Afghanistan's effect: A new bipolar world?

Aboeprijadi Santoso, Radio Netherlands, Amsterdam

The horrific acts of terror in America on Sept. 11 have given a new dimension to Samuel Huntington's 1993 thesis, Clash of Civilizations. In the context of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, though, this kind of bipolar paradigm is not politically encouraging, so that we had better bury it.

Eight years ago, Huntington raised the prospective confrontation between the West and Islam, which provided a model to comprehend the increasingly diffuse and unpredictable post- Cold War era.

Yet, what we have seen since the demise of the Soviet Union, in addition to the expanding role of the U.S. as the remaining superpower, are ethno-religious conflicts, regional wars and ongoing massacres. They came as a threat to the simultaneous but diametric trend throughout the nineties of openness and democratization.

Although successive U.S. administrations claimed to advocate good governance principles and growing democracy, their global interests dictated quite different priorities.

Many analysts have pointed out the consequences for the U.S.- backed corrupt Arab-Muslim regimes, which suppressed local democratic potentials. A French study of Algeria has concluded that, as the mosque was the only public tribune left for dissenting voices, the discourses tended to focus on issues affecting religious values and the opposition was dominated by the "fundamentalists", i.e. the "militant Muslim" groups.

This crucial role of the mosque has also been noted when Soeharto's generals crushed Muslim opposition in Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta, in 1984. But what happened in Algeria was much worse as its generals hijacked votes the fundamentalists' were poised to win, and were trapped in years of civil war.

Elsewhere, the fate of Arab opposition groups may be less tragic, but with the enduring conflict in Palestine and the sufferings of Iraqi children as a consequence of the U.S.-led Allied bombings and UN sanctions, resentment toward America grew. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda is part of this process.

The West, however, ignored these consequences and saw them as failures of the Arab-Muslim world to respond to the new era. When the Berlin Wall went down in 1989, the U.S. soon became preoccupied with Europe in building what George Bush Sr. later called the "New World Order".

While Saddam's Iraq, Milosevic's adventures, the Somalia debacle and the Kosovo war ultimately frustrated that dream, Afghanistan was left at the mercy of the warring lords. It was not until Sept. 11 that the U.S. suddenly redirected its focus to the region.

The atrocities in New York and Washington are thus decisive -- a truly defining moment. Aggression on its own soil -- the first since 1812 -- has shocked America and the world. Its impact is profound and should be appreciated with deep sympathy.

However, the event also drove the U.S. into dictating all nations of the world to take position on its terms. Europe, for one, proclaimed almost blind solidarity with America.

As the U.S. president decided that the world had to choose to be "either with us, or against us", the British prime minister underpinned it by proclaiming a "New World Order", and the German parliament declared "Wir sind Amerikanen" (We are all Americans).

The impacts were great, as various figures, from an Italian prime minister to a Dutch columnist and men on the street, publicly expressed Islam-phobia.

Yet there had never been such outcry among the Western states earlier, despite worse atrocities. None of them had raised their voices in the 1970s when U.S. President Johnson's carpet bombings drove hundreds of thousands of Cambodians into the camp of the Khmer Rouge, triggering the rise of Pol Pot's murderous regime.

Neither had there been serious protests when the Indonesian army, with Western (armed) support, was involved in massacres in the 1960s and launched dirty wars in East Timor and Aceh.

No one sung "We are all Cambodians (or Timorese)" when these nations were reduced to "Year Zero" in the 1970s. Indeed, Western democracies had always been fully supportive of both the Khmer Rouge and Soeharto's New Order.

In other words, as the superpower now rides on a high moral ground and treats global terrorism as a pretext for war, it could simply divide the world into two camps, thus creating a bipolar world, by ignoring the complexities of the problem and its own role in atrocities elsewhere.

Huntington's Clash of Civilizations assumes Islam too much as a monolith. Academic critic Edward Said, who calls it "clash of ignorance", writes that it ignores complex Western and Arab- Muslim historic civilizational elements that make up the modern world.

Huntington, he said, wanted "to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular".

To be fair, Huntington himself did not see Sept. 11 as a clash between the West and Islam yet, "but there is a real danger that it could move in that direction". He claimed he has advised the U.S. government to prevent it from happening.

But the unintended consequences of his "Clash" may have strongly reinforced public perception of a new bipolar world.

Many in Europe, with its tens of millions of Muslim migrants, fear a communal clash and tend to think in terms of "we" and "them", whereas religious fanatics are by definition caught in such bipolar categories.

Bin Laden, for example, has appeared as a clever politician, speaking to the non-Muslim world on TV worldwide acting, he claimed, on behalf of Islam and raising issues he never talked about before.

If the myth of bipolar politics can be established by terror and hijacking a religion, extremists could manipulate a simplistic but popular ideology -- a medieval interpretation of a religion -- for their own political ends with possibly far reaching consequences.

Similarly, increasing tensions, even a flare-up, could be expected if the superpower strengthens the bipolar pattern by raising the stakes. Both are self-fulfilling prophecies to create a new Cold War that would only be welcomed by extremists on both sides.

Western politicians should learn from the failure of the post- Cold War triumphalism, for, by replacing it instead with (for want of a better term) "a dictating superpowerism", they in effect are playing the same bipolar game -- the very game bin Laden wants them to play -- despite their leaders' repeated honest statements that the war against terror is not a war against any religion.

It's time for enlightened Muslim leaders to speak up before there are more clashes within Islamic communities. But, first, it's time to bury Huntington's "clash" as a political (sic!) paradigm and, with it, the myth and madness of bipolarism -- be it manifested in a war against another country, a "religious" call from a Kandahar cave, or extremist actions in the streets of Jakarta.