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| Sunday, 17 August 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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NATO's giant step backward : Global stability vs super-colonialism Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA The White Sahibs seem to be back again in Asia. And it is barely a decade after they had abandoned their last colonial bastion in Hong Kong. The take-over of the military domination of Afghanistan by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) indicates a certain presumed permanency of the Western occupation of Afghanistan. While in terms of actual territorial control, it is only the capital of Kabul and its surrounding region that is under Western occupation, the entirety of Afghanistan does come under a certain politico-military domination by the Western forces due to their sheer military supremacy as well as their semi-legitimacy as the 'protectors' of the Kabul regime and as aid 'donors' for Afghanistan's 'post-war' recovery. The significance, for Afghanistan, of the arrival of NATO in that country is that while previously the Western occupation of Afghanistan was merely an ad hoc or spontaneous conglomeration of the military forces of just a few Western countries led by the United States of America (very much in the old colonial tradition), the take-over by North Atlantic Treaty forces implies a certain further legitimisation as well as a multi-lateral institutionalisation of the Western occupation. NATO is a well-established, highly institutionalised organisation encompassing much of Europe as well as Iceland, the US and Canada. Following the collapse of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance, NATO is the only really integrated multi-national military force in the world, even if any others are formed elsewhere, NATO is likely to easily remain the most powerful such alliance for a long time to come. In fact, if things go smoothly, NATO will, by next year, have its own multi-national, 'Rapid Reaction Force' of an estimated 21,000 troops (backed, of course, by massive air and naval logistical power). This Force is intended to do just what NATO is doing now in Afghanistan: intervene militarily in any part of the world. But even before such a force has come into being, NATO has, for the first time already formally intervened - in Afghanistan. Just as much as NATO is the core of the combined military capability of the Western capitalist powers, NATO's arrival in Afghanistan implies a significant upgrading of the West's direct intervention in other parts of the world after the end of the colonial era. This is the first implication for Afghanistan of NATO's intervention there. That is, the military occupation of that country has become more institutionalised and consolidated. It must be remembered that except for Iran all other states neighbouring Afghanistan now have US military bases set up primarily to ensure the sustenance of the Western military presence in that country. Of course, these bases also ensure a permanency for the Western presence in the whole of Central Asia as well - for the first time in world history. The second implication for Afghanistan is that with the taking over of the military occupation by a multi-lateral organisation, the occupation itself has become more legitimised in the eyes of the world; or at least in the perception of the populations of the Western powers and their subservient or allied societies elsewhere. The occupation is no longer the ad hoc action of individual nation-states who can be more easily accused or suspected of imperial ambitions or, at the very least, crude revenge for attacks on their territory (i.e. the guerrilla strikes on New York and Washington). NATO implies a more measured, multi-national and 'democratic' decision that endorses the Afghan occupation as 'just' and the interests of 'democracy.' The NATO intervention in Afghanistan has implications for the world as a whole as well. In the first place, all other multi-national military alliances that could be construed as catering to the strategic global interests of the Western powers are those that are not exclusively or even largely based on purely western military capability. Whether it is CENTCOM (that groups the US with Turkey and Pakistan, and previously Iran under the Shah dictatorship), or the ASEAN-based military pact (which, deriving from the old SEATO, is also US-led) or ANZUS (the US link up with Australia and New Zealand), or the new 'security' treaties with the Central Asian republics, or the US' bilateral military alliances with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Israel, the functioning of all these alliances depend on the concurrence of extra-regional partners who do not necessarily have the same degree of congruence of geo-strategic and political-economic interests that NATO has. For example, even the old ANZUS alliance has long been under some strain because of New Zealand's one-time refusal to provide port facilities to US navy vessels carrying nuclear weapons, while Australia's strategic perceptions of politics in ASEAN, especially Indonesia, are significantly different from that of the US. CENTCOM was earlier weakened with the collapse of the Shah dictatorship and has been further weakened by Turkey's recent refusal to allow US invasion forces through its territory into Iraq. Likewise, the politics of a South Korea no longer under military dictatorship has been significantly different in its attitude toward North Korea from that of Washington, especially the hard right-wing Washington of today. Similarly, any new military co-operation with regional power, India, is also a necessarily limited one given Washington's logical preference for Pakistan in view of the State Department's (correct, in my view) perception that, in the long-term, India is too independent a power to want to