The End of Imagination (30 page)

At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many e-mails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes too much data can actually hinder intelligence—small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India’s nuclear tests in 1998.)

The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical, and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom—that precious, precious thing—will be the first casualty. It’s already hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously.

Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People’s Resistance Forum who were distributing antiwar and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested.
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The right-wing government (while it shelters Hindu extremist groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Students’ Islamic Movement of India and is trying to revive an antiterrorist act that had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used.
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Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?

Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, the mainstream media, particularly in the United States, has more or less rolled over, allowing itself to be tickled on the stomach with press handouts from military men and government officials. Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumors spread.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They’re blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

President George Bush recently boasted, “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a two million dollar missile at a ten dollar empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.”
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President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money’s worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the International Coalition’s weapons manufacturers.

It wouldn’t make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group—described by the
Industry Standard
as “one of the world’s largest private investment funds,” with $13 billion under management.
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Carlyle invests in the defense sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci is its chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld’s). Carlyle’s other partners include former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III, George Soros, and Fred Malek (George Bush Sr.’s campaign manager).

An American paper—the
Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel
—says that former President Bush is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make “presentations” to potential government clients.
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Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it’s all in the family.

Then there’s that other branch of traditional family business—oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr.) and Vice President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.

Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world’s third-largest gas reserves and an estimated 6 billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next thirty years (or a developing country’s energy requirements for a couple of centuries).
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America has always viewed oil as a security consideration and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.

Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently move northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests.

In 1998 Dick Cheney—then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry—said, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight.”
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True enough.

For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian Sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative “emerging markets” in South and Southeast Asia. In December 1997 a delegation of Taliban mullahs traveled to America and even met US State Department officials and Unocal executives in Houston.
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At that time the Taliban’s taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now. Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration. Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry’s big chance.

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defense deals to get any real play in the media.

In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the “clash of civilizations” and the “good versus evil” home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or antidepressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been—a curiously insular people administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being airdropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we’re hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theater unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders: Have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to reimagine beauty? Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in one’s ear, without thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan?

13. War Talk

Summer Games with Nuclear Bombs

When India and Pakistan conducted their nuclear tests in 1998, even those of us who condemned them balked at the hypocrisy of Western nuclear powers. Implicit in their denunciation of the tests was the notion that Blacks cannot be trusted with the Bomb. Now we are presented with the spectacle of our governments competing to confirm that belief.

As diplomats’ families and tourists disappear from the subcontinent, Western journalists arrive in Delhi in droves. Many call me. “Why haven’t you left the city?” they ask. “Isn’t nuclear war a real possibility? Isn’t Delhi a prime target?”

If nuclear weapons exist, then nuclear war is a real possibility. And Delhi is a prime target. It is.

But where shall we go? Is it possible to go out and buy another life because this one’s not panning out?

If I go away, and everything and everyone—every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel, and bird that I have known and loved—is incinerated, how shall I live on? Whom shall I love? And who will love me back? Which society will welcome me and allow me to be the hooligan that I am here, at home?

So we’re all staying. We huddle together. We realize how much we love each other. And we think, what a shame it would be to die now. Life’s normal only because the macabre has become normal. While we wait for rain, for football, for justice, the old generals and eager boy-anchors on TV talk of first-strike and second-strike capabilities as though they’re discussing a family board game.

My friends and I discuss
Prophecy
, the documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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The fireball. The dead bodies choking the river. The living stripped of skin and hair. The singed, bald children, still alive, their clothes burned into their bodies. The thick, black, toxic water. The scorched, burning air. The cancers, implanted genetically, a malignant letter to the unborn. We remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of a building. We imagine ourselves like that. As stains on staircases. I imagine future generations of hushed schoolchildren pointing at my stain . . . That was a writer. Not she or he.
That.

I’m sorry if my thoughts are stray and disconnected, not always worthy. Often ridiculous.

