Johann Hari

The great cliché of our age is that we are sinking into a lobotomised celebrity culture where we worship the worthless. We jabber on about Katie and Peter while carbon emissions soar; we yammer about the X Factor while Afghanistan burns. The new headline-snatching documentary Starsuckers, released today, expresses this view at great length: the West has been drugged by fame into a brain-coma, where our eyes can only follow the neon lights of Hollywood and the Big Brother house.

But is it true? The two-hour film – with all its haughty polemic – helped me to figure out why I am so queasy about this argument, even though I agree with some of its specific points. Yes, I worry that my young nephews' first question about anyone I mention is: "Are they famous?" Yes, I fret that one of my friends is obsessed with Justin Timberlake, and seems to have a stronger imaginary relationship with him than with anyone she actually knows. Yes, I find the creeping of celebrity gossip into serious news broadcasts disturbing.

But the sweeping, simplistic dismissal of celebrity culture misses some more deeper, tougher truths. Running through Starsuckers – and this wider debate – are two incompatible arguments about celebrity. The first is that this revering of celebrities is a new phenomenon, born with television, and intensified by the internet. With these new technologies, we have fallen under a form of electronic hypnosis. We stare numbly at our screens and imagine we are seeing something real, rather than a photo-shopped fiction.

The second argument is more interesting. It suggests that we are hard-wired to seek out Big Men (or Women) and copy them. Think about the hunter-gatherer tribes that we lived in a few minutes ago (in evolutionary terms). Those ancestors of ours who identified the most powerful or abundant people in their group, worked their way into their entourage, and imitated their ways were obviously more likely to survive. Seeking out celebs had an evolutionary advantage – so they passed this instinct on to us. The people who thought it was dumb to act this way dropped off the human family tree.

This seems more persuasive, because some form of celebrity-worship has always existed. In his terrific new book Fame – From the Bronze Age to Britney, the classicist Tom Payne shows how humans have always told lascivious stories about people they don't know.

The ancient Romans made celebrities out of their gladiators, cheering when they killed and weeping when they died. Later, they made celebrities out of the Christian martyrs who were gored by them. The ancient Greeks gossiped about their gods' love affairs – and far from being wholly mythical, the gods appeared among them all the time. As Payne says: "You could invite gods to dinner. The god Serapis [or rather, somebody posing as him] would hold parties at which he was once 'host and guest'.... You could even have sex with a goddess." The tyrant Pisistratus typically found a gorgeous woman, put her in a chariot, and announced she was the goddess Athene. The crowd howled and whooped like anyone at Madison Square Gardens.

And just as there has always been fame, there have always been people complaining that these days people get famous for nothing. In St Paul's letters to the Corinthians, he moans that people only become Christian martyrs nowadays "to obtain a corruptible crown" of celebrity. Here's Chaucer, writing in the 14th-century, giving voice to a crowd: "We have done neither that nor this/but spend our lives in idle play./Nonetheless we come to pray/That we should have as good a fame,/and great renown, and well-known name/as those who have done noble deeds." The Queen snaps: "What! Why should I serve/you the good fame you don't deserve/ because you've not achieved a thing?"

If celebrity has always existed, the debate changes. When people jeered at the Japanese game-shows Clive James put on air, where men ate maggots and crawled through shit, he counselled us to remember: a generation before, these young men would have been using the same drive for danger to fly kamikaze planes into Allied warships. He wrote: "Civilisation doesn't eliminate human impulses: it tames them, through changing their means of expression."

Our innate celebrity-instinct used to be directed in really dangerous ways – towards finding revering warriors like Achilles, who killed so many people that Homer ran out of names; or towards fanatics like the Catholic saints who believed God was talking to her. What were the the Jewish prophets, the Muslim martyrs or the Hindu gods but the celebrities of their day? They took this impulse and channelled it towards primitive superstitions, with all their cruelty, and all their backwardness. Compared to them, directing this impulse towards Zac Efron or Beyoncé or Robbie Williams – because they are hot, or sweet, or make pretty sounds – seems positively benign.

Modern celebrity isn't a deterioration from a pristine past; it's a taming of an impulse that was once met in far more harmful ways. Better Madonna than the Madonna. Better the Heat of celebs telling you to buy perfume than the heat of martyrs telling you you'll burn in hell.

