twilight Of Our World

Peering into the future is a hazardous profession. If the writer predicts an event too far ahead, he is dismissed as an alarmist. If he is a shade slow or too cautious, he is dismissed for stating the obvious. This is especially true of political predictions. Despite that, it has become more necessary than ever to make the attempt. For there is a risk the US' decisions in its war against terrorism could spell the end of the civilised world and usher in a new dark age.

Last week, the US used fuel-air explosive bombs for the first time in Afghanistan. It did this despite the widespread attempts to have it banned as a chemical weapon. In the US and many other parts, this was greeted with relief. It showed that the US had given up the attempt to cobble together a "friendly, broad-based"—i.e non-Northern Alliance—government in Afghanistan, as a precondition for military operations. Its use of this weapon behind the Taliban frontlines north of Kabul made it clear that it intended to use the Northern Alliance to dislodge the former from Kabul before winter sets in; possibly even before Ramzan.

This is a welcome, if delayed, change of strategy. The problem is the choice of weapon. The fuel-air bomb, according to a US assessment, leaves a crater up to 600 yards wide. Beyond that, it kills every living creature in a radius of about two kilometres through asphyxiation and decompression, because it sucks every bit of oxygen out of the air. It is particularly effective in caves and tunnels, where air cannot rush in to fill the vacuum created. Since Osama and the Taliban leadership are believed to be hiding in caves, we may see many more of these bombs being used in the coming days.

The trouble is that, in sharp contrast to laser-guided bombs, it cannot make any distinction between a civilian and a military target. Indeed, its use suggests that the US is perilously close to giving up the effort altogether. This is where troubling questions begin to rise. How will the Islamic world react to this? How will it affect the stability of the US' closest allies in the Islamic world, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia? How will that in turn affect the future effectiveness of a war that, even Bush concedes, will not end with the death of Osama?

How will mounting civilian deaths, and a growing callousness towards them, affect support for the US even among countries that share its desire to root out terrorism?

Most troubling of all, how will another Kuwait-type blitzkrieg affect the spread of "western values" if the rest of the world increasingly associates these values with massacres carried out by weapons of mass destruction dropped from safe heights; one that only a servile international press dignifies by calling "war"? Lastly, if "western values" face a wholesale rejection, what future will the world head to?

To not one of these questions can one find a reassuring answer. Any substantial use of the "daisy-cutter" will cause a quantum jump in animosity towards America. A two-kilometre radius covers an area of 25 square kms. This is approximately the area between Nehru Place and Defence Colony in Delhi or Malabar Hill and Nariman Point in Bombay. However sparsely populated Afghanistan may be, it is impossible for such a bomb not to kill civilians indiscriminately. Hence, a repeated use of this bomb will drown out the few remaining voices of moderation in the Islamic world and make the clash of civilisations a reality.

Were that to happen, it could prove the straw that breaks the backs of Musharraf and the Saudi royal family.Musharraf's problems are well understood, but the Saudi royal family's difficulties are more cause for concern. At roughly $13,000 a head, the Saudi per capita income is roughly half of what it used to be in the early '80s. This puts it below the level of South Korea. It also suffers from a 30 per cent unemployment rate. That it continues to employ hundreds of thousands of foreign workers means the cause is not a dearth of work, but that even 'poor' Saudis have become used to a certain lifestyle and standard of living. And this only makes the anomie—loss of a sense of purpose—of the average Saudi that much more acute.

Declines in income are never equally distributed: the strong hold on to their share, transferring the entire loss onto the weak. Add the 30 per cent unemployed and it becomes clear that the comparison US analysts are making between the 'broad base' of the 7,000-strong Saudi ruling family and the isolated Shah of Iran is misleading. In reality, the royal family now sits atop a pyramid much longer and narrower than two decades ago.

Osama and the Islamic jehad feed on this declining social, economic status and the corruption of Islam and its way of life that oil wealth has allegedly caused. He was already so much an inspiration to the anti-establishment clergy that he was exiled in 1994. Today, he's even more dangerous dead than alive. Were he to be killed, the upheaval in Saudi Arabia would be hard to control. At best, it would force a demand for the withdrawal of US bases. At worst, one could have the first jehadi oil-rich state in the world.

A nightmare vision of the future would be a globalised West, with 55,000 transnational corporations and 450,000 subsidiaries with headquarters conveniently bunched in a few dozen skyscrapers in a handful of countries, confronted by a crescent of jehadi states with oil revenues, N-bombs and legions of aspiring fidayeen backed tacitly by an Islamic world with few moderate voices. In such a world, no westerner will feel safe; tourism, the airlines will receive a death blow; and the spread of manufacturing to low-wage countries will halt. Democratic values will be discarded as inconvenient (witness the gagging of Al Jazeera in the US); surveillance, interrogation and even torture will gradually become normal. The world will become a police super-state and the rich will find themselves living in a gilded cage.