ABSTRACT
Afghanistan began. The sound and fury of the bombing, and the right and proper resistance to it, obscured the deepening divisiveness of American foreign policy initiatives being pursued in its shadow. In this sense, American and British bombing was not only a means to the end of specific objectives in Afghanistan, but also a means to much more general ends. This was-and is-the systematic pursuit of a particular view of globalisation by means of war. Let me take two instances of initiatives pursued by the United States of America while the bombs were falling, and try to build an analysis of the role of the Afghanistan campaign in the creation of an (American) global environment. The two initiatives in question were the latest round of World Trade talks, under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), in Doha, Qatar, and the most recent stage of the Kyoto agreement on climate change, in Marrakech, Morocco. Both of these events took place in November 2001, but even an avid observer of the news would have been forgiven for not noticing, so intensively was our attention focussed on events in Afghanistan. Let me take the WTO talks first.
