On the London Car Bomb Attempts: Collateral Damage, Hypothetical Damage, and the Plight of Karzai

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” Joseph Conrad

“Freedom’s untidy” Donald Rumsfeld

A week or so before the widely-publicized London car bomb attempts thankfully failed and spared the world what would have been another needless and senseless orgy of blood-letting and terrorism, an angry Ahmed Karzai, the US-installed puppet-President of Afghanistan – uncharitable commentators insist he is no more than the Mayor of Kabul! – called a curious international press conference. During the exercise, an unusually emotional Karzai lambasted his benefactors, the NATO forces – read mostly American and sprinkles of Canadian and British - who are struggling to consolidate the sacrifices and the great labour of love of the West which consists in letting freedom, justice, and democracy bloom like a thousand flowers among people who, last time I checked much of American public discourse, are ontological strangers to those concepts.

Why was Karzai so angry? Why did he elect to bite the very fingers that installed and have been feeding him in the ‘Presidency’ in Kabul? Why did he run the risk of annoying the now politically vulnerable Emperor in Washington? Why enter the bad books of American politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, as one of those “ungrateful Arabs” who are just too dumb to appreciate what “our men and women in uniform” are doing for them? Remember, everyone from that part of the world is an Arab in US-Speak. Well, it would seem that Karzai finally returned from slumberland to the reality that Tariq Ali, Mahmoud Darwish, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Wole Soyinka, Arundhati Roy, Al Franken, Bill Maher, the folks at counterpunch.com, and every member of what I will call the global community of conscience have been decrying since the beginning of the current American rape of our collective humanity: the dizzying and benumbing number of innocent civilians – women and children – that the “forces of freedom” have been “left with no other choice” than to maim and obliterate in the search for that elusive terrorist who hides in civilian enclaves, using children playing in courtyards as human shields. American/NATO forces have been killing Afghan civilians in the hundreds in order to save them from the terrorists and not even Karzai, an American creation, could continue to pretend to understand an arithmetic designed singularly for the crystal balls of the neoconservative establishment in Washington.

The levity with which the forces of freedom call for “air support” when invading and violating peoples’ innermost private domains in the warrens of Kabul and Baghdad, and the attendant rain of cluster bombs, missiles, and rockets to which such civilian enclaves are treated, have become regular news, so trite as not to merit being censored from the insular ears of a traditionally sedated American public. But for the tragic consequences spelt out in innocent civilian lives whenever an American unit calls for air support in Kabul and Baghdad, those of us in the global community of conscience would have considered the usual explanations – White House Press Briefings, Pentagon Press Briefings, Centcom Briefings, etc – as nothing more than a comical but valuable window into the strange psyche and the esoteric logic of the mini-Napoleons in the White House and Capitol Hill.

But human lives are involved, hundreds of thousands of lives wasted casually by Christian forces seemingly determined to impose freedom and democracy on an Afghanistan without Afghans, an Iraq bombed clean of every living Iraqi. Confronted by the spectre of undeniable massacres that American power is busy overlaying on the topography of the Middle East, an American General, backed by a State of exception that shields him from such strange concepts as Geneva conventions, war crimes, and international law, declares arrogantly: “we don’t do body counts!” Before one could recover one’s breath, sucked away from the lungs by the unthinkable callousness, the gargantuan depravity of this statement, US-Speak parachutes a euphemistic concept aimed at controlling the damage into our discourse-space. Yes, we do, regrettably incur civilian casualties. But we take utmost care when we move in with our fighter jets and smart bombs. And it’s not really our fault. Remember, we are the good guys. It’s those insurgents! They make us do it. We can’t help having “collateral damage” along the way! And patati and patata!

Thus collateral damage – a criminal euphemism that deserves its own day in The Hague! – is introduced casually into the international lexicon of the American war on terror. It is precisely in the domain of this subterranean war of/for concepts and meaning that the current American enterprise presents some of the most daunting cerebral challenges for the interpellated organic intellectual. For beneath the blitzkrieg of critical interventionism – be it of the activist or discursive kinds – from the global community of conscience in confronting power and challenging Prospero over the nature of his arrangements in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Niger Delta and all other sites of imperial greed lies the under-addressed issue of our being interlocked in a struggle for meaning. In one of his earliest interventions at the outset of the American misadventure in Iraq, Edwin Madunagu, one of Nigeria’s foremost public intellectuals, had warned all intellectuals of good conscience to prepare for a long-drawn battle over the right to define and narrativize the word, terrorism. He had surmised correctly that we were entering a phase in which the intellectual would have to anticipate, politically and ideologically, neocon definitions of that word emanating from Washington and resist such as one of the great moral responsibilities of our time.