It's only once you admit that celebrity has a place that you can keep it in its place. To a culture, celebrity is like sugar: fun in moderation, deadly if it's all you consume. We are letting one impulse – to vicariously enter the Big Man's entourage – over-ride the others, like the desire to enrich our minds. I have seen some of the best minds of my generation focus on nothing but discussing fame in ever more ironic ways, and they are left with a kind of intellectual diabetes. Whenever I see celebrity news bursting beyond its proper boundary, I remember Pauline Kael, the great film critic for the New Yorker and one of the first intellectuals to take trashy films seriously. When she was dying, she gave a final interview, and said sadly: "All that time I was promoting trash culture, I never imagined it would become the only culture we have."

We need an unwritten Celeb Code of Hygiene about what they should do, and how we should respond to them. Celebrities can provide us with pleasure and titillation – within limits. There needs to be privacy rules to stop us stalking celebs to despair or death. Remember – Greta Garbo didn't actually say "I want to be alone." She said "I want to be let alone" – and there's a world of difference.

And we should drop the mad idea that they should provide us with political guidance. The most effective part of Starsuckers is the exposé of how Bob Geldof and Bono hijacked the Make Poverty History campaign, defying the advice of the main aid groups to applaud political charades that later came to nothing. There's a more terrifying vision still in the film: in Lithuania, a "Celebrities' Party" ran for office, and became the second biggest party in government. The host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire became speaker of the parliament.

We will always have celebrities, and we will – if we are honest – always want them. If we rage against them Starsuckers-style, with an annihilating, snobbish superiority, we will lose the argument. The real struggle instead is to temper our instinct for fame – and stop it sucking up all the cultural oxygen.

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johannhari101

He is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

I am dismayed by how many people will email me after an article saying: "How could you possibly say X, Y or Z?" when I haven't said it. After puzzling for a while, I realize they are talking about the headline - which I didn't write.

This week there have been two ripe examples. My piece about some nineteenth century anarchists was headlined "The First Terrorists." More than five hundred people have emailed saying - how could you say that? There were hundreds of 'terrorists' who preceded them, etc etc. But read the article. I didn't call them "terrorists" at all, never mind "the first terrorists." I don't think they are.

Then a headline was put on my article about the risk from the white far right in Britain which said "the terror risk comes not from jihadis but from Neo-Nazis." Huge numbers of people emailed to say: how can you possibly say there isn't a risk from jihadis etc etc. But anybody who knows anything about me knows that I loathe jihadis - I have worked undercover to expose them, and I have had plenty of death-threats from them. Indeed, the article itself talks very plainly about the very real risk from jihadis.

Journalists never write their own headlines. It's an ineluctable fact of newspaper production.

I'm not complaining about the section editors and sub-editors who do write the headlines at all: they work under enormous time constraints and tremendous pressure, and do a great job 90 percent of the time - which is a considerably better proportion of great work than I manage.

I'm just appealing to readers to be aware of this quirk of newspaper production. If you want to make an informed comment on an article, you have to read the article and disregard the headline. Headlines are very broad-brush guides to what the article is about, and the broadness of the brush sometimes paints over the point. Don't assume the headline reflects the views of the writer.

It's on YouTube in four parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-1EMNSwfms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByKl4oa8uts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpJCLQboVk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG-ayGlSvEM

Or - for those of you in the UK - it's on the BBC i-Player here: http://is.gd/4INCT

Just click here to watch it on YouTube.

Also, you can see me this Friday on Newsnight Review, 11pm, BBC2...

Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of Helmand longer than the First and Second World Wars combined – yet the mutterings from the marble halls of Washington DC suggest he may order a troop escalation.

Obama has to decide now whether to side with the American people and the Afghan people calling for a rapid reduction in US force, or with a small military clique demanding a ramping-up of the conflict. The populations of both countries are in close agreement. The latest Washington Post poll shows that 51 per cent of Americans say the war is "not worth fighting" and that ending the foreign occupation will "reduce terrorism". Only 27 per cent disagree. At the other end of the gun-barrel, 77 per cent of Afghans in the latest BBC poll say the on-going US air strikes are "unacceptable", and the US troops should only remain if they are going to provide reconstruction assistance rather than bombs.

