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The Ethics of America's Afghan War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2011

Richard W. Miller
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Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , Summer 2011 , pp. 103 - 131
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Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2011

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References

NOTES

1 In the final lawyerly “terms sheet,” written by the president, which all participants accepted as their final orders, the objectives were said to include “Denying the Taliban access to and control of key population and production centers and lines of communication” and “Degrading the Taliban to levels manageable by the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF)” (Woodward, Bob, Obama's Wars [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010], p. 386Google Scholar). If this means an end to the Taliban's capacity to exercise control for any significant period over any significant part of Afghanistan's sparse highway system (largely, one national ring road), or enabling the ANSF eventually, without foreign support, to protect the authority of the national government in every significant part of Afghanistan, then the U.S. goal is eventual virtual defeat of the Taliban. But perhaps the goal would be reached when the ANSF, with significant residual U.S. military support, can prevent Taliban seizure of the national government and the largest cities and Taliban control of vital aspects of Afghanistan's economy. In subsequent advocacy and explanation, the objective became, if anything, more obscure.

2 See Dorronsoro, Gilles, “Afghanistan Will Only Get Worse,” International Herald Tribune, September 14, 2010, pp. 1fGoogle Scholar. Other illuminating contributions to the consensus include Dorronsoro, , Revolution Unending (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Dorronsoro, , Afghanistan at the Breaking Point (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010)Google Scholar; Giustozzi, Antonio, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Giustozzi, , Empires of Mud: War and Warlords in Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Giustozzi, , Afghanistan: Transition without End (London: Crisis States Research Centre [London School of Economics], 2008)Google Scholar; Shahzad, Syed Saleem [Pakistan Bureau Chief of the Asia Times (Hong Kong)], Pakistan, the Taliban and Dadullah (Bradford, UK: Pakistan Security Research Unit [University of Bradford], 2007)Google Scholar; Fergusson, James, Taliban (London: Bantam Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and the fieldwork collected in Giustozzi, , Decoding the New Taliban (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. See also Dorronsoro, Giustozzi, Robert Crews, Ahmed Rashid, and others, “An Open Letter to President Obama” (December 2010), www.afghanistancalltoreason.com.

3 Admiral Michael Mullen, U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, “Hearing to Receive Testimony on Afghanistan,” December 2, 2009; available at www.senate.gov/~armed_services/Transcripts/2009/12%20December/09-65%20-%2012-2-09.pdf, p. 13.

4 U.S. Department of Defense, “Report [to Congress] on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” April 2010; available at www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/Report_Final_SecDef_04_26_10.pdf, pp. 35–37; and U.S. Department of Defense, “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan,” November 2010; available at www.defense.gov/pubs/November_1230_Report_FINAL.pdf, p. 52. In the earlier report, of December 2009 security ratings, a fourth of key districts had not been assessed. In the March 2010 tabulation, in which only 6 percent of districts were unassessed, 34 percent were rated as dangerous or unsecure. There is no rating by popular support in the November 2010 report. In all of these tabulations, the dangerous/unsecure, Taliban -sympathetic/supporting districts are concentrated in the Pashtun countryside.

5 See Ian Livingston , “Afghanistan Index,” Brookings Institution, February 28, 2011; available at www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Programs/FP/afghanistan%20index/index.pdf, p.10.

6 Woodward, Obama's Wars, p. 243.

7 On the evolution and importance of the network of clerical support, see Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending, ch. 9; Giustozzi,, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop, pp. 43–46.

8 See Center for Policy and Human Development and U. N. Development Program, Afghanistan Human Development Report 2007 (Kabul: University of Kabul, 2007), p. 96Google Scholar; Sanayee Development Organization, Linking Formal and Informal Conflict Resolution Mechanisms in Afghanistan (Kabul: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2008)Google Scholar; available at library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/kabul/05655.pdf.

9 See Giustozzi, Antonio, “Afghan Army Far from Fitting Fit,” Asia Times May 9, 2008Google Scholar; Richburg, Keith, “U.S. Makes Small Strides in Getting Afghan Army Fitting Fit, But Hurdles Remain,” Washington Post, February 1, 2010Google Scholar; International Crisis Group, “A Force in Fragments: Reconstituting the Afghan National Army,” May 12, 2010; available at www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/asia/south-asia/afghanistan/190-a-force-in-fragments-reconstituting-the-afghan-national-army.aspx, pp. 7, 10–12, 19–20.

10 See Human Rights Watch, “Military Assistance to The Afghan Opposition,” October 2001; available at www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/afghan-bck1005.htm, p. 4.

11 See Rivais, Rafaele, “Ce documentaire qui accuse les vainqueurs de crimes de guerre en Afghanistan,” Le Monde, June 13, 2002Google Scholar; Gall, Carlotta, “Witnesses Say Many Taliban Died in Custody,” New York Times, December 11, 2001Google Scholar; Gall with Landler, Mark, “Prison Packed with Taliban Raises Concern,” New York Times, January 5, 2002Google Scholar.

12 DeYoung, Karen, “U.S. Official Resigns over Afghan War,” Washington Post, October 27, 2009Google Scholar, and Matthew P. Hoh, “Letter of Resignation,” September 10, 2009, p. 2; available at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf.