Little did Madunagu know that other concepts whose meaning no one would have imagined disputable before the war on terror would become literal and metaphorical prisoners of the war. Concepts such as what it means to be human; the very nature and value of humanity; the right to and equality of all human life; and, most importantly, the democracy of death have been seriously endangered in the current global climate. Death is the most democratic of human experiences, the great uniter, and the faultless leveler. Distinctions of race, class, creed, nationality, gender, and age are mute in the province of death. This explains why every human culture agrees that George Orwell has no space in the democratic domain of death. Hence the Yoruba is in agreement with the Welsh, the Chinese, the Gikuyu, the Indian, the Maori, the French, the Zulu, the Italian, and most Americans – I cannot speak for the neoconservative base of the war – that all human corpses are equal and no corpse is more equal than others. Corpses should not, ought not to present the living with the choice of valuation and hierarchizing. As Dele Giwa, one of Nigeria’s finest journalists, asserted before he was bombed to death in 1986 by the military dictatorship of Ibrahim Babangida, “one life taken in cold blood is as important as a million that go down in a pogrom”.

Giwa spoke some twenty years too early. Enter the American war on terror with its lexicon, its political economy, its atmospherics, its frenzied search for moral anchorage, its constantly shifting and confounding justifications and every discursive/conceptual certitude known to humanity since the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man crashes. Nowhere is this collapse of meaning and the categories with which we engage and apprehend the essence of the human more manifest than in a comparative analysis of the actualities that provoked Karzai’s road-to-Damascus crisis and the almost-event of the London car bombs. Comparing both calls for extreme dexterity in juggling moral latitudes within the overall schemes of discourse introduced by the war on terror. For how does one compare things that have actually happened and are still happening – the mass murder of innocent civilians by their Western liberators in Afghanistan an Iraq – with what almost happened? Is the human imagination fecund enough for the dubious morality of weighing affective and emotional responses to the actual and quotidian spectacle of hundreds of thousands of corpses in Kabul and Baghdad, hacked down by America’s smart bombs with the almost corpses of the failed London bombs? Actual Arab corpses versus Western almost corpses: the new phase of Samuel Huntington’s famed clash of civilizations?

Just when you think that these are harebrained propositions, that collective human morality should have no ambiguities in terms of the distribution of outrage and sorrow; just when I have convinced myself that my sense of morality expects me to shed more tears for the actual corpse, enter the paranoid Western media with their paranoid publics in Washington and London to reassure us that even the almost dead are more equal than the absolutely dead in the bizarre morality of our times. Karzai’s scream of outrage at the large numbers of his innocent citizens that are being liberated into early graves by American bombs, like every other previous attempt by global bodies and institutions to draw attention to the West’s routine of murdering innocent civilians, got scant attention in the Western media. He got passing mention in CNN and was footnoted by a few other cable networks. Then came the failed car bomb attempts in London. Then came the deluge!

Characteristically, the Americans wept louder than the bereaved. Long after BBC had moved on to other news items and developments around the world, CNN remained frozen in a bubble, unable to move beyond the London almost-event. After one week of round- the-clock coverage by Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Christian Amanpour, and other members of “the best political team on television”, I almost changed the channel but the intellectual analyst/observer in me persevered. I had to determine just how long CNN was going to mourn the civilians who almost died or who could have been killed in London while treating daily news of hundreds of Iraqi and Afghan civilian deaths in the hands of American soldiers as part of its routine “Happening Now”. No mourning here. Those are just collateral damage!

And so CNN’s self-declared season of mourning continued. On day ten of mourning, CNN was in New Mexico performing an experiment. They bought an automobile similar to one of the London cars, rigged it with explosives similar to those discovered in London, and exploded it in the desert of New Mexico just to assess how much damage could potentially have been done had the bombs in London exploded, just how many civilians could have been killed. Welcome to the domain of Hypothetical damage! The reporter of course wears an appropriate mournful look for the occasion as the results of CNN’s experiment are reeled out. In the interest of the same logic being applicable to the goose and the gander, why has it never occurred to CNN to buy a fighter jet or an apache helicopter, load it with all the cluster bombs that are the regular fare of Afghan and Iraqi women and children, and experiment it in America, if they are suddenly so enamoured of potential scenarios and hypotheticals? Just as their New Mexico experiment allowed them to take project themselves and their audience into the pain, the sorrow, and the anguish of the people of London over the casualties they almost suffered, what exactly is preventing CNN from taking themselves and their audience on a similar tour of the mental and physical anguish of Afghans and Iraqis on accounts of the casualties that they actually suffer as collateral damage from American bombs?

Slowly but surely, we are headed for an international moral order that privileges hypothetical pain over actual pain, so long as that hypothetical pain is believed to be Western and the actual pain is believed to have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses. Slowly but surely, we are journeying towards a situation in which the hitherto secure democracy of death will be completely unhinged by the West and its primordial instinct to hierarchize. Not only will our dead and their dead not be allowed to be equal, we will now watch our dead compared with and rated lower than the almost dead, the hypothetical dead of Europe and America. This is the destination of CNN’s train and it is our responsibility as intellectuals to refuse a ride on this abominable train, even if the ticket is free!