erratum: september 11, 2001

Erratum: September 11, 2001Author(s): William F. Shughart IISource: Public Choice, Vol. 112, No. 3/4 (Sep., 2002), pp. 225-232Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30026301 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Public Choice.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.77.62 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:06:56 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer

http://www.jstor.org/stable/30026301?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Public Choice 112: 225-232, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

225

September 11, 2001

WILLIAM F. E SHUGHART II School of Business Administration, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, U.S.A.

Accepted 15 January 2002

War is a mere continuation of policy by other means. (Carl von Clausewitz, [1832] 1976: 87)

Except at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian .... Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid. (Winston S. Churchill, [1930] 1996: 134)

Afghanistan has almost always been on the verge of disintegration. Straddling the mountain passes that link the plains of India with Central Asia and beyond, it was a frequently moved pawn in the Great Game played out in the late nineteenth century between the British and Russian empires, each seeking a buffer zone against the other's expansionist aims. Before that, Afghanistan sat astride the path of vital East-West trade convoys moving over the famous Silk Route. More recently, control of the Afghani mountain passes has been sharply contested by local warlords and Mafia-like criminal organizations trafficking in drugs and contraband. Foreign powers, great and small, have long sought "spheres of influence" in this "strategic frontier" (Pigou, [1921] 1941: 27), sometimes intervening directly, but more often by courting tribal chieftains with money and guns.

The proximate cause of Afghanistan's descent into chaos at the close of the twentieth century was American neglect in the wake of the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, bloodied in a decade-long conflict with the mujaheddin, and the subsequent overthrow, following the USSR's collapse in 1991, of its puppet regime in Kabul (Rashid, 2000: 21). Fighting one of the Cold War's eleventh-hour battles by proxy, the United States had supported the mujahed-



226

din generously with some $4 to $5 billion worth of modern weaponry (ibid.: 18), including 900 Stinger missiles (ibid.: 44), which it funneled covertly to them through the Pakistani government's Interservices Intelligence (ISI) agency. Victory won, "the Americans ... washed their hands of Afghanistan ..." (Elliot, 1999: 24), leaving a country "divided into warlord fiefdoms" over which "all the warlords ... fought, switched sides and fought again in a bewildering array of alliances, betrayals and bloodshed" (Rashid, 2000: 21), and "ordinary Afghans with a widespread feeling of having been betrayed" (Elliot, 1999: 24).

Into this power vacuum stepped the Taliban. A series of military successes over tribal factions contending for local or regional supremacy, crowned by the capture of Kabul in September 1996, triggered hopes that peace and stability would finally be restored, at least to Afghanistan's southern provinces. To Pakistan, "desperately keen to open up direct land routes for trade with the Central Asian Republics ..." (Rashid, 2000: 26), and to the United States, interested both in a strategically located partner to its anti-Iran policy and in a regime that would help ensure the success of a joint American-Saudi- financed, trans-Afghanistan natural gas pipeline long delayed by civil war (ibid.: 46), the Taliban seemed to be a godsend. Neither country was much off-put by the Taliban's virulent anti-modernism and subjugation of women implemented under a strict interpretation of the Sharia law. Not until feminist pressure was brought to bear on the Clinton administration in late 1997 did US policy begin turning around, a reversal soon solidified by the Taliban's refusal to endorse the pipeline project (ibid.: 176).

Despite its need for continued American aid, Pakistan remained faithful to the Taliban because, under Mullah Omar, the regime kept its promise of restoring "peace", albeit the peace of authoritarian repression. By eliminating the petty warlords who had disrupted the lucrative smuggling trade over the southern mountain passes, the Taliban overcame a tragedy of "anticommons", arising from multiple rights to exclude (Buchanan and Yoon, 2000). Roving bandits were displaced by a stationary bandit (McGuire and Olson, 1996). In 1993, travelers on the 130-mile-long route from Quetta to Kandahar "were stopped by at least 20 different groups, who had put chains across the road and demanded a toll ..." (Rashid, 2000: 22). Soon after entering the fray in late 1994, "the Taliban cleared the chains from the roads, set up a one-toll system for trucks entering Afghanistan at Spin Baldak and patrolled the highway from Pakistan. The transport mafia was ecstatic ..." (ibid.: 29). Tolls fell to "an average of 6,000 rupees (US$150) for a truck traveling from Peshawar to Kabul, compared to 30,000-50,000 rupees, which truckers paid before" (ibid.: 191). Although the Pakistani economy was heavily damaged by the widespread evasion of customs' duties the Taliban facilitated, the "enorm-



227

ous nexus of corruption" that emerged in Afghanistan's neighbor ensured governmental complaisance (ibid.).