But there is another side: General Stanley McCrystal says that if he is given another 40,000 troops – on top of the current increase which has pushed military levels above anything in the Bush years – he will "finally win" by "breaking the back" of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

How should Obama – and us, the watching world – figure out who is right? We have to start from a hard-headed acknowledgement. Every option from here entails a risk – to Afghan civilians, and to Americans and Europeans. It is not possible to achieve absolute safety. We can only try to figure out what would bring the least risk, and pursue it.

There is obviously a huge risk in sending an extra 40,000 machine-gun wielding troops into a country they don't understand to "clear" huge areas of insurgent fighters who look exactly like the civilian population, and establish "control" of places that have never been controlled by a central government at any point in their history.

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders – but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren't hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus' counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more you have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus's strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan – where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable – but I found that in fact the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11 redux. In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs off the internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's not my view: it's that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security Advisor. He said recently there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the "training camps" they want there – but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

Even if – and this is highly unlikely – you could plug every hole in the Afghan state's authority and therefore make it possible to shut down every camp, there are a dozen other failed states they can scuttle off to the next day and pitch some more tents. Again, that's not my view. Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, says: "As we disrupt [al-Qa'ida], they will seek other safe havens. Somalia and Yemen are potential al-Qa'ida bases in the future." The US can't occupy every failed state in the world for decades – so why desperately try to plug one hole in a bath full of leaks, when the water will only seep out anyway?

There are plenty of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan – but they are a different matter to al-Qa'ida. The latest leaked US intelligence reports say, according to the Boston Globe, that 90 per cent of them are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". They have "no goals" beyond Afghanistan's borders.

Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument – and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any Afghan president – Karzai, or his opponents – will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-Qa'ida. Re-energised, they will surge out across the world. In fact, in November 2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses – without their achieving anything of note!" These wars will, he said, boost al-Qa'ida recruitment across the world, and in time "bankrupt America". They walked right into his trap.

Yes, there is real risk in going – but it is dwarfed by the risk of staying. A bloody escalation in the war is more likely to fuel jihadism than thwart it. If Obama is serious about undermining this vile fanatical movement, it would be much wiser to take the hundreds of billions he is currently squandering on chasing after a hundred fighters in the Afghan mountains and redeploy it. Spend it instead on beefing up policing and intelligence, and on building a network of schools across Pakistan and other flash-points in the Muslim world, so parents there have an alternative to the fanatical madrassahs that churn out bin Laden-fodder. The American people will be far safer if the world sees them building schools for Muslim kids instead of dropping bombs on them.

He can explain – with his tongue dipped in amazing eloquence – that trying to defeat al-Qa'ida with hundreds of thousands of occupying troops and Predator jets is like trying to treat cancer with a blowtorch. Now, that really would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at http://twitter.com/johannhari101

Traducido por Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi.

¿Está Barack Obama para conducir su presidencia en una cuneta sangrienta, llena de cadáveres? Se opina que el presidente anunciará cualquier día ahora su decisión sobre el futuro de la guerra en Afganistán. Sabe que los militares estadounidenses y británicos se han estacionado en el infierno de Helmand por más tiempo que la guerra primera y la guerra segunda mundial combinadas- pero los murmullos en los pasillos de mármol en Washington sugieren que ordene posiblemente un incremento del número de las tropas.

Ahora Obama tiene que decidirse a tomar el partido de la gente estadounidense y la gente afgana que instan que se reduzcan rápidamente las fuerzas estadounidenses, o el de un grupo pequeño de militares que exigen que se escale el conflicto. Las poblaciones de los dos países están de acuerdo. La última encuesta de Washington Post muestra que un 51% de los estadounidenses dice que no vale la pena luchar la guerra y que poner fin a la ocupación extranjera reducirá el terrorismo. No está de acuerdo solamente un 27%. Mientras tanto, un 77% de los afganos en el último sondeo de la BBC dice que los bombardeos aéreos actuales estadounidenses no son aceptables y que las tropas deben permanecer solamente si van a proporcionar asistencia para la reconstrucción en lugar de las bombas.

Sin embargo, hay otro lado: el general Stanley McCrystal dice que, si se los dan a 40.000 militares más- junto con el incremento actual que ha aumentado los niveles militares por encima de todas las cosas en los años de Bush- ‘ganará finalmente’ por romperles las espaldas a Talibán y Al-Qaeda.

¿Cómo podemos saber Obama y nosotros- el mundo espectador- quién tiene razón? Es necesario que empecemos con un reconocimiento firme. Todas las opciones suponen un riesgo- para los civiles afganos, y para los americanos y los europeos. No es posible lograr la seguridad absoluta. Podemos intentar explicarnos solamente qué correría el riesgo menos, y seguirlo.

Se corre obviamente un riesgo grande por mandar a 40.000 militares más con ametralladoras en un país que no entienden para limpiar áreas enormes de insurgentes que se parezcan exactamente a la población civil- y establecer el ‘control’ de los lugares que nunca hayan sido controlados por un gobierno central en cualquier punto de su historia.

Todas las estrategias militares de contra-insurgencia tienen una probabilidad que cree a más enemigos que mata en el tiempo. Se vuela un sitio sospechado del Talibán y se matan dos comandantes- pero se matan también 98 hembras y niños, cuyas familias se han resuelto a matar de ese día a los militares y expulsarlos del país. Éstos no son números hipotéticos. Son del teniente Coronel David Kilcullen que fue consejero de General Petraeus en su estrategia de contra-insurgencia en Irak. Dice que los bombardeos aéreos estadounidenses en la frontera de Afganistán y Pakistán han matado a 14 líderes de Al-Qaeda, pero han matado también a más de 700 civiles. Dice: ‘Eso es una tasa de éxito de 2% y una tasa de garantía de 98%. No es moral.’ Explica la paradoja aparente que venció a los Estados Unidos en Vietnam: si matas a más ‘chicos malos’, tienes que matar a más de ellos.

Hay un peligro aun más grande que esto. La estrategia del General Petraeus es expulsar el Talibán de Afganistán. Cuando tenga éxito, corren a Pakistán donde hay las bombas nucleares.

Para justificar estos riesgos, los que propongan la escalada necesitan argumentos muy persuasivos para demostrar cómo su estrategia ha reducido tan dramáticamente otros riesgos que valió más que estos peligros. No es inconcebible- sino hallé que el caso que dan de hecho para escalar la guerra, o continuar la ocupación, es basado en tres premisas que se vuelven el polvo afgano al examinar.

Primer argumento: hay que privar a Al-Qaeda de sus bases en Afganistán, o los utilizarán para planear atentados contra nosotros, y enfrentaremos a otro 9/11. De hecho, casi todos los atentados yihadistas contra los países occidentales se han planeado en los países occidentales, y requieren capacidades o entrenamiento tecnológico muy limitado. Las atrocidades de 9/11 fueron planeadas en Hamburgo y Florida por 19 saudís que necesitaron saber solamente utilizar los cortadores de cajas y chocar un avión. Los hombres bomba de 7/7 planearon su atentado en Yorkshire: fueron jóvenes británicos que aprendieron a fabricar bombas por la red. Un yihadista fue detenido solamente la semana pasada porque planeaba volar un rascacielos en esa base yihadista conocida, Dallas, Texas. Etcétera.

No hay en realidad casi ningunos combatientes de Al-Qaeda en Afganistán. No es mi punto de vista: es lo que opina el General Jim Jones, consejero de la Seguridad Nacional Estadounidense. Dijo recientemente que hay 100 combatientes de Al-Qaeda en Afganistán. Eso vale repetir: hay 100 combatientes de Al-Qaeda en Afganistán. No muestra tampoco que funciona la guerra. El Talibán y los señores de la guerra que sean sus amigos controlan ya un 40% de Afganistán hoy. Pueden edificar todos los ‘campamentos de entrenamiento’ que quieran- pero han hallado solamente a cien brutos fundamentalistas que provean de personal.

