Place and Politics

It was striking how a number of commentators, in discussions that preceded the war, regularly failed to connect the predicament of women in Afghanistan with the massive military and economic support that the US provided, as part of its Cold War strategy, to the most extreme of Afghan religious militant groups (Hirschkind and Mahmood: 340-341).

Yay! Anthropologists! And some very good anthropologists too, I might add. I enjoyed the Hirschkind and Mahmood article for a number of reasons, the first being that it makes the American agenda in Afghanistan explicit and marks the way that the discourse being circulated in popular media completely ignores the role that American foreign-policy has played in creating "terrorism" and "fundamentalism". This article allows us to begin to understand "terror" as the end product of something other than an ideological incompatibility between the "Muslim world" and "the West"; we begin to see the events of September 11th (or the subway bombings in London, or the train massacres in Spain) as a particular genre of response to the (often dehumanizing) pervasiveness of global capital, made meaningful by the powerful symbols enacted on all sides.

This is the thing that is often ignored. Sure there are training camps for wannabe militants, but its not like Osama Bin Laden meets with all the various global terrorists and gives them direct orders. The destruction of the Twin Towers created an image and style of violence that set a precedent. This kind of violence had been enacted before, but it was largely directed at embassies, and so thought of as a political statement. The great civilian death and immense media coverage of Sept. 11th - perhaps counter-intuitively - depoliticized the violence. The way that the event was handled left most Americans feeling like they had been attacked by madmen, and the only way that that madness could be explained was to pin it to Islam. A political statement couched in a religious idiom was misinterpreted as a religious insanity with little or no political pretensions. 

In simpler times it was easy to find your enemy... you simply pointed across an ocean and talked about the Japanese, the Germans, the Viet Cong, the Russians... enemies were once nation-states, and the violence enacted by nation-states is in some way legitimated by their codification in terms of "war". War operates by rules, it has clear objectives, and it has clear opponents; but to call the American initiative to protect it's citizenry from global insurgency a "War on Terror" is wishful thinking at best, and a calculating way to manipulate popular sentiment at worst. There is no opponent in this war; he is a ghost - a decentralized, non-hierarchical, non-national ghost. Regardless, to focus the hate away from the incompetence of the American government, an opponent was created using images of "traditional" Islam: 

What gives Islamic fundamentalism such explanatory power? To begin, note the variety of ideas, images, and fears that Islamic fundamentalism evokes in the American imagination: women wearing headscarves (now, burqas), the cutting off of hands and heads, massive crowds praying in unison, the imposition of a normative public morality grounded in a puritanical and legalistic interpretation of religious texts, a rejection and hatred of the West and its globalized culture, the desire to put aside history and return to a pristine past, and the quick recourse to violence against those who are different. In other words, the notion of fundamentalism collapses a rather heterogeneous collection of images and descriptions, linking them together as aspects of a singular socio-religious formation (Hirschkind and Mahmood: 348).

 In any event, this all relates to the Silk Road in some interesting ways. It shows that America (and Canada, and Russia, and certainly Great Britain) is part of the Silk Road just as much as Sogdiana or Tang China. Central Asia has been an important geopolitical context for thousands of years, where the big players have tried to control the movement and behaviour of people over huge tracts of land. Nothing has changed. Right now we're bombing mosques and shooting rebels to keep our busy little fingers in Central Asia permanently.