Jonny Steinberg
10 October 2001
editorial
The problem the US faces is not that it armed foreign combatants, but that it did it for the wrong reasons
SHOULD a US aircraft fly less than 3000m 10000 feet above Taliban-controlled territory during the current military campaign, there is a chance it will be shot down by a nasty little weapon called the Stinger. The Stinger is 1,5m five feet , long, weighs about 15kg and is fitted with a heat-seeking sensor that homes in on its target's engine. And, like apple pie, it was made in America.
In the mid- and late 1980s, during the final years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the US dished out about 1000 a thousand Stingers to the anti-Soviet mujahideen. They appear to have done the job; the Soviets lost air superiority, and, ultimately, the war itself.
Who has the Stingers now? If US journalist Ken Silverstein is to be believed, the real question to ask is: who does not? have the Stingers now?
"Even before the Soviet departure," Silverstein writes in Slate Magazine, "the Stingers began dispersing to all corners of the earth. In the late 1980s, Iranian Revolutionary Guards ambushed a mujahideen military caravan and made off with several dozen missiles."
Pakistani intelligence got hold of a few and sold one to China, which had its engineers copy it and produce replicas. Stingers also ended up in the arsenals of rebel groups in Tajikistan, Chechnya and Algeria.
"Stingers inevitably turned up for sale on the international black market," Silverstein writes. "In 1990, two Colombian drug dealers were arrested in Tampa, after attempting to arrange the purchase of Stingers for the Medellin cartel." In an effort to curb the damage, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) decided, in the early 1990s, to buy back its errant missiles at inflated prices.
"The CIA offered so much for the Stingers," Silverstein writes, "the ... most immediate effect was to drive up (their) price of Stingers on the black market. They were offering so much Sellers could take the money and buy themselves cheaper anti-aircraft missiles and other weapons."
Does this satire have a moral? to teach? For US isolationists on both right and left, the moral is simple: do not go dishing out weapons. The left's isolationists are saying "I told you so". Behave like an imperialist, they say, try to run the entire planet by remote control, and you create monsters who will come back to bite you. Try to remember that your way of life is parochial, not universal. Do not try to impose it on unwilling recipients.
The isolationists on the right tell a different story, but with the same arms policy implications. Some parts of the world, they argue, are so mired in malevolence they are beyond repair. Do not give them aid, for they will waste it. Do not give them succour, for they will abuse it. And above all, do not give them weapons for they will turn them against you.
Both arguments are wrong. Think back, for instance, to Rwanda, 1994. The Interahamwe was bludgeoning thousands of people to death. The exiled army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was massed on Uganda's border, set to invade to save its compatriots.
Let us fiddle with history a little. Let us say that the RPF was poorly armed and that the French army was not fighting on the side of the genocidal regime. Let us imagine that the international community's decision was whether or not to arm the RPF.
To say that an anti-genocidal army should not be armed because it is wrong to impose one's values on others is perverse. And to refuse to arm them on the grounds that the great lakes region is an intractable mess anyway, so that injecting it with weapons will lead to nothing but trouble, is equally perverse.
There are times when defending basic human values requires arming people.
So the Stinger tale should not be read as a caution against arming foreigners. It is a caution against the particular way the US has armed foreigners since the onset of the Cold War.
This is a sorry story we in Africa know well. US policy here was in essence a desperate search for stooges. The superpower fed its puppets, not just arms, but billions of dollars in "aid" with which to bloat their bureaucracies, buy off their urban middle-classes and wreck their economies. When the Cold War ended, the US pulled the plug, leaving the states it had helped ruin to implode. upon themselves.
Hence, the scattering of US and Soviet arms to bandits, terrorists and warlords as nations descended into a state of nature.
US involvement in Afghanistan tells a similar story, albeit less acutely. During the 1980s, the US poured $3bn worth of aid into Afghanistan. By the end of 1994, that figure had dropped close to zero.
Having armed the mujahideen, the US abandoned a fractured, unstable and wartraumatised country to its own devices.
The moral of the Stinger story is the only reason to arm foreigners is to fight barbarism and end gratuitous suffering. The flip side is arms should only be part of the intervention; the rest is about helping those you armed to build peace and stability after the war.
Some may dismiss this argument as a case of dreamy naivety. If politics in general is a cynical vocation, international politics is the apotheosis of cynicism. Global engagement is always about promoting national interests, and this promoting national interests entails pragmatism.
There is clearly an element of truth in this riposte. In assembling a coalition against AlQaeda and the Taliban, the US has decided to overlook, among other things, Russian atrocities in Chechnya and sponsoring of terrorism by the Saudi state. Fighting one evil has meant turning a blind eye to others.
Yet the point still stands. Developing a robust international consensus about when it is necessary for a state to arm citizens of another nation, and how it should be done, is part of building a moral hegemony. States will inevitably transgress the terms of the consensus, but the world will know that they have crossed a sacred line.
That means errant states will have to defend themselves within the rules of a universal moral discourse. Should they lose that battle of ideas, the price is isolation and scorn. That is just the sort of scorn the world needs, and it has been in horribly short supply.
Steinberg is a Senior Writer at Business Day.
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