What's He GWOT To Show?

As I write this, it is a few hours short of the moment two years ago when a hijacked civilian airplane flew into the first of the WTC towers and changed the shape of the future. Few who saw what looked like a tasteless TV thriller could have imagined its deep and lasting impact on their lives. Within hours, George W. Bush declared a war on terrorism, soon shortened to GWOT, a Global War On Terror. In pursuing it, the US has invaded two countries, and vanquished two regimes, killed up to 30,000 civilians, and laid to waste two countries that had already been reduced to destitution by previous sanctions and civil war. But the war on terror is no closer to being won.

How is GWOT going? The second anniversary of 9/11 is the right time to take stock of what we have gained and lost. George Bush did take stock, for the benefit of the American nation, on September 7, and predictably claimed that things could not be going better. About Afghanistan, he claimed the US had destroyed the training camps of terror and removed the regime that harboured Al Qaeda. In its war against 'terror' it had captured or killed nearly two-thirds of Al Qaeda's known leaders. In stentorian tones he proclaimed, "We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilisation, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power." In Iraq, he claimed, "We are helping the long-suffering people of that country to build a decent and democratic society at the centre of the Middle East. Together we are transforming a place of torture chambers and mass graves into a nation of laws and free institutions."

A moment's reflection shows that Bush's speech was a triumph of wishful thinking. The US has indeed captured or killed thousands from Al Qaeda. But since Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri and other top guns remain at large, these captures have accomplished nothing. This has been demonstrated by the bomb blasts in Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Jakarta and elsewhere that have claimed hundreds of lives. Even while Bush shrilly claims victory, CIA assessments show

Al Qaeda is short neither of funds nor recruits. It is, in fact, rapidly becoming a trademark for terrorists bent upon stopping the US march to hegemony over the Islamic world.

In Afghanistan, the US won the war but is losing the peace. Once again, thousands of its cadres are dead or in prison, but Mullah Omar and his top lieutenants remain free. Despite the US repeated bombings and forays into the south and east, the Taliban are making a slow and relentless comeback, especially around Kandahar. In its attempts to prevent this without losing American lives, the US is pouring money into the coffers of the warlords. But since these are the very same persons whom the people had grown to hate in 1994-95 before the Taliban removed them from power, the US is only consolidating the hold of the Taliban. The loser is the legally constituted government of Afghanistan under Hamid Karzai, whose writ no longer runs in the south, if it ever did. Emboldened by US support, the warlords now refuse to surrender tax revenues to Kabul. Afghanistan is relentlessly slipping back into the anarchy that bred the Taliban. Karzai lives more and more on borrowed time. But the US has lost interest in Afghanistan, wants to hand it over to Pakistan, and has turned westwards in its search for easier battles to win.

One such 'easier battle' was, of course, against sanctions-ravaged Iraq. Bush claimed that in Iraq the US had waged "one of the swiftest and most humane military campaigns in history". But pacification has been neither swift nor easy. The US has lost more soldiers in Iraq since May 1 than it did during the actual hostilities. The number of its dead is rising currently by 40 a month. The resistance—Bush calls them terrorists—is getting more organised, and as the bomb blasts at the Jordan embassy, the UN and the Najaf shrine showed, its attacks are becoming more explicitly political.

Today Bush cannot quite hide his desperation. Even 1,40,000 US troops are not sufficient to pacify Iraq. But he has no more to send. These 1,40,000 soldiers have to be sent home. The army has warned him it cannot keep more than 60,000 troops in Iraq after March. But the replacements from other countries are nowhere in sight. None of his allies except the UK is prepared to give him more than a few hundred token soldiers.

His rationale for the Iraq war lies in tatters. His project to create a brand new democratic Iraq has few takers. A large proportion of his voters thinks he deceived the Congress into sanctioning a war. The American economy is in poor shape. Unemployment is at a 20-year high and the budget deficit is out of control. Worst of all, instead of eradicating terrorism, the American presence in Iraq is attracting terrorists from all over the world like flies to honey. Why bother to go to the US when you can kill Americans in Iraq? At the present rate, by the time the American public chooses its next president, 700 Americans would have died and over 3,500 wounded in an occupation that will patently appear counter-productive. Bush is not likely to be the next chosen one.

Two years after 9/11, it is apparent that the solution to terror does not lie in Bush's security doctrine of 'pre-emptive' attack but in building a saner and just world. A world that is governed by law instead of brute force. But America is light years away from learning that lesson. By the time it does, it might be too late to reverse the slide into chaos.