The roots of September 11, 2001, go much deeper than the Soviet Union's collapse, however. A fundamental problem is cartography. Afghanistan, like many of the nation-states fashioned from the carcass of the Ottoman Em- pire in the aftermath of the First World War (Fromkin, 1989), is an artificial construct. Its southern border was drawn in the late nineteenth century by Sir Mortimer Durand, the colonial government of India's foreign secretary, expressly to divide the Pashtun (or Pathan) tribe's homeland in half, thereby establishing a buffer state on India's northwest frontier. When the Pashtunis who found themselves on the Indian side of the Durand line failed to in- tegrate themselves quietly under the Raj, the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) was sliced off from the Punjab to establish a second, inner buffer. These two "tribal belts" were formally incorporated within the boundaries of Pakistan when that nation separated from a newly independent India under the Partition Plan effective 14 August 1947; the Durand line stood (Hilton, 2001).

Afghanistan's northern border was drawn by Josef Stalin. Formalized in the "Settlement of 1922", a series of treaties between the Soviet Union and its southern neighbors (Fromkin, 1989: 559), the new boundary lines carved up a region, "comprising modern day Tajikistan, southern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan", that had been "one contiguous territory for centuries" (Rashid, 2000: 146). Like Sir Mortimer Durand, Stalin was apparently keen to create his own buffer zone against the Pashtuns (and the Raj) by strand- ing sizeable Tajik and Uzbek populations in what thenceforth was northern Afghanistan.

What emerged was the map of a wholly synthetic nation-state comprising at least 20 distinct ethnic groups. Heading the list are the Pashtuns, concen- trated in the south and accounting for between 30 and 40 percent of the total Afghani population. Then there are the Turkmen, Tajiks and Uzbeks of northern Afghanistan, a region less populous than the southern Pashtun provinces, but containing "60 percent of Afghanistan's agricultural resources and 80 percent of its former industry" (ibid.: 55). Nuristanis, claiming descent from the armies of Alexander the Great, dominate the western provinces, while remote, mountainous central Afghanistan is the homeland of the Hazaras, "distant offspring of the armies of Chingiz Khan" (Elliot, 1999: 52-53).

The map's failure to respect customary tribal territorial claims and to accommodate existing regional trade patterns and social networks has had disastrous consequences for Afghanistan, as it also has had in much of sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Rowley, 1999). In both cases, members of some close-knit ethnic groups find themselves on opposite sides of new, unwanted



228

national borders; others are compelled to share ground with their enemies of old. Ethnic violence is the predictable outcome as each group seeks control of local, regional and national levers of political power. Strongmen rise and fall as their supporters gain the upper hand. Political authority is exercised, not by sharing power with rivals, but by repressing them.

A factional disease demands a republican cure. Short of redrawing the map of Central Asia, as has been proposed for sub-Saharan Africa (Kimenyi, 1999), the cycle of ethnic conflict can only be stopped by constitutional means. A federal system of government that shifts most political decision- making authority away from the center toward regions having a high degree of autonomy, combined with a representative legislature empowered to re- solve tightly defined questions of national policy, offers a time-tested way of accommodating the diverse insular interests of an ethnically heterogeneous polity (Frey and Eichenberger, 1999). The history of the Middle East in gen- eral (Friedman, [1989] 1995; Lewis, 1995), and of Afghanistan in particular (Lewis, 2001), suggests, however, that even republican forms of government may be unworkable. Indeed, the UN-sponsored transitional government already has drawn fire from Uzbeks angered at the appointment of Tajiks by interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, a Pashtuni, to head the high-profile defense, foreign affairs and interior ministries (Schaeffer, 2001). Starting with existing national borders, new constitutions that provide for orderly means of secession and self-determination may be the only trouble-free path to regional political stability.

The "spongy no-go area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a land of fierce and complicated tribal loyalties and equally ferocious tribal feuds, of gunrunning, drug dealing, and smuggling ..."(Hilton, 2001: 60), provided a natural refuge for Osama bin Laden, the architect of September 11, 2001. Awash with money and weapons, some of which had been supplied to bin Laden directly by the United States to help equip the camps he built to train mujaheddin units during the Soviet invasion (and to establish theological col- leges - madrassas - to inoculate them with Islamist zeal), the region evolved into a terrorist nursery. After the Soviets withdrew, bin Laden redeployed his military infrastructure in support of the Taliban's drive to restore Pashtunis to their self-claimed place as the rightful rulers of Afghanistan.

