No spots on stars and stripes

Think what would have happened in our own country if Atal Behari Vajpayee took us to war to, for instance, destroy Pakistan’s nuclear facilities and came back without achieving this. He would find it hard to survive the wrath of his own party, leave alone that of the Opposition, press and the general public.

So it came as a huge surprise to me that George W’s popularity soars to new heights and there are almost no questions being asked about why he dragged his country into a Second Gulf War.

Instead of questions being asked, support for the war is so aggressive that when Chris Hedges, a New York Times reporter and author of a recent book on war, tried to express a dissident view at the commencement ceremony of Rockford College in Illinois, students booed him off the stage.

It is the season of commencement ceremonies and the New York Times carried excerpts from speeches made across the country by such eminent speakers as Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu, Sydney Pollack and James Baker.

The only speaker who dared extol the importance of the ‘‘impertinent question’’ was cartoonist, Garry Trudeau. In his speech at Trinity College, Hartford pointed out that Copernicus, Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King and Bill Gates were among those who had changed the world by daring to question conventional wisdom.

‘‘Whether reviled or revered in their lifetimes, history’s movers framed their questions in ways that were entirely disrespectful of conventional wisdom. Civilisation has always advanced in the shimmering wake of its discontents.’’

There are disturbingly few dissidents and discontents in America today. And, those that are there speak softly or creep out in the dead of night to paint their slogans when nobody is looking.

On Harvard bridge I saw a slogan that said ‘‘Dissent is Patriotic’’ and remember it as one of the few dissenting views I came across in a country where today patriotism has become synonymous with supporting the Bush administration in whatever it does.

Dissidence, questions, real information have been so absent even in the press that a recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that a majority of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11.

A journalist friend in New York said it was mainly because the press asked no questions and television networks had remained ‘‘embedded’’ that the American public had been misled into believing in a partisan and incorrect version of how the global war against terrorism was going. Personally, I was shocked to hear ordinary people say that America should have attacked Iraq a long time ago and that they would be disappointed if Iran, Syria and North Korea were not next.

When I asked if they were not worried by the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the answer usually was that they had been taken across the border into Syria or destroyed. Nobody wondered why if Saddam had 25,000 tonnes of Anthrax he did not attempt to use a tiny bit when Baghdad was falling.

Even if Americans ask no questions it is vital that we do. We who have lost more than thirty thousand people to terrorist violence in the past twenty years need to ask if there is still a global war on terrorism in progress or whether what we are really seeing is America consolidate its own foreign policy interests at the cost of the rest of us.

Peace in the Middle East is a fine objective but what of poor, once more forgotten Afghanistan? With the reconstruction of Iraq now at the top of America’s agenda who will remember that Afghanistan remains in ruins? And, once more, will we see Pakistan pick up the pieces?

From all accounts Afghanistan is back where it was before September 11. Warlords rule the countryside, Kabul’s hold on governance slips away, religious fundamentalists continue to see Islam as the only solution and the desperate poverty of the average Afghan is likely to make him grasp at anything that looks like stability or a solution. Are these not the exact conditions that led to the Taliban coming to power?

And, in neighbouring Pakistan, support for Islamic fundamentalism grows so obviously that the Northwest Frontier Province’s Legislative Assembly last week voted unanimously to introduce the Shariah.

Islamic law will now override the courts and a serious effort will be made to bring educational and financial institutions into Islamic mode. How soon before we see the effects in Kashmir?

Perhaps, it’s time for a regional war on terrorism. One that will be unwinnable, though, unless Pakistan and India fight together and recognise that if South Asia is to ever become a player in the global arena we need peace. What happened, incidentally, to the peace moves? So, insignificant are we on the map of the world that I have neither heard nor read anything about us in America except two paragraphs that said there was a heat wave.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com