AFGHANISTAN: No Lessons Learned

In August 1998, two weeks after a little-known terror outfit called al-Qaida announced itself to the world with bomb attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the US president, Bill Clinton, retaliated with missile strikes against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. 

Central Khartoum was rocked in the middle of the night by the impact of a dozen Tomahawk missiles, which destroyed the plant, killing a night watchman and wounding 11 others. 

The US claimed that the factory – which was the largest provider of medicines in a country under sanctions – was secretly producing nerve agents on behalf of al-Qaida, but it didn’t take long for American officials to admit that the “evidence … was not as solid as first portrayed”.

The attack, in other words, was simply an act of retaliation against a random target, without any connection to the crime purportedly being avenged. 

I was a university student in Khartoum at the time. I can remember the confusion the day after the explosions, then visiting the shattered site of the factory with other students. 

What was suddenly clear to us then, standing in front of the ruins in a sleepy city that had supposedly become the centre of Islamic terrorism overnight, was the real logic of the “war on terror”: our lives were fodder for the production of bold headlines in American newspapers, saluting the strength, swift action and resolve of western leaders. 

We, on the sharp end of it all, would never be the protagonists. Those were the policy and opinion makers far, far away, for whom our experience was merely the resolution of an argument about themselves. The operation was chillingly, but appropriately, called Infinite Reach.  READ MORE