The U.S. War on Terror Discourse: Mapping De-politicization and the Politics of Confinement in Afghanistan.

• Author: Sahill, Pamir H.
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction

There are aspects of evil that have such a power of contagion, such a force of scandal that any publicity multiplies them infinitely. (1) In August 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump laid out his Afghanistan and South Asia strategy, vowing to win the war against terrorism. Trump's strategy expands the war from Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan by seeing it in a regional context (2 )17 years after the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks. The events of 9/11 marked the beginning of the (re)construction of terrorism discourse; the fight against terrorism has continued to dominate public, political and academic discourses as one of the most important global problems. (3) Given the significance of the terror problem, this article argues that it is even more important today to reinterpret and critically assess the discourse of former U.S. President George W. Bush on the war on terror (WoT) in Afghanistan. Bush's pronouncements brought in a new and now dominant discourse (and practice). One of the most noteworthy cracks in Bush's discourse on the WoT is that it is based on the shaky foundations of what Ish-Shalom, Muller and Sheikh (4) call 'evilization,' which is the process of appointing or assigning evil.

Evil, as Foucault notes, is indeed powerful, not only as a "contagion" but in its effects as well. (5) Since it is historically embedded in religious discourses, the concept of evil 'solidifies' and fixes human identities, constituting an identity/difference nexus (6) that is deeply divisive. Perhaps Bush realized its power and thus used the term frequently after 9/11. The U.S. discourse on the WoT in Afghanistan during the Bush presidency defines and identifies 9/11 as an evil act that was perpetrated by al-Qaeda against modern, freedom-loving civilization. Framing al-Qaeda and the Taliban as 'evil' however, is problematic, and has had far-reaching implications. This article contests the idea that evilization in the Bush discourse on the WoT in Afghanistan was 'rhetorical' or merely a securitization speech act; instead it seeks to advance the debate around evilization by further problematizing president Bush's discourse on terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. In this process it asks two equally important questions: (i) Why does evilization function as part of a wider de-politicization in Bush's discourse on terrorism and the war in Afghanistan? And, (ii) How is the (evilized) de-politicization constitutive of the spaces and politics of confinement?

The article employs a poststructuralist Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and first outlines the theoretical and methodological profile of the study. Second, it sets the scene by unpacking Bush's discourse. Third, utilizing scholarly work around the evilization process and drawing upon Nietzsche's work on morality, it contextualizes the notion of 'evil' and argues that evilization is part of the de-politicization process. Finally, the article argues that understanding evilization as a securitization speech act may not suffice to reveal the confining power of Bush's discourse on terrorism; therefore, it provides a brief description of Foucault's archival work on psychiatry (7) and then applies his ideas to the post-2001 Afghan context.

Theory and Methodology: Why a Poststructuralist CDA?

Poststructuralism follows an anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist epistemology and ontology, rejecting the possibility of a given or valid 'truth about the world (8) suggesting that "truth is not discovered," and that "the analysis of political processes cannot rely on categories which are prior to or 'outside' the process itself." (9) Understanding the world from an anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist perspective, however, presents a "radical challenge to both the fact/value distinction and our concept of facticity generally," because post-structuralism claims that facticity is not "founded in nature" (10) but is formulated where the 'meaning is always imposed,' as the world we come to know cannot be "separated from the interpretive practices through which it is made." (11) The process of imposing meaning does not take place in a vacuum, but instead implicates power. It is thus the "exercise of power" that "perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power." In that sense, "it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power." (12) Once understood in this way, power becomes productive, "both objectify[ing] and subjectivat[ing] modern subjects." (13) Foucault argues that the interplay of the power/knowledge nexus is spread throughout the social body, where "a certain economy of discourses of truth" is formulated which operates through the very power/knowledge association. (14) Ontology and epistemology are thus bound together in poststructuralism. Rather than dealing with them separately and aspiring for a positivist, objective knowledge, in poststructuralism, the way of investigating the world ultimately affects the ways of understanding it. Following Nietzschean tradition, Foucault notes that the world does not itself "turn towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher;" (15) rather it is formed and understood through discourse:

All that we can know is textual and related to discourses. There is a constant referral of meaning, the signifier/signified breaks down and everything becomes a signifier with never ending possibilities. This allows many readings of the text to occur. (16) Like power, then, discourses are dispersed everywhere in a society like a web or a network of veins through which they flow and are filtered at the same time, "enabling maintenance and reinforcement." That said, discourses are not mirrors, only reflecting social reality, but are also making it. (17)

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a suitable methodological frame for this article to unpack the discourse on the WoT in Afghanistan, because discourses cannot be simply confined as "groups of signs," but are rather "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak." (18) The Foucauldian concept of discourse, involving power relations, enables the "production and reproduction of particular subjectivities and identities" and exclusions. (19) Discourse offers a "stable unity of meaning and identities," and is representative of a "gap which prevents full closure." (20) Put differently, there are certain limitations, contradictions and inconsistencies in discourses which can be efficiently unveiled through CDA, which extends "the critical tradition in social science" focusing on modes and ways of discrimination (21) or revealing the dividing practices that occur in societies. The critical' in CDA exhibits a rather explicitly radical approach, what van Dijk calls "an attitude;" (22) nonetheless, it is not to say that this attitude sets the researcher free from ethical academic considerations because then the research does not add value and rather reduces to a polemic. Any researcher utilizing CDA cannot be situated beyond or outside the discourse, as subjects are "themselves the historical outcome of discourse;" therefore her/his "possible bias is not based on truth but represents a position that in turn is the result of a discursive process." (23)

Method: Text Selection, Delimitation and Timeframe

I have chosen Lene Hansen's Model 1 for delimiting texts to conduct the analysis of the post-9/11 U.S. discourse on terrorism. Hansen describes three inter-textuality models. (24) Model 1, which deals with grand or dominant discourses, suits the scope of this article better than the other models, which deal with oppositional and marginal discourses. Bush's discourse on the WoT in Afghanistan became hegemonic and dominant almost immediately after the events of 9/11. Moreover, until almost the end of Bush's presidency, the discourses of the U.S. government, the opposition, and the international community in regard to the WoT in Afghanistan did not have any substantial disagreements and rather merged together in a way that strengthened the grand or dominant discourse.

The critical analysis of the U.S. discourse on terrorism and the WoT focuses on the Bush era, 2001 to 2008. The text selection and delimitation from the primary sources was a two-step process. First, texts, policies and speeches were selected and delimited from four booklets published by the White House --comprising about 850 pages--as well as the autobiography of George W. Bush and his 9/11 interview with National Geographic. (25) Only policies and texts that dealt with the war in Afghanistan were selected. At times, the information in the publications of the White House was repetitive; the recurrence of themes and phrases is indicative of the efforts of the Bush Administration to ensure the dominance of certain categories of 'truth.'

A discourse denotes an organized "order, or a field, that makes specific beings and practices intelligible and knowledgeable, makes us who we are, and what we do and think." (26) In the Foucauldian sense, it is a group of statements that is behind the production, transformation and reproduction of objects, subjects and concepts; (27) therefore, the dominance, suppression and the expansion or existence of a discourse in the social body should be determined in some way. To do that, I cross-checked all the selected texts in the international and Afghan media. I looked for texts in globally circulated news media like The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and BBC. In Afghanistan, because of the low literacy rate, the texts were examined in the available record of news-hours and the websites of BBC Pashto, and Azadi Radio, the most-listened-to radio channel. (28) Any text that did not fulfill the criterion was omitted.

As part of the secondary sources, the article uses scholarly works to contextualize, contest and advance the debate. In the following section, the article utilizes...