Obama should say 'No thanks, not this time'
Brian Topp
Monday, September 28, 2009
With a little unwitting help from the Roman Catholic Church, I am going to argue in the notes that follow that President Barack Obama should say "no thanks, not this time" to General Stanley McChrystal's proposal, presented this weekend, to deploy an additional 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
Instead it is time for NATO, led by the United States, to negotiate the best terms it can get and to begin an orderly withdrawal from that country -- with a clear remaining undertaking.
The church I grew up in has many interesting things to say on the topic of "just war." Its views are well-summarized in the new Catholic Catechism, paragraphs 2307 to 2317.
Let's take a look at some of this (I'll include the beautifully-written Latin, as well as the almost equally impressive English:
2308 Singuli cives et gubernantes agere tenentur ad bella vitanda. «Quamdiu autem periculum belli aderit, auctoritasque internationalis competens congruisque viribus munita defuerit, tamdiu, exhaustis quidem omnibus pacificae tractationis subsidiis, ius legitimae defensionis guberniis denegari non poterit».
2308 All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war. However, as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.
The substance of this point was carefully debated among Canada's social democrats in 1939, when the CCF parliamentary caucus and its national council considered whether to support Canada's entry into the Second World War.
The party leader of the day, J. S. Woodsworth, strongly opposed entering that war.
As his daughter, Grace MacInnis, put it: "When he spoke in Parliament [during the debate on the war, a day after the CCF had decided what to do]... it was as a man apart, as a prophet. Frail and aging, he poured into that single speech his whole molten hatred of war, of its utter senselessness and uselessness, of his personal determination to oppose it to the end and of his hope that someday men would learn to live as brothers."
Woodsworth's speech on peace is one of the great moments of Canadian parliamentary history, and should be required reading by every Member of Parliament before they turn to issues of peace and war.
It is also true that at that moment Woodsworth was utterly wrong, as his party and caucus regretfully concluded.
Social democrats in Parliament applauded him, thanked him, and then broke with him, voting correctly to join Britain's increasingly lonely fight against Nazism -- two years before the United States could bring itself to do so.
All this to say that contrary to the caricatures scribbled in crayon so many times in the columns of our nation's Fifth Estate over the past eight years, it is not in the basic DNA of mainstream social democrats in Canada to be pacifists. Like the authors of the Catholic Catechism, the mainstream of the orange tribe in Canada has long understood that there is a time and a place for legitimate self-defence.
CCF legend James. S. Woodsworth is shown in an undated file photo.
Onward:
2309 Strictas condiciones legitimae defensionis vi militari oportet severe considerare. Talis decisionis gravitas eam condicionibus legitimitatis moralis subigit rigorosis. Requiritur simul:
damnum ab aggressore nationi vel nationum communitati inflictum esse diuturnum, grave et certum;
omnia alia media ad illi imponendum finem manifestata esse impossibilia vel inefficacia;
serias ad exitum prosperum simul haberi condiciones;
armorum usum mala non implicare et perturbationes graviora quam malum supprimendum. Modernorum destructionis mediorum potentia in hac condicione aestimanda gravissimum habet pondus.
2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
there must be serious prospects of success;
the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
This is the heart of the matter -- a brief, clear summary of what is and is not a "just war".
The Church's views are rooted in the writings of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas and numerous other meditations on these issues (including as discussed at Vatican II in paragraph 79).
But I like the Catechism's take, because of its surgical precision. Let's look at each element as it might apply to the war in Afghanistan today, remembering that the Catechism's drafters assert that each of every element must be true "at one and the same time."
The damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain
There can be no doubt that the atrocity committed in New York on Sept. 11, 2001 was a lasting, grave and certain act of war perpetrated by the government of Afghanistan, through the al-Qaeda terrorists it was fostering, against the United States of America and its allies, including Canada.
This cannot be dismissed or explained away by progressives or anyone else. Yes, the U.S. government and its corporate friends have done a great deal of evil in the world. But the people on those planes did not deserve to die, nor did the people working in those buildings.
A man stands in the rubble after the collapse of the first World Trade Center tower on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York.
All other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective
There is room for debate here.
It is true that the al-Qaeda network is not a nation state, and will not be destroyed through conventional warfare.
Al-Qaeda's finances need to be identified and turned off. Its leaders and senior personnel need to captured and tried for their crimes (tried fairly and impartially, remembering that the wrong people are charged with offenses with distressing regularity). Its safe-houses and camps need to be destroyed. Its apologists and propagandists need to be persuasively rebutted. This is multinational work for intelligence agencies, diplomats, special forces, financial regulators, police agencies, jurists and many others, and will take many, many years. It is (mostly) not work for the U.S. Marines, the U.S. Army or for the U.S. Air Force.
But the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was a national government.
It provided al-Qaeda with its principal base of operations as well as moral and practical support that was condition-precedent for the September, 2001, atrocity. That regime could be destroyed through conventional warfare.
I submit that as direct party to an undeniable act of war, the Taliban government in Afghanistan provided the United States and its allies with just cause for a focused, limited and promptly-ended war. Given the history and state-of-play of Afghanistan at the time, it is hard to see how the Taliban regime could otherwise have been destroyed (for example through an embargo, or through sustained bombing) without unacceptable harm to the people of that country.
There must be serious prospects of success
Here we get to the nub of the matter as it stands today.
There were "serious prospects of success" for what was appropriate to do in the fall of 2001 -- which was to destroy the Taliban government in Afghanistan, to install an alternative government with some reasonable level of support, and then to promptly get out -- in, say, 12 months (toward the end of 2002).
This would not have supplied schooling and health care to the children of Afghanistan -- also lacking in many neighbourhoods in the United States, Canada and numerous other countries.
