Page 2 of 2 Kabul 2009: War of the Worlds redux
By Tom Engelhardt
Resistant as Washington may be to the thought, the obvious has recently been
crossing some influential minds. Amid the debate over war options - more
troops, more training of the Afghan military and police, more drone attacks in
Pakistan, or some mix-and-match version of all of the above, but certainly not
a withdrawal from the country - it has become more common to express concern
that deploying up to 40,000 more US troops might create too big an American
"footprint". As Peter Baker and Thom Shanker of the New York Times wrote in a
profile of Robert Gates, the secretary of defense "has repeatedly declared his
concern that more troops would make Americans look increasingly like
occupiers".
After almost eight years of war, only now does the danger that we might "look
increasingly like occupiers" rise to the surface. Since "occupier" is a role
Americans just can't imagine occupying, let's
consider a fantasy alternative instead, one perhaps easier to imagine: What if
it turns out that we are the Martians?
Crushing the rabbits
The first Martian invasion of this planet - they landed near the town of Woking
in England and, before they were done, laid waste to London - took place in
1898, thanks to the Tasmanians, and if you don't think that's worth considering
more than a century later, think again. In fact, General McChrystal, President
Barack Obama, Proconsul Holbrooke, as you're doing your reassessments of the
Afghan War, do I have a book for you.
I was perhaps 12 years old when I first read it - under the covers by
flashlight long after I was supposed to be asleep - and it scared the hell out
of me. Even now, when alien invasion plots are a dime a dozen, I have a hunch
that it could do the same for you. I'm talking, of course, about H G Wells' The
War of the Worlds. If you remember, that other Welles, Orson,
successfully redid it in a 1938 radio version in which the fictional Martians
landed in New Jersey, and many perfectly real New Yorkers were reportedly
unnerved. (The 2005 Steven Spielberg movie version, the second film made from
Wells' classic, had all the expectable modern pyrotechnics, but none of the
punch of the book.)
Back in the era when Wells wrote his book, invasion novels were already
commonplace in England, with the part of the implacable, inhuman invader
normally played by the Germans. Wells, on the other hand, almost
single-handedly created the alien invader genre, arming his brainy monsters
from the dying planet Mars with poison gas and a laser-like heat ray, and then
supplying them with giant walking tripods (think elevated tanks without treads)
- all prefiguring the weaponry of the world wars to come (and even of wars
beyond our own).
However, nothing in the book - not the weaponry, not even the destruction - is
more terrifying than the attitude of the Martians ("intellects vast and cool
and unsympathetic"), for this is one of the great role-reversal novels of all
time. They are implacable exactly because they see the English as we would see
rabbits, or as English colonists in Australia did indeed see the Tasmanians, a
people they all but exterminated with hardly a twinge of regret.
In fact, that's where The War of the Worlds evidently began. It seems
that Wells' brother Frank brought up the Aborigine inhabitants of Tasmania,
south of Australia, who were eradicated when the English transformed the island
into a prison colony day, launching the idea for a book still in print 111
years later. Evidently, the question that came to Wells's mind was this: what
if someone arrived in England with the same view of the superior English that
the English had had of the Tasmanians, and the sort of advanced weaponry and
technology capable of turning that attitude into a grim reality?
As his unnamed central character comments in the first pages of the novel: "The
Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space
of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians
warred in the same spirit?"
The Martians (actually transmogrified Englishmen) advance through the English
countryside and into London, frying everything in sight in a version of what,
in the next century, would come to be known as total war - that is, war visited
not just on the warriors, but on the civilian population. At the same time,
they harvest humans and feed off their blood. In the coming century, there
would indeed be Martians aplenty on this planet, more than ready to feed off
the blood of its inhabitants.
General McChrystal, President Obama, Proconsul Holbrooke, The War of the Worlds,
old as it is, offers a rare example of how to imagine us from the point of view
of them. I urge you to study it with the intensity you now apply to
counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism strategies. After all, in our own way,
we could be considered the Martians of the 21st century and (how typical!) we
don't even know it.
Unlike Wells' Martians, who arrived on this planet without a propaganda
department or a care in the world about English "hearts and minds", we landed
in Afghanistan talking a people-friendly game, and we've never stopped, even if
much of the palaver has been for home consumption. And yet during the first
eight years of our Afghan War, as McChrystal recently admitted in his 66-page
report to the secretary of defense, we could hardly have exhibited a more
profound ignorance of the Afghan world, or a more Martian lack of interest in
finding out about it, even as we were blowing Afghans away.
Now, the Pentagon is attempting to correct that by setting up a new
intelligence unit "to provide military and civilian officials in Afghanistan
with detailed analysis of the country's tribal, political and religious
dynamics". As Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation's Dreyfuss Report, points out,
however, this unit will be based at a center in Tampa, Florida; we will, that
is, now study the Afghans as anthropologists might once have studied the
Trobriand Islanders. Then we will process that information thousands of miles
away, just as our "pilots" do.
Perhaps it's time to study ourselves instead. What if, from an Afghan point of
view, we really are Wells' Martians? Then, it's not a matter of
counter-insurgency versus counter-terror, or more American troops versus more
American-trained Afghan ones, or even nation-building versus stabilization.
What if - and this is an un-American thought - there is no American solution to
Afghanistan? What if no alternative, or combination of alternatives, will work?
What if the only thing Martians can effectively do is destroy - or leave?
(Remember, even Wells's aliens finally and involuntary chose to abandon their
occupation of England. They died, thanks to bacteria to which they had no
immunity.)
What if the Afghans will never see those Predators - our equivalent of the
Martian "tripods" and death rays combined - as their protectors? After all, our
drones represent the technologically advanced, the alien, and the death-dealing
along with, as Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis wrote recently, the whole
panoply of our "B-1 heavy bombers, F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, Apache and AC-130
gunships, heavy artillery, tanks, radars, killer drones, cluster bombs, white
phosphorus, rockets, and space surveillance".
Even our propaganda, dropped from the air (as if from another universe), can
kill. Recently, an Afghan girl died after being hit by a box of propaganda
leaflets, released from a British plane, that "failed to come apart". Her heart
and mind may be stilled, but rest assured, those of her parents, her relatives,
and others who knew her, undoubtedly are not.
Here's a little exchange, as reported at a New York Times blog from an alien
"encounter" in another land. A US Army major, Guy Parmeter, had it near Samara
in Iraq's Salahuddin province in 2004 ("[I]t made me think: how are we
perceived, who are we to them?"):
Major Guy Parmeter: "Seen any foreign fighters?"
Iraqi farmer: "Yes, you."
Sometimes it takes 66 pages to report on a war. Sometimes a century old novel
can do the trick. Sometimes you can write tomes about the "mistakes" made in,
and the "tragedy" of, an American counter-insurgency war in a distant land.
Sometimes a simple "yes, you" will do.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch
and the author of The End of Victory Culture. His novel, The
Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.
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