I think of a little mixed-breed dog I know. Each of his toes is a different color. Will he become a radioactive stain on a staircase too? My husband’s writing a book on trees. He has a section on how figs are pollinated. Each fig only by its own specialized fig wasp. There are nearly a thousand different species of fig wasps, each a precise, exquisite synchrony, the product of millions of years of evolution.

All the fig wasps will be nuked. Zzzz. Ash. And my husband. And his book.

A dear friend, who’s an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmada valley, is on indefinite hunger strike. Today is the fourteenth day of her fast. She and the others fasting with her are weakening quickly. They’re protesting because the Madhya Pradesh government is bulldozing schools, clear-felling forests, uprooting hand pumps, forcing people from their villages to make way for the Maan dam. The people have nowhere to go. And so the hunger strike.
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What an act of faith and hope! How brave it is to believe that in today’s world, reasoned, nonviolent protest will register, will matter. But will it? To governments that are comfortable with the notion of a wasted world, what’s a wasted valley?

The threshold of horror has been ratcheted up so high that nothing short of genocide or the prospect of nuclear war merits mention. Peaceful resistance is treated with contempt. Terrorism’s the real thing. The underlying principle of the War Against Terror, the very notion that war is an acceptable solution to terrorism, has ensured that terrorists in the subcontinent now have the power to trigger a nuclear war.

Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease—these are now just the funnies, the comic-strip items. Our Home Minister says that Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has it all wrong—the key to India’s development is not education and health but defense (and don’t forget the kickbacks, O Best Beloved).
3

Perhaps what he really meant was that war is the key to distracting the world’s attention from fascism and genocide. To avoid dealing with any single issue of real governance that urgently needs to be addressed.

For the governments of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is not a
problem
, it’s their perennial and spectacularly successful
solution
. Kashmir is the rabbit they pull out of their hats every time they need a rabbit. Unfortunately, it’s a radioactive rabbit now, and it’s careening out of control.

No doubt there is Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. But there are other kinds of terror in the valley. There’s the inchoate nexus between jihadist militants, ex-militants, foreign mercenaries, local mercenaries, underworld mafiosi, security forces, arms dealers, and criminalized politicians and officials on both sides of the border. There are also rigged elections, daily humiliation, “disappearances,” and staged “encounters.”
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And now the cry has gone up in the heartland: India is a Hindu country. Muslims can be murdered under the benign gaze of the state. Mass murderers will not be brought to justice. Indeed, they will stand for elections. Is India to be a Hindu nation in the heartland and a secular one around the edges?

Meanwhile the International Coalition Against Terror makes war and preaches restraint. While India and Pakistan bay for each other’s blood, the coalition is quietly laying gas pipelines, selling us weapons, and pushing through their business deals. (Buy now, pay later.) Britain, for example, is busy arming both sides.
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Tony Blair’s “peace” mission a few months ago was actually a business trip to discuss a billion-pound deal (and don’t forget the kickbacks, O Best Beloved) to sell sixty-six Hawk fighter-bombers to India.
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Roughly, for the price of a
single
Hawk bomber, the government could provide 1.5 million people with clean drinking water for life.
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“Why isn’t there a peace movement?” Western journalists ask me ingenuously. How can there be a peace movement when, for most people in India, peace means a daily battle: for food, for water, for shelter, for dignity? War, on the other hand, is something professional soldiers fight far away on the border. And nuclear war—well, that’s completely outside the realm of most people’s comprehension. No one knows what a nuclear bomb is. No one cares to explain. As the Home Minister said, education is not a pressing priority.

The last question every visiting journalist always asks me is: Are you writing another book? That question mocks me. Another book? Right
now
? This talk of nuclear war displays such contempt for music, art, literature, and everything else that defines civilization. So what kind of book should I write?

It’s not just the one million soldiers on the border who are living on hair-trigger alert. It’s all of us. That’s what nuclear bombs do. Whether they’re used or not, they violate everything that is humane. They alter the meaning of life itself.

Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate the men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human race?