The Helplessness the Americans Feel Is the Helplessness That Pakistani Citizens Felt — As Extremists Attacked Pakistan
By Rafia Zakaria
January 13, 2021
THEY didn’t understand terrorism until it was too late. Ever
since 9/11, and arguably even in the years prior to that, Americans believed
that terrorism was a Muslim problem. Such was this belief that in the post-9/11
years the Department of Homeland Security was created to protect the US from
Islamist militancy. And as everyone in South Asia and the Middle East
experienced, that was hardly all of it.
A trio of white
Christian terrorists that called themselves “The Crusaders” have been convicted
of plotting to bomb a mosque in Kansas.
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In Afghanistan, where the erstwhile 9/11 terrorists had
hidden, a military campaign (still ongoing) killed hundreds of thousands of
civilians. In Iraq, a functioning infrastructure of governance was dismantled,
nearly a million innocent Iraqis were killed and several millions more rendered
refugees. The weight of the cumulative carnage spanned decades and its true
measure is still not known. When it became too costly to send soldiers, the
Americans used drones, killing even young children with their approximate
marksmanship and their penchant for mistaking funerals and wedding parties for
terrorist convoys. At home in the US, every Muslim became a terror suspect, and
mosques were filled with undercover FBI agents trying to find terrorists.
Those days lasted until Jan 6, 2021. Until then, and despite
the rising number of home-grown white supremacist terror attacks, Americans
still soundly believed that terrorism was a Muslim problem, inextricably tied
to something about the faith. If anyone, particularly a Muslim, interjected,
the retort would always be something like, ‘Yes, maybe not all terrorists are
Muslim, but so many are’. It would be the beginning of a circular and pointless
argument, whose only value was how it exposed the extent of American
Islamophobia.
So deep was this denial that on Christmas Day 2020, when a
member of the conspiracy group QAnon parked a camper truck full of explosives
outside a building that housed a good bit of the 5G infrastructure belonging to
the communications giant AT&T, US counterterrorism officials and media
outlets refused to refer to the attack — which reduced two downtown streets in
Nashville, Tennessee, to rubble — as a terrorist attack. “There was no
political motive,” one such terrorism analyst held on CNN. It was a statement
that was misguided at best and a downright lie at worst.
Timothy McVeigh, Osama
Bin Laden (AP/David Longstreath)
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The QAnon conspiracy group believes, in summary, that
Democrats run an undercover paedophilia ring and that Donald Trump is fighting
this ring. All other sorts of nonsense, such as secret signs and clues, are
wrapped up in the mix, and even the president, who has refused to condemn the
group, regurgitated some of its beliefs in a criminal telephone call to the
secretary of state of Georgia a little over a week ago.
Before the election, the planned kidnapping and execution of
the governor of the state of Michigan and the storming of the Michigan State
Capitol were all rationalised away and given none of the seriousness that would
have been allotted to the issue had the assailants been Black Lives Matter
protesters or American Muslims.
On Jan 6, Americans had to confront the fact that terrorism
is not a ‘Muslim’ or even a poverty problem but a tactic that can attach itself
to any ideology. The white nationalists who stormed the US Capitol were people
they knew and never suspected, as demonstrated by the easy access that the
thousands of gathered protesters had to the steps of the Capitol (several
videos even appeared to show police officers assisting the protestors). What
happened next has been seen by people all around the world.
The crowd was in a state of frenzy thanks to the president,
who was the one to tell them to march to the Capitol in the first place.
Trump’s son Don Jr warned lawmakers that “we’re coming after you” if they certified
the election results, and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani declared it was time for
“trial by combat” just that morning. And so the crowd stormed the Capitol.
Lawmakers had to take refuge in ‘safe and undisclosed’
locations, windows were broken, the speaker’s office was vandalised, the Senate
and House chambers were overrun by the rioters who looted and stole and damaged
with abandon, making sure to capture it all in selfies and live-streams on
Facebook and many other platforms. Five people died and scores were injured;
crowds were heard chanting “Hang Mike Pence” in response to his refusal to stop
the certification process of Electoral College votes.
Based on the events, and the precedent set by the US itself,
Canada or Mexico would be well within their rights to attack and take over
their neighbour owing to its poor management of its home-grown terrorists. Like
Pakistan routinely was, the US too can be labelled a ‘safe haven’ for white
supremacist terrorists who can then carry out attacks in the wider world, given
that they can gather, plot and roam free in the US, which does not keep track
of its home-grown terrorists.
There is nothing good about an incident that takes innocent
lives and causes such damage to people and property, but perhaps Americans who
are watching in disbelief can use this time to consider the position of
Pakistanis who watched their own country slip into chaos and carnage for the
entire duration of America’s so-called war on terror. The helplessness they
feel is the helplessness that Pakistanis felt — wanting to do something but not
knowing what to do, also knowing that the intoxications of extremist ideology
are such that those who have been affected by them cannot be converted to
reason and rationality so easily.
The challenge before the US has only just begun; its failure
to evaluate the dangers of the snake pit within means too many snakes are lying
in wait for their moment to attack the machinery of the state. The rioters were
not able to stop the certification process; Twitter kicked Trump off its
platform and Amazon webhosting has denied platforms to right-wing talk shows.
Even with this, the fight has only just begun.
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Rafia Zakaria is an attorney teaching constitutional law
and political philosophy.
Original Headline: Safe haven’ for white terrorists?
Source: The
Dawn, Pakistan
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