ARCHIVE - November, 2001

This Is Not Your Father's War
Elizabeth Dunn, Department of Geography

The initial analogies made between the bombings on September 11 and Pearl Harbor are, as as cooler heads now acknowledge, problematic.   But though explicit comparison with World War II has been rejected, old models of conflict ingrained in  Western military and political institutions are shaping American responses to the current crisis, even though this is not the kind of conflict the United States is now engaged in.  In Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo, -- conflicts which do not meet the pattern Western institutions are based upon -- the US reshaped the facts to make old models apply.  Although this creates an opportunity to join the fight, it does not lead to lasting solutions.  We should not allow this to happen in the current "war on terrorism."

The United States has three models of conflict which may lead to counter-productive action.  The "sovereign state" model assumes that all conflict is among different nationalities that are separable into distinct territories and states.  The model is derived from Hitler's aggression, but is not universally applicable.  The US and NATO applied this model in the former Yugoslavia.   Although ethnic groups in the region had lived together for decades, the US accepted Milosevic's principle of ethnic separatism and recognized Serbs and Croats as nations deserving  separate states. The result was new manifestations of the same conflict in Kosovo and Macedonia.

We are using the sovereign state model to turn the current crisis into a war with Afghanistan, the only state that can plausibly be linked to Osama bin Laden.  But overthrowing the Taliban won't stop terrorist attacks.  Al Qaeda is a loose network, which is not territorially or organizationally bounded.  Hit Afghanistan, and it will simply move elsewhere. Assuming that the enemy is embodied within a plot of land or a nation-state will only result in more conflict elsewhere.

The second model, the archetypical battle between good and evil, helped rally US support for World War Two, and Bush uses it for the same purpose now.  But bipolarity has pitfalls.  It assumes that if the enemy is evil, the enemy of the enemy must be good.  We used this approach to equip the Mujaheddin, our proxies in the conflict with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.  The arms we supplied are now used against us by the Taliban.   Although arming brutal people to fight America's enemies may enable them to fight us later, we are doing so once again.  We are currently funding the Northern Alliance, a group of fundamentalists with an atrocious human rights record.  We are allied with Pervez Musharraf, a military dictator who tortures political opponents.  Once again, we fail to see how the enemies of our enemies may not remain friends when the current conflict is over.

The "black hat" model assumes a single terrible leader is the root of conflict.  Remove the evil leader from power -- as we removed Hitler -- and the conflict will end.  But removing a leader is of little consequence if the structural conditions which produced that leader remain.  In Yugoslavia, the Clinton Administration was determined to remove Slobodan Milosevic from power.  Yet, because resources are still doled out along ethnic lines, there is further conflict in Macedonia and Kosovo.  We use the black hat model again by focusing on bin Laden.  But bin Laden alone is not the problem, and killing him will not stop terrorism.  Terrorism is not expensive, and terrorists are not dependent on bin Laden's money.  Nor are they dependent on bin Laden's organization: similar groups exist throughout the Middle East.

The force that propelled the September 11 attacks is not a person, a state or a demon.  We must discard our sixty year old templates and see the force behind the terror as diffuse sentiments stemming from a particular history and from complex geopolitical relations.  The attacks that took place in New York and Washington were a rejection of both superpowers of the twentieth century, and therefore a modern rejection of modernity.  We must cast off modernist ways of understanding conflict to combat them.

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