But it would have removed the Taliban and have replaced them, then leaving the field to players motivated to find some sort of post-war accommodation in what was then a much lower-intensity conflict. Specifically, the Karzai government installed in December of 2001 would have been much more strongly motivated to come to some sort of modus vivendi with the Pashtun tribes -- some of whom who were then open to one.
This approach, in summary, is what NDP Leader Jack Layton has consistently proposed -- for which he has been universally reviled by other parties in Parliament and by most of the usual suspects commenting from the sidelines.
What did we do instead?
The United States has led, and Canada has joined, an eight-year intervention on one side of an ever-intesnsifying civil war between the Afghan government and the Pashtun insurgencies, attempting to impose a northern-dominated government on the Pashtuns by force, using an ever-growing army of western troops.
What are the prospects for success?
Don't take it from me.
Or from the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.
Take it from the present American commander, General Stanley McChrystal, whose "initial assessment" should be the next thing Canadian MPs read on this issue, after Woodsworth's speech on the futility and evil of war.
In sum, McCrystal is reporting that the war in Afghanistan as it is currently being conducted will fail, possibly soon.
The details of what McChrystal has to say merit more discussion than we have room for here. But his key points seem to be these: after eight years of war, the Pashtun insurgencies are making steady progress. Specifically, they are targeting Kandahar, the centre of Canada's military mission, and are making significant progress gaining control of it despite the valiant efforts of Canadian and other allied troops. The ham-fisted tactics of most of the Western armies, focused on protecting their own soldiers, along with the incompetence and corruption of the present Afghan government, have alienated the Afghan people. The result is numerous dangerous and perverse outcomes -- like the fact that the Afghan government's own prison system has become a principal recruiting and training ground for the enemy.
Military commanders are not hired to give up. McChrystal wants to succeed. And so this weekend, The New York Times reports, he presented his much-discussed troop request to the Pentagon.
A number of options are apparently set out in McCrystal's plan. But as one Pentagon official put it, the “we’re in this to win” option requires the deployment of an additional 40,000 U.S. troops.
Which brings us to the Catholic Church's final definitional point:
The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated
What would the Americans do with an additional 40,000 troops in Afghanistan? McCrystal outlines his plan in his "initial assessment." In sum, he proposes to use them in a hopefully smarter, more locally-focused, targeted and sustained assault on Pashtun insurgents -- seeking to end the Afghan civil war by force.
What are the prospects for success?
Perhaps the Pashtun insurgents will note that the United States has deployed 40,000 more troops, will conclude that they cannot win against this largely Christian alien enemy fighting in their homeland, and will surrender to the now hopelessly corrupt and electorally-illegitimate Karzai government.
Or perhaps the Pashtun insurgency will find, from among the 42 million people it swims among, another 10,000 to 20,000 insurgents -- remembering British General Sir Harold Brigg's classic anti-insurgency doctrine that the defending force must overwhelmingly outnumber the insurgent force if it hopes to prevail.
If the latter were to happen, then a thoughtful U.S. Defence Secretary might write this:
"Deployment of the kind we have recommended will not guarantee success. Our intelligence estimate is that the present [enemy] policy is to continue to prosecute the war vigorously in the south. They continue to believe that the war will be a long one, that time is their ally, and that they own staying power is superior to ours. They recognize that the U.S. reinforcements signify a determination to avoid defeat, and that more U.S. troops can be expected.
We expect them, upon learning of any U.S. intentions to augment its forces, to boost their own commitment and to test U.S. capacities and will to persevere at a higher level of conflict and casualties... It follows, therefore, that the odds are about even that, even with the recommended deployments, we will be faced with a military standoff at a much higher level..."
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, right, confers with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in this Nov. 23, 1963, file photo.
Which is what Robert McNamara did write on Dec. 7, 1965, in a cover note to President Lyndon Johnson that accompanied a proposal from the U.S. military leadership to massively increase U.S. ground forces in Southern Vietnam (you can find it in the Pentagon Papers, chapter 8, document 108).
As it turned out, McNamara was absolutely correct in this forecast. But it tragically took the United States 10 years, and some three million Vietnamese dead (along with 58,209 Americans killed, 303,635 wounded, and 1,948 missing-in-action), to accept it.
Afghanistan is not South Vietnam, but McNamara's point is applicable. Additional U.S. forces in anything like the kind of numbers currently being discussed can be offset by relatively easy, low-cost recruiting by the Pashtun insurgencies. If so, it is entirely possible that the present conflict will continue indefinitely at a much higher level.
Will it take three million Afghan dead to persuade us of this?
That would not be a just war, as defined by the Roman Catholic Church or by common sense. That would be a new sanguinary quagmire -- another evil and disorder worse than its alternative.
President Obama should therefore say "no thanks, not this time" to the proposal to enlarge the war. Instead he should take the road President Johnson did not in 1965 -- an orderly withdrawal of western forces.
With a remaining understanding:
Forces in Afghanistan who oppose the use of that country as a base for terrorist attacks in other countries should be plentifully and indefinitely supplied and supported.
And the United States and its allies should make clear -- and mean it (i.e. through new agreements and an appropriate permanent base structure) -- that a future Afghan government that provides sanctuary to al-Qaeda will again be destroyed.
One more word from the Catechism:
2313 Non-praeliantes, vulneratos milites et bello captos oportet observare et humaniter tractare. Actiones iuri gentium et eius universalibus principiis deliberate contrariae, et etiam iussiones quae illas praecipiunt, sunt crimina. Caeca quaedam oboedientia non sufficit ut ii, qui se illis submittunt, excusentur. ...
2313 Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely. Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out. ...
In other words, war criminals must be brought to justice.
