The Turkish air force has now shot down a Russian warplane. Whose fault this may be is not the question. What is more to the point is whether this incident will result in a further widening of the extremely messy war going on in and around Syria.
This particular war already involves Turkey and Russia (but not yet against one another), the US and the recently wounded France (both sounding extremely belligerent), the Assad regime in Syria against the ‘democratic’ rebels, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Iraq and the UK, the al Qaeda terrorist franchise and the sinister entity known as Daesh or Islamic State (IS). Alongside, and still continuing with no end in sight, is the series of conflictscentring around the usurped rights of the Palestinians, and the still to be concluded civil wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas. None of these show any sign of coming to an end any time soon; no, not even the war in FATA despite the valiant (and overdue) campaigns undertaken by our armed forces.
My piece today is not about this or that particular war. It is about modern warfare itself. The first and most important point I wish to make is this: wars do not end. If the victories of one side over another do occur, these victories themselves become the seeds of further conflicts down the road.Consider. In the country once called Annam, thereafter French Indo-China, and now Vietnam, the Japanese were fought, defeated and driven out in the 1940s and the French in the 1950s. Then, the US entered the war, plastering Vietnam with the “rolling thunder” carpet-bombings that showered down on the citizens of that small countrydoubled the total explosive tonnage used in all the previous wars in human history. But, thanks in part to consistent Soviet assistance, April 1975 saw the US defeated and scuttling in disarray from Saigon. As a distasteful post-script, China also invaded Vietnam in 1978,and was repulsed in turn.
But things did not end there. The US was determined to salve its humiliation by punishing the USSR for having backed Vietnam. In Afghanistan, the social radicalism of the Parcham-Khalq revolutionary regime brought it into conflict with the Afghan clerics, tribal chieftains and landowners. By October 1978, resistance to the Saur Revolution’s reforms had become open revolt.
The unconstitutional Pakistani usurper,ZiaulHaq, sought to exploit his self-proclaimed ‘Islamisation’ project as a pretext for clinging onto power and for hanging, flogging, lashing and imprisoning Pakistani citizens. The mujahideen’s raids into Afghanistan, in support of the revolt there, offered Zia the opportunity to use these anti-communist Islamist guerrillas to gain acceptance for his repulsive regime with the US and other governments, as well as for securing large inflows of military and other aid. US National Security Advisor Brzezinski saw the opportunity to prepare his ‘bear trap’.
We know from the published memoirs of the former CIA director and later US defence secretary, Robert Gates, that the CIA armed and trained the mujahideen under President Carter’s executive order of July 3, authorising CIA covert operations and funding for the mujahideen. This was nearly six months before December 24, 1979, when the Soviet army actually entered Afghanistan.Brzezinski would later recall, “That secret operation had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap. The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: we now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.”
The Soviet army was fought to a standstill. The USSR itself collapsed and disintegrated a couple of years afterwards.
In Afghanistan, the war morphed into armed conflict between various militias. Eventually victorious, the Taliban militia permitted headquarters to be created for the al Qaeda multinational enterprise’s terror campaigns against the US. With the US actively brought into the theatre, the war in Afghanistan took yet another form. It spilled across the border into Pakistan. It was also carried into Iraq, thereby unleashing the deadly forces that are at play today in the Syrian theatre and elsewhere in the world.
And so it goes on: unending warfare, insurgency, terrorism, anarchy, state failure, enormous refugee displacements, human misery and millions of lost lives.Does the reader note this continuum between the Japanese occupation of Indo-China in 1940 and what is happening in our country, in Afghanistan and in Syria today? Wars do not end. They perpetuate themselves and spread in a kind of domino effect around the globe. In his book, The Shield of Achilles,the historian Philip Bobbitt in fact suggests that the epochal war of our times began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in August 1914, itself an offshoot of the earlier conflicts in the Balkans.The Great War in Europe that ensued ended in an unjust peace, as a result of which the Second World War became inevitable. The Second World War ended in the nuclear bombing of Japan and ushered in the Cold War between the US and USSR. The Cold War was itself a series of hot wars in various theatres, including prominently the Middle East and Vietnam.
And these, as we have seen, have fed into the unending war that is going on today.Consider the consequences of modern warfare; the nations, economies, roads, factories, homes and lives destroyed. Consider the ranks of the jobless, the homeless and the destitute. Again and again, writers and commentators have decried the senseless destruction caused by warfare. Wars do not, as we have seen, either achieve their objectives or, in most cases, even come to an end. Therefore, this is the next observation: warfare is irrational, causing completely gratuitous destruction. And this is without even considering the extraordinary horrors of nuclear war.
My final point is that modern armies and weaponry are extremely expensive, requiring huge chunks of a nation’s GDP to sustain them. Even the mighty USSR crumbled, unable to support its superpower military appetite. Thus, modern warfare is clearly an economically senseless enterprise. If a nation must destroy its people’s livelihoods and homes in order to defend them, what exactly is it supposed to be defending?
In one person’s adult life, I have seen both superpowers embark on vast military projects only to be bogged down, demoralised and humiliated. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, surely, these examples are sufficient for even a child to appreciate the fatuity of modern warfare. Paradoxically, warfare — at least as we know it — isan unsound way of combating an enemy.For the moment, let us understand that the mature nations of the world — Japan, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, among several other examples, and, increasingly, China as well — emphasise commercial relationships over territorial issues and peaceful handshakes over military pugnacity.
It isall in the mindset.So long as we continue to regard killing other human beings for political or territorial objectives as heroic, for so long will this kind of endless war continue and people continue to endlessly perish. And for so long will the world’s armaments’ industries continue to reap endless profits.
The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet