Politics & Power Quote by Arundhati Roy

Roy’s move here is to sabotage the seductive simplicity of wartime language. “Wipe out” sounds clean, surgical, final. She forces the listener to sit with what that verb actually licenses: not a strategy but a mood, a permission slip for endless violence in the name of a tidy outcome. By insisting the Taliban is “not a fixed number of people,” she’s puncturing the fantasy that enemies can be reduced to a kill list. If it’s an ideology, then treating it like a finite body count is less a plan than a performance for domestic reassurance.

The sharper barb is the causal boomerang: “America created anyway.” Roy isn’t arguing that the U.S. invented Afghan conservatism out of thin air; she’s invoking the Cold War petri dish - U.S. backing for mujahideen factions, Pakistan’s role as a conduit, the weaponization of religion against the Soviets - and the later vacuum of abandoned reconstruction. Subtext: moral outrage without historical memory is not morality; it’s branding. When a superpower frames its intervention as self-defense against monsters, she asks who stocked the lab.

Her intent is also rhetorical: she drags the conversation from revenge to responsibility. If the target is an ideology with roots in geopolitical engineering, “wiping out” becomes both impossible and self-serving. The line reads like a warning about the forever-war logic: you can always claim you’re not done, because you were never fighting something that could be definitively finished.