really come under US influence. Of course, elements in the current BJP government in Delhi continue to have fond hopes of India supplanting Pakistan as the US' 'friend', and Washington will continue to take advantage of these 'hopes'. From a global geo-strategic perspective, all these other military pacts are ones in which the most powerful partner, the US, is extra-regional, that is, external to the region which is the focus of the respective pact. From a Western point of view this would render these pacts as inherently unreliable in terms of meeting exclusively Western strategic interests (whether economic or political). But from a global multi-lateral perspective, at least there is a strategic balance in that states within the respective region of each pact also have a say in the operation of the pact. And decisions have not always gone simply in the direction that the extra-regional power has wanted as indicated above in the examples of CENTCOM and ANZUS. Thus, in terms of a genuinely global multi-lateralism, NATO is unique in that it is the sole (and most powerful) military alliance that is exclusively regional in its focus. NATO, in fact constitutes the sole regional military power bloc. It is a 'power bloc' in that it is independent of any extra-regional or other external influence or control, whatsoever, whether major or minor. Most significant, in terms of global stability and security, however, is the fact that NATO is also, by far, the most powerful joint military force in the world, and it is the one that belongs to the bloc of country's whose economies dominate the world and depend on that continued domination for their continued affluence. When history also tells us that this alliance is led by an inner core of countries that were the former colonial powers whose imperial depredations originated the iniquitous global economic system of today, the mix of history, geography, politics and economics is too potent for anyone to ignore the ramifications of the unilateral behaviour of such an entity as NATO on the world stage. After decades of operation seemingly as the counter-point to that other erstwhile 'power bloc', the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, the US-led NATO emerged the 'victor' in that so-called 'cold war' between the two super-powers. The Warsaw Pact was, similar to NATO, an exclusively regional power bloc that was not dependent on any extra-regional partners and could exclusively focus on its purely regional interests and the projection of these interests globally. In terms of global geo-politics, what the collapse of the Warsaw Pact meant was that, NATO, the most powerful politico-economic grouping of nations with the most powerful integrated military alliance, then emerged as the sole regional 'power bloc' which has not only the ability of projecting its interests globally but whose individual states were already busy doing so. NATO has now taken the giant backward step of its first extra-regional major intervention. The desirability or undesirability of this NATO action is decided by one's perspective of the requisites for stability and peace in a globalised world. One either falls back on old concepts of imperial interventions as in the past in different parts of the world, or, one adopts the new ideas of the newly globalised world that has been, inspired by concepts of democracy and the new capacities for the establishment of such democracy: the idea of globally multi-lateral world order that relies on stability on the basis not of domination but of shared power, not of limited sovereignty but of shared sovereignty. The old pre-global order saw the actions of imperial powers in various parts of the world that sometimes helped stabilise parts of the world (usually small, even tiny, parts): e.g. the 'Pax Romana', the Dharmasoka's Maurya empire and China's larger stability under the Ming dynasty. But all of these empires ultimately had their geographical and temporal limits and virtually all their ruling elites acknowledged those limits. Even China's self-conception of the 'Middle Kingdom' did philosophically acknowledge the contours (limits) of that cosmological 'kingdom.' The first form of imperialism to even hint at an imperial endeavour without limits was the European colonial venture. Even the European colonial powers, however, described the global nature of their imperial ambition only in terms of 'spreading' or propagating Christianity and Christian 'civilisation.' Given some of the recent philosophising by Western thinkers who seemingly dominate mainstream thought, the new global configuration of the world is one that involves Western supremacy without limits. The presumptions of 'victory' in the Cold War saw new presumptions of a new eternity: that of Western civilisation in all its aspects, beginning with the political-economic, of course. Thus capitalism and democracy are the ultimate solution to human needs and Western civilisation will bring these two systems to all of humanity. It is a conception of empire without limits. NATO's first major extra-regional intervention in Afghanistan, then, sets the stage for a kind of 'super-colonialism' or 'super-imperialism' unprecedented in human history. One dreads to think of what fantasies are being born in the corridors of Washington with the US' so-called experiment of 'building democracy' in Western-occupied Iraq. I wonder whether Lebanon is next on line. It has been a Western-originated theory of modern democracy that has inspired many ideas and structures for a global multi-lateral order. The current geo-politics emanating from the centres of Western power, however, are seemingly going against the current. Unilateral power projections, whether by individual states or by regional groupings, is simply not the way forward for any civilisation whether Western or a genuinely global one. |
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