His reasons for doing so are bound up in the constellation of theological, cultural and political crosscurrents that have plagued the Middle East for millennia. One of the most important of these is Wahhabism, a movement launched in the eighteenth century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1787), an Arabian cleric who fathered "a campaign of purification and renewal. His purpose was to return the Muslim world to the pure and authentic Islam of the Prophet, removing and, where necessary, destroying



229

all later accretions" (Lewis, 2001: 59). Wahhabi doctrine was embraced by the House of Saud, the rulers set over Arabia by Britain in the interwar period. The Taliban's rejection of modernity, a central tenant of that doctrine, attracted covert support from at least some members of Saudi Arabia's royal family, to whom bin Laden had developed close ties (and amassed a personal fortune) through his father's construction business (Rashid, 2000: 131-132). Bin Laden's involvement with the Taliban was also animated by the centuries-old sectarian division between Shia and Sunni Muslims, groun- ded in a doctrinal dispute over the proper line of succession (hereditary versus elective) to the Prophet Muhammad. The Talibans are fiercely Sunni. Seeing a threat to its own security in the collapse of the Afghan state, neighboring Iran, the only nation where Shias constitute a majority of the population, backed the opposition forces (ibid.: 196-206).

At the end of the day, bin Laden became the Taliban's single most important financial backer, supplying an estimated $100 billion in cash and military assistance to the Afghan regime over the past five years. These monies came not from his own bank account, but "from three primary sources: legal and il- legal businesses or front companies bin Laden operates directly or indirectly; tribute payments he receives from several Persian Gulf states, companies or individuals that give him funds so he and his al Qaeda supporters will stay out of or minimize activities in their countries; and entities that are masked as charities" (Woodward, 2001). The Taliban leadership's economic dependency on bin Laden helps explain why they continued to protect and shelter him after September 11 rather than save their own necks (ibid.).

The withdrawal of US support for the Taliban in the late 1990s added to bin Laden's list of grievances against the "Great Satan", a list that includes the American victory over Iraq in the Gulf War, the continued presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia after Kuwait's liberation, America's rapprochement with post-Khomeini Iran and, not least, its long-standing support of Israel (ibid.: 133). Bin Laden became a household name in August 1998, following the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which claimed 220 lives. He may also have had a hand in earlier attacks against Amer- ican interests. Bin Laden has been blamed for the 18 US soldiers killed in

Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993; for a 1995 bombing in Riyadh, which caused the deaths of five American servicemen; and for another 19 Americans killed in Dhahran in 1996. His involvement is suspected in bombings in Aden in 1992 and at the World Trade Center in 1993, in a plot to kill President Clinton during his 1994 state visit to the Philippines, and in a plan to destroy 12 US civilian aircraft in 1995 (ibid.: 134-135).

September 11, 2001, was the unforgettable pinnacle of Osama bin Laden's campaign of terror. A preliminary effort to assess the economic impact of



230

that day's events suggests that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon imposed immediate costs exceeding $100 billion, in the forms of property damage and values of lives lost, and of up to $2 trillion in lower future corporate profits (Navarro and Spencer, 2001).

A reasonably alert US intelligence service would have been better pre- pared. Bin Laden had already demonstrated American vulnerability to a terrorist strike on its homeland. Nonetheless, an administration weakened by the Monica Lewinsky affair and lacking basic foreign policy expertise (according to Elliot, 1999: 76, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was so uninformed about Afghanistan that, during her first trip to the country, she had to be told the names of the different Afghan parties) failed to avert tragedy.

Neither did the airline industry heed the alarm bells that had been ringing "since 1988, when a bomb in a suitcase destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland ..." (Yeoman and Hogan, 2002: 43). As a matter of fact, the industry's lobbyists - a cadre counting, among others, ten former members of Congress, two former transportation secretaries, three former of- ficials of the Federal Aviation Administration and the wife of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle - have worked hard to water down or defeat every subsequent proposal to beef up airport security, "including the recommendations of two high-profile presidential commissions" (ibid.: 42). For example, apparently worried about the costs of implementing new security procedures and of annoying the flying public, the airlines fought a plan floated in the midst of the 1996 presidential election campaign by Vice President Al Gore, chair of the White House Commission on Aviation and Security, to require the affirmative matching of all passengers with their baggage. In the weeks following the Vice President's decision to reverse course and accept the industry's weaker alternative proposal, calling only for monitoring the baggage of "suspicious passengers", the airlines contributed some $500,000 to the Democratic Party (ibid.: 45).

Interest-group politics thus stalks explanations for why and how commer- cial aircraft were so easily turned into weapons of terror on September 11. Even now, the airlines warn that unprecedented focus on security threatens to delay the implementation of promising accident-prevention technologies, such as air-turbulence detection devices, and they have apparently convinced the Bush administration not to require prospective employees of the new federal airport security service to have high-school diplomas (Pasztor, 2001).

While terrorism is probably as old as mankind, its modem use as a strategy for influencing public opinion and public policy by groups lacking the means to wage war on a national scale can be traced to 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip, thereby angering supporters of Palestinian statehood. The end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union



231

added fuel to the terrorist fire as ethnic factions maneuvered for regional autonomy (Enders and Sandler, 1995: 215). Terrorism is likely to continue for the foreseeable future in the Middle East and Central Asia as diverse groups forced for a century or more to live on a map drawn by foreign powers, their ancient conflicts suppressed temporarily, first, by Ottoman and Persian, and, later, by British, French and Soviet hegemony, "regroup to create new political identities for themselves". After all, "it was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete" (Fromkin, 1989: 565).

