When a respected conservative magazine becomes an anti-war
magazine its readers and writers should sit up, take notice, and
examine their consciences. That was the reaction of your High
Spirits columnist to the coruscating editorial attacking “Obama’s
War” (TAS, October 2010) by our distinguished publisher,
Alfred S. Regnery.
Examination of conscience is always a challenging task. It is
particularly difficult when reassessing the reasons for having
given instinctive support to one’s country fighting a war. Yet
there are well-tried tests for such an exercise using theological
and historical tools to make the examination.
I have been trying to apply these tests using the ancient
spiritual writings of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the theory of
the just war, connecting them with two illuminating books published
this fall: Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward (Simon &
Schuster) and Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political
History by Thomas Barfield (Princeton University Press). The
net result of burning the midnight oil on these tomes is that I
have swung firmly behind the pessimistic viewpoint on Afghanistan
championed by our publisher.
Like the present administration’s foreign policy, Christian
theology on the doctrine of the just war seems rather confusing in
2010. Yet the original questions asked by Augustine and Aquinas
still have validity. Is there legitimate authority for waging war?
Is there a just cause? Is there a right intention?
These simple moral issues became obfuscated when the Obama
administration was making its biggest decisions on Afghanistan.
Here is Bob Woodward’s account of one pivotal NSC meeting, chaired
by the president, at which the legitimate authority of the Kabul
government was discussed:
“I understand the government is a criminal syndicate,” said
General Petraeus, “but we need to help achieve and improve
security.”…Biden broke in for a question. “If the government’s a
criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a
difference?” No one recorded an answer in their notes. Biden was
swinging hard at McChrystal, Gates and Petraeus. “What’s the
best-guess estimate for getting things headed in the right
direction?” he asked. “If a year from now there is no demonstrable
progress in governance, what do we do?”
No answer.
Vice President Biden is portrayed throughout Woodward’s book as
a garrulous old uncle who keeps barging in at White House meetings
on Afghanistan with embarrassing questions and monologues that the
rest of the key figures ignore. But theologically Biden was right
on the money with many of the points he kept making. For the most
up-to-date pronouncements on the theory of the just war were
formulated by the U.S. Catholic bishops in 1970. In their doctrinal
statement they built on the foundations set by Augustine and
Aquinas and added extra conditions. The two most important were:
(1) that war must be a last resort. (2) that war must have a
reasonable possibility of success.
Neither condition is anywhere near being fulfilled in the latest
moves in the Afghanistan war. President Obama and his team had
plenty of options before they raised the stakes by committing an
extra 33,000 troops. The idea they were doing this as a “last
resort” looks nonsensical. Even the basic mission statement of the
United States has been oscillating between “defeating” and
“degrading” the Taliban.
As for the “reasonable possibility of success” test, I was
initially hesitant about accepting our publisher’s harsh judgment
in his editorial that “Obama’s Afghan war is a fool’s errand with
virtually no chance of success.” Now, after reading Woodward, I
think Al Regnery has understated his case.
The amoral dysfunctionality of the Obama administration’s
decision-making process on Afghanistan is exposed to look like a
bad episode of The West Wing. All the big players come out
poorly. The military’s top brass fight against each other and leak
to the Washington Post (a.k.a. the ubiquitous Woodward)
with a ruthlessness that leaves the politicians shambling around
like rank amateurs. They in turn think only of elections. The story
(so far) ends with the commander in chief surrendering to his
generals by giving them more than three-quarters of the 40,000
extra troops they demanded. However, to appease his political
aides, Obama’s killer twist is to announce that he has set a date
for starting the withdrawal of those troops-July 2011. This
electioneering gesture is a virtual guarantee of military failure,
ensuring that an unjust war will become an undisguised debacle.
EXTRAORDINARY THOUGH IT SOUNDS, there is not a single mention in
Woodward’s pages of the Afghan people. The tribal chiefs and chiefs
of staff in Washington appear to be far too busy with their own
internecine feuding to bother with the history of the complex
tribes whose lands they are fighting in.
Thomas Barfield makes no such mistake in his historian’s picture
of Afghanistan. He reminds us that the country is a complex
patchwork of Pashtuns, Pathans, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and
Aimaqs, helpfully adding, “but ethnic group definitions are based
on multiple criteria that are often locally idiosyncratic.”
I have some ancestral understanding of these idiosyncrasies. In
the heyday of the Raj my maternal grandfather, Sir John Maffey, was
governor of the North West Frontier Province of British India. My
mother was born in his official residence overlooking the Khyber
Pass. From both of them I heard many stories about the tribal
terrorists who created chaos in the region that is now partly
Pakistan and partly Afghanistan. The essence of those tales was
that most of the tribes were cruel and corrupt double-crossers.
Brutal in their hostilities against each other, they were
nevertheless serpentine in their conspiracies with each other when
it came to undermining any foreign invader or occupying power.
The British came to understand this all too well after the
losses suffered in the Anglo-Afghan wars. But, alas, the first
lesson of history is that the politicians of the present rarely
learn from the mistakes of the past. Today the mix of
chaos-creators around the Khyber Pass is far more lethal than it
was in my grandfather’s day. He too had to deal with the taking of
Western hostages, booby-trap bombs (made with barrels of
gunpowder!), and arms financed by profits from the opium trade. But
the stakes today are immeasurably higher because of Pakistan and
Islamic extremism-two elephants in the situation room that did not
exist when the leaders of the British Empire made their military
decisions.
Sadly, whether you approach it historically, theologically, or
militarily, the quagmire in Afghanistan is destined to get much,
much worse.
I will leave the last word to my mother, whose Afghan nursemaids
had taught her fluent Pashto. Shortly before she passed away in her
95th year she addressed Tony Blair in this language. As he appeared
on her television screen announcing that the British troop
commitment in Helmand province was to be increased to 10,000
soldiers, my mother wagged her finger at the prime minister and
said some angry words in her best Pashto. She translated them as:
“Those Afghans will give us a bloody nose again.”
This is exactly what has been happening and will go on happening
until we find how to disentangle the forces of NATO and the United
States from an increasingly unjust and unwinnable war.
