It has been almost fourteen years since the September 11th attacks—longer than the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, longer than America’s war in Vietnam. The fallout has been an improbable and wrong-footed business from the start, unfolding in a series of improvisations and flukes, with actions or reactions that often seemed not just incommensurate with their consequences but utterly disconnected: nineteen hijackers commandeer four commercial airplanes; the United States drives the Taliban from Afghanistan; Osama bin Laden escapes to Pakistan; the Bush Administration invents a secret legal apparatus; the Taliban return; the U.S. invades Iraq, occupies it for eight years, then leaves; bin Laden is hunted down and killed while under the protection of a putative American ally; Arab states disintegrate; an obscure jihadist from Baghdad declares the restoration of the caliphate; the U.S. returns to Iraq. As narrative, the war on terror has been like the nouveau roman, with no coherent plot, only jarring disjunctions of cause and effect, time and place.
“This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others,” President George W. Bush said at a prayer service at the National Cathedral, three days after the attacks. “It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.” But the conflict didn’t yield to anyone’s mastery. Bush never wanted it to end, and his successor couldn’t find the way or the hour. Twelve years later, speaking at the National Defense University, President Obama proposed a rhetorical exit: “We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ but, rather, as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists.” But narrowing the focus from tactics to groups didn’t have the desired effect. Guantánamo remains open, drone strikes have increased, mass-casualty suicide bombings are routine in half a dozen countries, the fighting in Iraq and Syria has brutally escalated, videotaped beheadings are normal. Much as we want it to be over, the era won’t end.
John Sifton, a former researcher with Human Rights Watch, found the whole thing preposterous from the start. “It was difficult to believe it was all happening,” he writes in “Violence All Around” (Harvard). “This is not a real war, I thought. It is a big misunderstanding. Al-Qaeda—what I knew of it then, and what it emerged to be—a couple of hundred men. Something about the battle, about al-Qaeda’s naïve resentments and America’s naïve responses, seemed unhinged. There was no profundity in it, the affairs of the day seemed puerile, an agenda set by children—very dangerous children for sure, but children all the same.” The usual tone of human-rights advocacy is outrage, with little modulation regardless of the nature of the abuse. Sifton’s version is closer to disdain, but just as often he finds himself in a disturbing state of detachment. He feels detached wandering through the dust and ash of lower Manhattan on the day of the attacks; a few weeks later, in Kandahar, staring at the bombed-out compounds of Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda, he feels the same way.
Sifton is the grandson of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the son of a federal judge and a writer and editor of books. Inclination leads him to history, philosophy, and literature, not polemic. His job often took him to Afghanistan and had him digging into cases of aerial bombardment, drone strikes, rendition, and torture, but you get the feeling that he would rather have been digging up an Indo-European archeological site. Pondering the events of September 11th makes him think about Frederick Seidel’s “December,” a masterly, sinister poem written from the point of view of a terrorist. After nearly being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman, Sifton indulges in an extended meditation on the role of proximity in violence.
At an extreme, detachment flirts with philosophical pessimism and even cynicism—the sense that everything has always been thus and nothing we do can matter. Sifton is susceptible to it, and the long view can be a drag on the daily motivation of a human-rights worker trying to document abuses: “yet another set of violent episodes on the Asian steppe, villages being attacked in the same manner as they might have been two or three thousand years before.” But detachment is a welcome stance for a book about violence, especially violence in our time. After a decade and a half, we still have no distance from the war on terror—a phrase that made Sifton recoil when President Bush first used it, in the days after September 11th. The era has generated more shallow certitude than lasting insight, with most commentators too intent on justification or condemnation to explore the harder questions that the conflict raises. The instant wisdom that everything changed on 9/11 was later echoed by the assertion that nothing was ever the same after the Central Intelligence Agency waterboarded Abu Zubaydah. Does either claim hold up? How does the violence of recent years fit in the long history of political mayhem?
Sifton’s project at the outset is to see violence objectively, as a human phenomenon. One aspect is its sheer difficulty: killing other people is no easy business, and it’s hardest at close range, when you can look into the other’s face. Even if a killer is untroubled by conscience, the deed itself may put him in a state of physical exhaustion, as if it required a tremendous effort to overcome an instinctive aversion. “People are not wired for unfettered violence,” Sifton writes. For theoretical support he turns to “On Aggression,” by the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who proposed that intraspecies violence, while innate in human beings and animals, is held in check by the impulse to submit or retreat.