Pakistan threatens to become the next powder keg. Allowing itself to become the key staging area for the Taliban's incursions into Afghanistan, Pakistan was also complicit in that group's assistance to the Kashmiri sep- aratist movement in next-door India (Rashid, 2000: 186). What goes around comes around. Demands for independence or autonomy on the part of the Kurds, "a scattered, tribal people who inhabit the plateaus and mountains where Iraq, Iran, Russian Armenia, and Turkey now overlap" (Fromkin, 1989: 503), "which had been on the agenda in 1921", but "somehow disappeared from [it] in 1922" (ibid.: 560), remain unfulfilled. Ethnic grudges are not in short supply.

The tools of economics can be applied fruitfully in analyzing terrorist behavior and in assessing alternative antiterrorism policies. Terrorists are ra- tional actors who select their targets and modes of attack cost-effectively, and respond predictably to changes in the expected benefits or costs of terrorist action (Enders and Sandler, 1995). The design and implementation of public policies toward terrorism accordingly merits careful thought, lest terrorists be given incentive to husband their limited resources by committing fewer, but even more dramatic acts than that which riveted the world's attention on September, 11, 2001. While priority clearly must be assigned to protecting innocent lives and property by suppressing al Qaeda and similar terrorist networks, as well as their sponsors in, among others, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Somalia, the public choice lesson of September 11 is that new national boundaries and new constitutions promise the only lasting solutions to the terrorism of the twenty-first century.

References

Buchanan, J.M. and Yoon, Y.J. (2000). Symmetric tragedies: Commons and anticommons. Journal of Law and Economics 43: 1-13.

Churchill, W.S. ([1930] 1996). My early life: 1874-1904. New York: Touchstone. Clausewitz, C. von ([1832] 1976). On war. Ed. and trans, by M. Howard and P. Paret.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.



232

Elliot, J. (1999). An unexpected light: Travels in Afghanistan. New York: Picador USA. Enders, W. and Sandler, T. (1995). Terrorism: Theory and applications. In K. Hartley and

T. Sandler (Eds.), Handbook of defense economics, vol. I, 213-249. Handbooks in Economics, vol. 12, ed. by K.J. Arrow and M.D. Intriligator. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Frey, B.S. and Eichenberger, R. (1999). A new proposal for federalism and democracy in developing countries. In M.S. Kimenyi and J.M. Mbaku (Eds.), Institutions and collective choice in developing countries, 315-326. Public choice and developing societies. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Friedman, T.L. ([1989] 1995). From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Anchor Books. Fromkin, D. (1989). A peace to end all peace: The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation

of the modern Middle East. New York: Henry Holt. Hilton, I. (2001). The Pashtun code. New Yorker (December 3): 58-71. Kimenyi, M.S. (1999). Spatial competition, ethnicity, and the optimal size and composition of

units of collective choice. In M.S. Kimenyi and J.M. Mbaku (Eds.), Institutions and collective choice in developing countries, 355-380. Public Choice and Developing Societies. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Lewis, B. (1995). The Middle East: A brief history of the last 2,000 years. New York: Touchstone.

Lewis, B. (2001). The revolt of Islam. New Yorker (November 19): 50-63. McGuire, M.C. and Olson, M. (1996). The economics of autocracy and majority rule: The

invisible hand and the use of force. Journal of Economic Literature 34: 72-96. Navarro, P. and Spencer, A. (2001). September 11, 2001: Assessing the costs of terrorism.

Milken Institute Review 2: 16-31. Pasztor, A. (2001). Focus on security may delay progress in airlines' accident-prevention

efforts. Wall Street Journal (December 31): A3 & A10. Pigou, A.C. ([1921] 1941). The political economy of war, new and rev. ed. New York:

Macmillan. Rashid, A. (2000). Taliban: Militant Islam, oil and fundamentalism in Central Asia. New

Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene. Rowley, C.K. (1999). Rent seeking and rent extraction from the perspective of Africa. In

M.S. Kimenyi and J.M. Mbaku (Eds.), Institutions and collective choice in developing countries, 223-254. Public Choice and Developing Societies. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Schaeffer, J. (2001). Taliban still pose threat to Afghans. Associated Press (December 28). Woodward, B. (2001). Bin Laden said to 'own' the Taliban. Washington Post (October 11):

Al. Yeoman, B. and Hogan, B. (2002). Airline insecurity. Mother Jones (January): 40-46.



erratum: september 11, 2001

Documents