Aunque (esto es muy improbable) se tapen todos los agujeros en la autoridad estatal afgana y por eso se haga posible que todos los campamentos se cierren, hay una docena de otros estados fracasados a los que puedan ir el día siguiente por crear más campamentos. Otra vez, no es mi opinión. León Panetta, director de la CIA, dice: ‘Aunque perturbemos el desarrollo de Al-Qaeda, buscarán otros lugares salvos. Somalia y Yemen son las bases de Al-Qaeda potenciales en el futuro’. Los Estados Unidos no pueden ocupar todos los estados fracasados del mundo para décadas- así ¿por qué intentan tapar de manera desesperada en una bañera llena de agujeros si el agua se filtrará en cualquier caso?

Hay muchos combatientes de Talibán en Afganistán- pero son diferentes de Al-Qaeda. Los informes revelados más recientes de la inteligencia estadounidense dicen, según the Boston Globe, que un 90% es una insurgencia tribal y localizada que se ve como oponerse a los Estados Unidos porque es una ‘potencia ocupante’. No tienen ningunos objetivos fuera de las fronteras de Afganistán.

Segundo argumento: Por quedarnos, mejoramos significativamente los derechos humanos afganos, sobre todo para las hembras. Éste es a mi parecer el argumento más fuerte- y el más deprimente. El Talibán es de hecho uno de las fuerzas más horribles del mundo, encarcelando a las mujeres en sus casas y torturándolas por los ‘crimines’ de mostrarse las caras, por expresar su sexualidad o por ser violadas. Siguen intentando asesinar a mi amiga Malalai Joya por el ‘crimen’ de ser creada para el parlamento con promesas de tratar a las mujeres como seres humanos, no como el ganado.

No obstante, como me dijo el mes pasado: ‘Tus gobiernos han reemplazado el régimen fundamentalista del Talibán con otro régimen fundamentalista de los señores de la guerra.’ Fuera de Kabul, el Talibán vicioso que hace cumplir la ley islámica ha sido reemplazado con señores de la guerra horribles que hacen cumplir la ley islámica. ‘La situación es ahora tan catastrófica como lo era con el Talibán para las mujeres,’ dijo. Cualquier presidente afgano- Karzai, o sus oponentes- será solamente en realidad alcalde de Kabul. Más allá de este pueblo es un mar de señores de la guerra, tan malos para las hembras como el mulá Omar. No es una diferencia por la cual debemos luchar o morir.

Tercer argumento: si nos retiramos, será una gran victoria para Al-Qaeda. Revitalizados, se alzarán a cabo en todo el mundo. De hecho, en noviembre de 2004, les dijo Osama Bin Laden a sus seguidores: ‘Todo lo que tenemos que hacer es enviar a dos yihadistas al punto más lejos al este y levantar un pedazo de tela en que se escribe ‘Al-Qaeda’ para hacer que los generales corran allí, y hacemos que los Estados Unidos sufran las pérdidas humanas, económicas y políticas, ¡sin que logren nada significativo! Estas guerras aumentarán (dijo) el reclutamiento de Al-Qaeda por todo el mundo, y en tiempo ‘harán que se quiebren los Estados Unidos’. Cayeron directamente en su trampa.

Sí, se corre un riesgo verdadero si nos vamos- pero es eclipsado por el riesgo de quedarnos. Una escalada sangrienta de la guerra aumente más probablemente el yihadismo que lo reduzca. Si Obama quiere minar verdaderamente este movimiento fanático horrible, sería mucho más prudente utilizar los cientos de billones que despilfarra para darles caza a cien combatientes en las montañas afganas para otro objetivo. Debe gastarlos para aumentar la policía y la inteligencia, y para crear una red de escuelas por Pakistán y otros puntos de crisis en el mundo musulmán, para que los padres tengan allí una alternativa a las escuelas islámicas fanáticas que produzcan a las personas receptivas a la ideología de Bin Laden. La gente estadounidense será mucho más salva si el mundo los ve edificar las escuelas para los niños musulmanes en lugar de bombardearlos.

Puede explicar- con su lengua llena de la elocuencia sorprendente- que tratar de vencer a Al-Qaeda con cientos de miles de tropas ocupantes y aviones de Predator es como intentar tratar cáncer con soplete. Ahora, eso merecería verdaderamente un premio Nobel de la paz.