Why, then, is there so much killing at close quarters, by machete, knife, or handgun? One answer Sifton proposes is a failure of empathy—or a misdirection of empathy, away from the other and toward one’s own kind, whether ethnic, national, religious, or political. If so, the task of the human-rights worker is not to argue from philosophical principles and international covenants. The way to prevent abuses is to create sympathy in the strong for the weak, and the way to do that is by telling stories—“long, sad, sentimental” ones, in the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty—through which the strong will begin to see the weak as fellow-creatures, worthy of protection and care. Sifton, the author of numerous Human Rights Watch reports, replete with tales of human suffering, acknowledges that, by this standard, his work is mostly a failure. (So, for that matter, is mine.)
But violence flows from more than the absence of empathy. In the worst cases, it’s a positive force, full of hatred, grievance, and a righteous sense of justice. Redirecting empathy in the perpetrators might be no easier than reasoning with them through principles and laws. This is why human-rights work can seem so futile, and why its champions have sometimes felt compelled to turn to violence as the only answer to worse violence. For a time, in the years between the end of the Cold War and the invasion of Iraq, humanitarian concern gave rise to the insight that, without the spectre of mutual annihilation by the superpowers, something vaguely known as “the international community” could stop atrocities and bring justice through the collective use of force. The idea was called humanitarian intervention.
As Sifton relates, there’s a long history behind this thinking. In its modern version, the insight that law and morality depend on violence is at least as old as Hobbes, and so is the argument that “massively destructive weapons could be humanitarian, if they were meant to end a war.” The producers of chemical weapons made that claim in the First World War, and President Truman used it to justify the use of nuclear weapons in the Second. Sifton is at his most subtle, and closest to the tragic realism of his grandfather, in showing that violence is inseparable from justice—that even Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., understood nonviolence not as pure pacifism but as a strategy that depended on the use of violence by others.
In the nineteen-nineties, war became a favored tool of people who cared passionately about human rights. Humanitarian intervention never happened in Rwanda, and it happened very late in Bosnia, but those cases only strengthened the arguments of its advocates. It then had some success in Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. By the turn of the century, humanitarian intervention had become a foreign-policy doctrine. Then came 9/11. Human rights appeared somewhere down the list of the Bush Administration’s reasons for undertaking regime change in Iraq. From a humanitarian perspective, though, the potential overthrow of Saddam Hussein was attractive to many people, including me. At Human Rights Watch, Sifton tells us, there was considerable discussion and disagreement. The group never took a position on the war, and most of its staff members were opposed, but those who worked on Kurdish and Iranian issues pointed out the potential benefits. Sifton, having seen at first hand the instability of post-Taliban Afghanistan, was prescient enough to imagine even worse in Iraq, and he opposed the war. He is also honest enough to acknowledge that the manipulation of human rights as a rationale helped get the U.S. into the mess.
Perhaps as a result, Sifton has a humble idea of his role. He doesn’t chafe at the essential impotence of human-rights work—its inability to do anything to stop the world’s monsters beyond the hope that some quiver of embarrassment might cause one to treat human beings with a little less cruelty. “The alternative seems worrisome: the idea that rights groups might regularly do more,” he admits. “If Human Rights Watch could summon giants easily to do violence against other giants in the name of human rights, we would be soliciting violence every day, from one end of the globe to the other, from Tripoli to Katmandu.”
It’s wisdom, but not the satisfying kind. It offers little comfort to the afflicted. What seemed like clear morality two decades ago has gone completely dark. Intervention in Libya created a failed state, a base for jihadists, and more killing. Non-intervention in Syria allowed for a failed state, a base for jihadists, and massive killing. No one should be sleeping well.
