The Afghan war and the just war theory

It feels naïve even to write about the Just War Theory simply for the fact that it is so utterly dismissed in practice and you feel like you’re trying to drag secular matter-of-fact realpolitik into a religious sermon it has long abandoned as badland.

Nevertheless, to ‘salvage the question’ retained by the larger humanity, a question seemingly dying down in the remote nooks of conscience, one needs to really just as much ‘talk’ about Just War.

The times we are living in, are times of confused identities and relative morals; good and bad are crossing each other and are chosen as per the situation requires. Morals are to be judged on the consequences they produce, and truth has to do nothing with what humans value, but only with logical reasoning and empirical facts. Just like the individual, the nation too is being made to have its sovereign boundaries crossed so that culture, language, belief and whatever constituted the identity of a people is being diluted by waves of globalisation, and states are being told that they are infested by disease that will only be cured by incursions of the supra.

The Afghans were told that they are infested by a like disease — the Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Al Qaeda, because they were terrorists; and the Taliban, because they had harboured the Al Qaeda! But where did Al Qaeda come from in the first place? The CIA had been in Afghanistan since 1979, running Operation Cyclone to covertly assist the Mujahideen against the USSR; the MI6 supported Ahmad Shah Massoud. In the shadow of the Afghan Jihad, the CIA delivered direct cash to Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, who were both close associates of Bin Laden.

How much did the Taliban know about the covert role of Al Qaeda, when overtly they were there just to assist in the Jihad — and how much the US knew about them and who was responsible for their creation? If we answer these corollaries with common sense, then the announced cause of attacking Afghanistan, in the words of Bush, “the Taliban regime… is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists”, in itself butchers the most basic requirement of a Just War, i.e. “the cause of the war must be just”. Because obviously, the CIA, not the Taliban, had been “sponsoring and sheltering and supplying” Al Qaeda. It is only obvious that if the Taliban had any thing of the like to do with Al Qaeda, it must have also had some connection with Al Qaeda’s later operations in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, which it did not have in the slightest.

Another requirement of a Just War is that “the use of force must be a last resort”. In his book, Delivering Osama, K Mohabbat, who was the US envoy to the Taliban for negotiations for the delivery of Osama bin Laden, details how the Taliban had capitulated to all of US demands and how as early as in February 2001, the Taliban had house-arrested OBL and invited the US to hit him and his men with cruise missiles — which they failed to for no obvious reason except that they wanted to resort to full force without exhausting any other measures.

The UN press release SC/6739, issued a week after the US had attacked Afghanistan, mentions OBL’s involvement in the Kenya and Tanzania bombings and killing of US nationals, which brings us to a third requirement of a Just War, that is, “violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered”. While the deaths caused by OBL’s bombings were not more than 4,000, with around 30,000 injured, in contrast, it is estimated that between two to three million Afghan civilians have been killed in the 18-year-long war. And millions more injured and displaced, because the US continuously obliterated another requirement of a Just War, that is, “weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants”.

The SC/6739 was titled “Security Council Demands that Taliban Turn Over OBL to Appropriate Authorities”, which not only makes us question the structural incapacity of the UN to assess the real time situation regarding the fact that the Taliban had just weeks prior tried to do exactly that, but also that the US had fabricated its own false truth to justify an invasion. Making a false truth can enable one to create a desired material outcome but it cannot convert a bad intention into a good one, therefore breaching another Just War clause that “a just war can only be fought with right intentions”.

Perhaps the clause that “a war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success” should be plausible to even the most materialistic. It is a disgrace for a country that boasts itself to be the greatest and most powerful, being unable to assess whether they could win this war at all; prolonging it to two decades of chaos and destruction of the Afghan people — just because someone else made chaos and destruction in their land for one day!

In a Just War the “cost benefit ratio” should also be “positive”, estimated at $2 trillion for the US — an extreme wastage and misappropriation of funds that belonged, not only to the American people, but should have been used for the welfare of the larger humanity. Death and injury incurred by the US, upon the Afghans in a hopeless cause and their dire miscalculations, prove their deprecate morality and dead justice. Perhaps now, leaving Afghanistan to the people can be the least they can try do to redress the un-redressable injuries they have unjustly inflicted upon a section of humanity, seeing them as weak and helpless.

Only if they had one adviser like Mencius (400BC) who told King Xuan, “if in annexing Yen you please its people then annex it… if in annexing Yen you antagonise its people then do not annex it.” But that is like dragging one into a religious sermon away from realpolitik! 

Published in The Express Tribune, June 26^th, 2020.

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