Empire strikes back

I'm glad that our Tomahawk cruise missiles and B-2 bombers are reducing the terrorist bases and military infrastructure of Afghanistan to piles of ash and rubble. Such is also the state of a good chunk of my hometown, thanks to al Qaida, and even though campus peaceniks like to prattle on about how "an eye for an eye leaves us all blind" they'd be thinking differently if someone went for their Ray Bans with a hot poker. Judging from how red and teary New Yorkers' eyes have been for almost a month now, you might have thought Osama bin Laden did exactly that.

As proud as I am of the success of our bombers, however, I am prouder by far of the C-17 aircraft flying out of an American air base in Ramstein, Germany. These are the planes that have been dropping food and supplies to the oppressed civilians of Afghanistan.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri accuse global capitalism (i.e., America) of being "Empire" in their must-read 'pomo' phenom of that title. (No, not "an empire," or even "the Empire." Just "Empire." Postmodernism, apparently, necessitates the death of the article.) As far as I can recall, however, the Mongol horde never made it a practice to feed and clothe civilians in enemy territory. To the contrary, they liked to kill the adult men, enslave everybody else and sow the enemy lands with salt.

What sort of Empire would ever dream of doing otherwise? The same one that can say truthfully that its war is not with the people of the nation it is fighting but only with its illegitimate government and the terrorists harbored by that loathsome regime. The same one that bears no hostility toward the faith in whose name these terrorists act, but which includes millions of that faith as full members of its own body politic, most notably as soldiers and chaplains in the very force currently fighting terror. The same one which, despite its long history of all-too-slow moral progress, can rightfully claim to be dedicated, not to the glory of one tribe above others, but to the proposition that all are created equal.

America's critics, both internal and external, reply that this alleged Empire cannot possibly care about the civilians of Afghanistan, some of whom will inevitably be killed in the attempt to oust the regime oppressing them. In the words of Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi, words which would not sound odd coming out of the mouth of Noam Chomsky, "These attacks will result in loss of life among civilians, and, therefore, they are not acceptable."

Tell that to the 15,000 men of the Northern Alliance. As if the eloquent words of their spokesman, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, were not enough, a single look at his close-cropped beard and uncovered head on CNN makes it clear why the rebel alliance has been fighting all these years. A few miles south of rebel-controlled territory, men are brutally beaten for appearing that way in public.

Tell that to Mooruddin Aki, a teenage Afghan refugee in Pakistan recently profiled by the New York Times. Mooruddin's arms were chopped off when he was caught smoking opium in a Taliban school.

Tell that to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who risk even graver punishments for the crime of secretly teaching young girls how to read.

America's critics will respond that the United States would never have come to the aid of the innocent victims of the Taliban if America itself had never been attacked. That is probably true, but America has been attacked, and it is responding in the knowledge that America's security requires Afghanistan's freedom. Freedom, though, is something that a people must ultimately seize for itself. This is therefore the message written on the leaflets and broadcast over the transistor radios, included with the rations being dropped over Afghanistan.

Let us hope that poor, oppressed Antonio Negri — confined each night to a Roman prison for attempting to violently overthrow Italy's democratic government, though living by day in his girlfriend's apartment — never finds himself in need of a similar airdrop. Until he does, however, he can have no real understanding of (the) Empire. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.