One striking feature of violence in the age of terror is its anonymity. The hijackers couldn’t see the faces of the workers in the Twin Towers. American pilots over Kandahar didn’t know whether children were present in the compound they were about to destroy. The goal of the suicide bomber in the Baghdad market was to kill as many people as possible. The drone operator in Nevada pushed the button based on a video feed of supposedly suspicious activity by passengers in a vehicle. Advances in weapons technology make violence easier by obviating the natural aversion to face-to-face killing, turning war into an automated activity and eliminating the mitigation that comes with our tendency toward submission and retreat. “On the one hand, we have the most intimate form of violence,” Sifton says of drone strikes, “while on the other hand, the least intimate of weapons.” But, judging by the number of drone operators who have been treated for alcoholism, depression, and other outcomes of post-traumatic stress, even this degree of remoteness can’t insulate the perpetrator from the effects of killing. “Modern killers and torturers suffer more than those of the past,” Sifton writes, “because of the larger discordance between our ordinary social lives and our violent activities.”
Sifton devotes a chapter to drones, with a short history of manned and unmanned air strikes. He describes the fallibility of drones (they’re only as good as the intelligence) and their appeal—the secrecy, the lack of physical risk, the low political cost. For American leaders, drones are an irresistible improvement over sending more ground forces to be shot at and blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones can extend targeted violence into countries with which the U.S. is not at war. If you’re making a case that violence changed after September 11th, drones are among your more persuasive exhibits.
Is this Sifton’s argument? “Violence All Around” doesn’t say so at the outset. The prefatory observations (“Violence is interesting. . . . Violence makes things happen. . . . We rarely look directly at it”) are so broad and speculative that Sifton’s canvas seems to be not just the past fourteen years but the whole human story. The best chapters come early in the book, and describe his experiences in Afghanistan before and after the fall of the Taliban. They move easily between travelogue and historical analogy, personal experience and philosophical meditation, discursion and sharp statement. Sifton is a fine essayist—he wears his reading, his war stories, and his moral indignation lightly. The pessimistic long view keeps threatening to take over, as on a hot afternoon in the much conquered Afghan city of Balkh, now a dusty outpost of neglect: “The sheer ancientness of the place struck me. The teahouse door slammed behind us after we left, causing pigeons in the square to take flight and scatter across the sky. The mountains lay in the distance, indifferent to the passing of time. The echo of the door slamming evoked pointlessness, a line of poetry: ‘all had been done, and long ago, that needed doing.’ ” I like the lack of urgency in passages like this. They defy the mood of most writing about the war on terror, as if to say, “Yes, things changed—they always do, but never as much as we think at first.”
Gradually, Sifton the essayist is eased aside by Sifton the human-rights worker. From drones he turns to torture, rendition, the dubious terminology of the military, the sheer quantity of official bullshit. These chapters cover ground that’s been exhaustively plowed by others. Sifton ascribes much of the era’s confusion and abuse to Bush’s folly of declaring war on a type of violence. The war on terror was both literal and metaphorical, mashing up words, ideas, and deeds, until “nothing was hard and fast, everything was up for grabs.”
This is why Sifton concludes that violence in our era is different: what’s changed is not the scale, not the type, but the idea of it. The war on terror turned a crime into a war. It risked eroding the institutions put in place after the catastrophe of the Second World War, thereby making it easier for those horrors to happen again. “The U.S. government, in responding to the September 11 attacks, was trying to change the very narrative of what violence was,” Sifton writes, using the kind of cliché he ordinarily avoids. “After the September 11 attacks, there was no solemn border anymore between the killings of war and the killings of terrorism and counterterrorism. Correspondingly, a blurring had occurred in the distinction between civilians and combatants. The idea of a war on terrorism had broken down the whole system. Killers, jailers, and victims had all been mixed up together into a new world of brutality, with no end in sight.”
The passage is as blurry with conflations and elisions as its subject. Sifton seems to be saying that the September 11th attackers used terror to try to start a war, the U.S. obliged them, and in these origins the idea of innocents ended, along with all the laws of war that protect them. But civilians have been the primary victims of war for a century. Terrorism and counterterrorism were integral elements of the French-Algerian war and other modern conflicts. The laws of war hardly ever matter to the combatants. What September 11th changed wasn’t the “narrative” of violence but the categories of war: for the first time, a great power went to war with a stateless, borderless group. Global jihadism was something new, and the U.S., faced with a hard strategic question, stepped into Al Qaeda’s trap. But in the course of Sifton’s paragraph the terrorists vanish. It’s the Americans who broke everything apart.
