notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part VI)

(224): The movement of settlers into the Occupied Territories took place in phases, accelerating with each successive one. Settlers numbered an estimated forty-six thousand by 1984, the end of the decade that followed the Yom Kippur War. By the time the Oslo Accord was signed a little less than ten years later, in 1993, there were roughly 200,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories. The irony is that the flow increased after the Oslo Accord. In the third decade, by the end of 2002, the number of settlers had doubled, to nearly 400,000---including those in East Jerusalem, now claimed by Israel. A recent israeli human-rights report notes that Israeli settlements now control almost 42 percent of the West Bank, not including Palestinian East Jerusalem.
(231): Political terror comes out of a government's or guerilla movement's failure to win civilian support. The most obvious link is with the practice of counterinsurgency that the British pioneered in their Malaysian colony during the Second World War and that Samuel Huntington advised America to emulate during the Vietnam War. Huntington called for the creation of strategic hamlets, to which to relocate the population sympathetic to the Viet Cong, so as to detach guerrilas from the population on which they had come to depend for support. Counterinsurgency turned the theory of guerrilla struggle on its head. If guerrillas claimed to be waging a political struggle with arms, moving through the population with the ease of fish in water, to use Mao's metaphor--and not a conventional war in which one could easily separate soldiers from civilians--then the point of counterinsurgency was first to drain the water so as to isolate the fish. Counterinsurgency, however, did not work as long as guerillas actually enjoyed the political support of part of the civilian population. So civilians had to be targeted militarily and intimidated into submission.
(234): The second cost of the Afghan war arose because the United States and its allies created, trained, and sustained an infrastructure of terror, international in scope, free of any effective state control, and wrapped up in the language of religious war.
(235): The third cost... was the development of a parallel infrastructrue of criminality connected with the international development of an illicit drug trade. The simple fact the government had to face was that if you decide to wage war without legislative consent, then you are likely to be short of funds.
(236): When it came to the contra war and CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, the consequences were direct. Between 1982 and 1985, the number of cocaine users in the United States rose by 38 percent to 5.8 million, more than ten times the number of heroin addicts.
(239): Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.
(242): US-Israeli relations have gone through different phases since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Relations were the most stretched during the 1956 Suez Crisis when Israel, along with Britain and France, was forced to acknowledge America's rise as the hegemonic Western power. It is only after 1967, and more so 1973, that we can speak of the building of a strategic alliance between the United States and Israel.
(246): Who can forget that apartheid South Africa claimed to be "the only democracy in Africa," just as Israel today claims to be "the only democracy in the Middle East"? This is not entirely a hozx, but neither does it reflect the whole truth... The larger truth... is that the "civilizing mission" was never meant to include all the natives. It was never meant to generalize the regime of rights or democracy to natives. The whole truth is that, just as the colony of Liberia and apartheid South Africa, Zionist Israel, too, reflects a contradictory unity, a democratic despotism, in a single space.
(249): At the same time, the founders of Israel considered themselves secular Jews, as the founders of Pakistan were self-declared secular Muslims. The shift from a secular to a religious Zionism in Israel under Begin, just as the Islamization of the Pakistani state, under Zia, occurred under the protective American umbrella during the Cold War.
(252): Rather than argue whether terrorism is a foreign import or a homegrown product, I have tried to point up the relationship between the two: the homegrown product could not have flourished except in a global environment where at least one superpower turned a blind eye to "its" terror.
(252): Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, 1 million died, another 1.5 million were maimed, another 5 million became refugees, and just about everyone was internally displaced. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half went clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world. Afghanistan was a brutalized society even before the American bombing began.
(255): If state terror claims to be an exercise in maintaining law and order, societal terror presents itself as a fight for justice. I have stressed the importance of grasping the relation between the two.
(260): To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live with it.