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Posted on 10/11/2001 11:41:02 AM PDT by Captain Ugly

Student demands end to war

by Peter Gelderloos

Awash in the recent news of four United Nations humanitarian aid workers killed by an American bomb, we have yet another opportunity to consider the purposes and effects of "America's New War." Appropriately, the bombing in Afghanistan started just before the dawn of Columbus Day. Within hours, our television stations displayed glorified graphics reading "America Strikes Back!," reminding me of "The Empire Strikes Back" in George Lucas' "Star Wars" sextet. The mention of Star Wars, with our current president, unleashes a new wave of parallels between Hollywood and reality that quickly descends into overwhelming morbidity. And with CNN.com displaying interactive maps, mission folders and weapons profiles, the like of which I have only ever seen in computer games, I wonder if our nation has really considered just what it is doing.

Our military leaders proclaim the humanitarian angle of the bombing, mentioning that we have been dropping 35,000 food packages a day. For the life of me, I cannot see how these food packages have any realistic purpose beyond one of propaganda, to convince Afghans and Americans of the righteousness of our bombs. Even assuming an impossible 100 percent success rate in the high-altitude delivery of these supplies, the airdrops will feed fewer than 0.53 percent of the 7.5 million famine-vulnerable Afghanis, and for just one day at that. Even before we began killing U.N. aid workers, the ability of humanitarian groups in Afghanistan to support the starving population had been greatly diminished, far from the extent of what our airdrops might accomplish.

Every time I hear some politician claim that we are bombing Afghanistan for the benefit of the Afghan people, I remember our similar claims in Vietnam, where our government overturned an election on behalf of the French colonists, then preceded to bomb, shoot and starve to death over two million Vietnamese men, women and children, all the while saying it was for their own good.

Due in part to America's war in Vietnam, the entire Indochina Peninsula, with the exception of Thailand, went to communism, albeit a much more militaristic and dictatorial form of communism than might have developed had the situations of their birth been less brutal. Will a similar effect arise out of our bombing Afghanistan? Protests in Pakistan and Indonesia lend credence to this precedent. The governments around Afghanistan, for obvious political reasons, endorse and support America's war, at the express disapproval of the majority of their people.

Already, this volatile mix, assuredly to the Taliban's benefit, has spread throughout neighboring countries. Even after just a few days of bombing, thousands of Pakistanis have engaged in running street battles with police and military, according to the Oct. 8 edition of the Washington Post. The fact that the police responded with live ammunition, killing and wounding quite a few, does not bode well for the possibility of any peaceful resolution; the Taliban, or similar forces, may spread throughout the entire region as a result of our bombing. To the north, Tajikistan still is recovering from a civil war, with largely religious motives, that left the country divided. Although a cease-fire was enacted, violence intermittently continues. It will not take much for the situation to re-ignite. Uzbekistan, which also shares a border with Afghanistan, was rocked by bombings less than three years ago, and the military government, which effectively illegalised religion, still operated on guard against local and Taliban-sponsored religious extremists when I visited that country earlier this year. How will we be helping that situation at all by increasing our military presence in Uzbekistan?

According to one of my friends in Uzbekistan, the bombings already are stirring up anti-American sentiments within the population, contrary to media reports about the world being united behind America's crusade. Aside from having a number of friends in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital less than 100 miles from the Afghan border, I also am vaguely acquainted with one of the two Americans being held by the Taliban, as she went to my high school. Some would say that this subjective connection would interfere with my ability to properly judge whether or not we should be dropping bombs, but I believe that if everyone had a friend in that area of the world, they would no longer be willing to declare that this bombing is in the best interest of those being bombed.

If people cannot, or will not, view our actions with a humanitarian interest, they still can look at the situation tactically and come to the conclusion that war is not the answer. The Soviet Union bombed Afghanistan for 10 years, losing tens of thousands of soldiers, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and doing nothing but strengthening the Taliban. With the current political climate as it is, our war on Afghanistan may only spread the Taliban, or similar regimes, to Pakistan, Indonesia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and it will do this with great cost to human life, American soldiers included.

There is yet another reason to oppose this war. It seems that the American freedoms we say we are defending have been the war's first casualties. Electronic communications have lost whatever small measure of privacy they once enjoyed; political dissidents are being called treasonous by many high-ranking members of the government; Tom Ridge, was appointed to the new Homeland Defense Council, which seems to be an institution that may mirror the "Red Squads" of the 1950s and political activists are being labeled "terrorists" under the FBI's new descriptions (which would have included Martin Luther King Jr., or even many of our Founding Fathers if they were still around).

In the interests of ourselves, our freedoms and all the people of the world, we must demand an end to this war.

Peter Gelderloos is a sophomore English major participating in a hunger strike to protest the war.

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