The same thing happens with the book. It begins with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of violence, then slowly zeroes in on the C.I.A.’s torture, rendition, and drone programs. Al Qaeda pretty much disappears. The Taliban blur into the general Afghan population caught in the sights of a Predator drone. The Islamic State barely rates a mention. These are strange omissions, particularly the last, since the extreme violence of ISIS fits perfectly with one of Sifton’s themes—the theatricality of war—while challenging another, the idea that contemporary violence is inflicted at increasingly greater distances in order to make killing easier. Nothing is more intimate than beheading, and the images, spread through social media, give the most remote spectators the sense of being close to the most horrifying violence imaginable. For ISIS, secrecy and automation are not the point of killing. Its violence is personal, overtly cruel, and limitless, in a way that’s both ancient and completely contemporary. These are the very qualities that attract legions of recruits who want to cleanse the world and rebuild it on a mountain of corpses.
Sifton is fascinated by words and ideas, but not by those of Islamists. It’s as if they didn’t belong to the same world as we do. When he writes that “the idea of a war on terrorism had broken down the whole system,” he doesn’t credit the terrorists with figuring out how to do it first. Jean-Pierre Filiu, a leading French scholar of the Arab world, recently told me, “ISIS, and Al Qaeda before, is far more modern and adapted to this world than we are as institutions, and even in our way of reacting. They are totally the product of our modernity, which is something that we are afraid to accept. We are looking for a failure story, while from their point of view it is a success story.”
None of this seems to interest Sifton much. Perhaps the book’s autobiographical through line kept his writing close to his work with Human Rights Watch. But he was the organization’s senior researcher on terrorism as well as on counterterrorism. Judging from the emphasis in “Violence All Around,” he dedicated most of his effort to the American side of the conflict. The pragmatist in him feels compelled to justify this decision. In quantitative terms, the focus of his work was small: he acknowledges that the number of detainees in C.I.A. prisons was around a hundred. From the same realistic viewpoint, he questions the relevance of the legal issues: to a Pakistani family, it didn’t matter whether the Hellfire missile that killed their children was fired by a military aircraft or a C.I.A. drone. “In deciding core issues of human rights abuse,” Sifton writes, “the main focus is on the effects of the violence and the identities of the victims, not the identity of the perpetrators or the type of weapon used.”
By this standard, the war on terror has been far less of an American disaster for human rights than the Vietnam War or the Second World War. No U.S. atrocity in Iraq came close to the wholesale slaughter of My Lai, or of the many My Lais that never became bywords. Aerial bombing in Afghanistan has been minuscule and precise compared with the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, Japan, or Germany. Sifton has more than enough historical consciousness to ask himself why he spent these years “so intently focused on the U.S. government.”
The question comes up near the end of the book, at a moment when Sifton and a colleague are waiting to talk with Polish prosecutors about the no longer secret C.I.A. prison in Poland. Sifton has been at it for almost a decade. He’s jet-lagged and depressed by the Warsaw weather, and he’s begun to wonder what it’s all for. Detachment threatens to set in; he staves it off. He doesn’t expect any American officials to be extradited to Poland and prosecuted. He tells his colleague, “It’s more like writing to the editor of a newspaper.” But human-rights workers like them were sending a message, protecting a principle. They were operating on the level of symbols. Whether anyone was listening, whether anything changed, was secondary.
The work of keeping American leaders honest was a high point in a low era. But it’s not quite the same as looking directly at violence. There’s the well-known American hubris of adventurism, and there’s another kind, which sees our wrongs as dangers to the foundation of civilization. The Bush Administration tortured prisoners and created a legal fiction to justify it; other regimes torture prisoners and call it obtaining a confession from traitors who threaten national security. Is there really such a difference that the second can be dismissed as the way of the world, while the first is “not mere violation but something more profound,” a crime so audacious that “a general deterioration in the valuation of human life, such as was seen in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, could happen again”? This is exceptionalism in another guise. The belief that when America behaves like other countries the results are worse carries an assumption that America must be different, and in some sense better. The past fourteen years have been hard on almost every dogma, including that one. ♦