13 International Council on Security and Development, Afghanistan Transition: Missing Variables (2010), available at www.icosgroup.net, p. 48. In Helmand and Kandahar provinces as a whole, this was the response of 45 percent. Asked whether they supported or opposed a military operation against the Taliban in their area, 55 percent in the two provinces as a whole chose “Oppose,” a proportion rising to 78 percent in the two districts that were current centers of counterinsurgency (p. 19). Asked “Do you think that working with foreign [i.e., U.S.-NATO] forces is right or wrong?” 58 percent in the whole survey said it was wrong, a proportion rising to 79 percent in the districts in which current fighting was intense (p. 24).

14 See, for example, Dorronsoro, , Fixing a Failed Strategy in Afghanistan (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009); p. 16Google Scholar; Barfield, Thomas, Afghanistan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 327Google Scholar.

15 ABC News, “Afghanistan Poll: Where Things Stand 2010,” December 6, 2010; available at abcnews.go.com/Politics/Afghanistan/afghanistan-poll-things-stand-2010/story?id=12277743, and the accompanying ABC News/BBC/ARD/Washington Post Poll, “Afghan Views Worsen as Setbacks Counter U.S. Progress in Helmand,” questions 9, 25; available at www.langerresearch.com/uploads/1116a1Afghanistan.pdf.

16 See ABC News, “Afghanistan Poll: Where Things Stand 2010”; “Afghan Views Worsen as Setbacks Counter U.S. Progress in Helmand,” pp. 54–55; and “Report on Methodology”; United Nations Development Program, International Human Development Indicators, “Adult Literacy Rate”; available at hdrstats.undp.org/en/indicators; U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, IRIN News, “Afghanistan: Family-Related Determinants of Poverty,” April 8, 2010; available at www.irin.news.org.

17 See Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War,” Military Review [U.S. Army Combined Arms Center], p. 6; Livingston et al., “Afghanistan Index,” pp. 7–10; Tilghman, Andrew, “Illiteracy, Desertion Slow Afghan Training,” Army Times, August 24, 2010Google Scholar; ICOS, Afghanistan Transition: Missing Variables, p. 35.

18 See Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending, chapter 10 for a brief, cogent narrative.

19 See Shahzad, Pakistan, the Taliban and Dadullah, p. 6; Barfield, Afghanistan, pp. 344–45.

20 See Giustozzi, Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop, pp. 27f.; Shahzad, Pakistan, the Taliban and Dadullah, pp. 4f. In the October 2010 ICOS survey, 57 percent say that Pashtuns “should have their own independent country (Pashtunistan),” p. 32.

21 Woodward, Obama's Wars, pp. 71, 162

22 United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict 2010 (Kabul: UNAMA, 2011), pp. 21–35Google Scholar.

23 In addition, 257 deaths were reported without attribution to either side, for a total of 2,777 civilian deaths. See ibid., pp. x, 1–20 and also UNAMA, Mid Year Report 2010: Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (Kabul: UNAMA, 2010), pp. 1–11Google Scholar. UNAMA's classifications of victims, which follow respectable usage in the United States, are potentially controversial. Except for those harmed while “taking an active part in hostilities,” UNAMA counts as civilians people who are active in the central government's effort to sustain the political order it seeks to impose, including “public servants who are not used for a military purpose in terms of fighting the conflict . . . political figures or office holders . . . civilian police personnel who are not being used as combatants” (Annual Report 2010, Glossary). Prior to its recent collaboration with AIHRC, UNAMA's glossaries explicitly included in this category “members of the military who are not being used in counter insurgency operations and not taking a direct part in hostilities including when they are off-duty” (Mid Year Report 2010, Glossary). U.S.-NATO forces do not seek to exempt from attack Taliban political commissars, shadow governors, or those mainly engaged in enforcing the writs and judgments of the Taliban in the territories they control. Their death or injury seems to play no role in UNAMA-AIHRC tallies of civilian casualties. A more stringent specification of the “civilian” category would reduce the tally, but would also increase the salience of the question of how deaths outside this especially protected category should figure in the moral assessment of an intervention.

24 See United Nations Development Programme, “International Human Development Indicators,” taking current rates to be the latest available estimates, for 2008; available at hdrstats.undp.org.

25 Ibid.; Bank, World, World Development Indicators 2010 (Washington, D.C., 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Table 2.19. Statistical estimates for extremely poor countries are always rough, and vary from source to source. For example, in addition to its main tabulation, UNICEF provides alternative statistics according to which there has been a reduction in Afghan under five mortality since 1990 (at essentially the same rate from 1990 to 2000 as from 2000 to 2009), and Afghanistan is not the world's worst. But Afghanistan is close to worst, very slightly better-off than Chad and tied for second-worst with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its rate of improvement is much lower than the norm for least-developed countries. See www.childinfo.org/mortality_ufmrcountrydata.php.

26 International Committee of the Red Cross, Afghanistan: Opinion Survey and In-Depth Research, 2009 (Geneva: ICRC, 2009)Google Scholar, Sample Profile, Question3A/B, Question 5.

27 icasualties.org, tabulating tolls from Coalition governments.

28 Agence France Presse, “Over 10,000 Died in Afghan Violence in 2010,” January 6, 2011.

29 Jason Straziuso, “Record 151 U.S. Troops Die in Afghanistan in 2008,” Associated Press, December 31, 2008.

30 Lamb, Christina, “Afghan Surge Is Proving Effective,” The Australian, November 15, 2010Google Scholar. See also Kimberley Dozier, “Petraeus Touts Special Operations Missions in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, September 3, 2010.

31 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Iraq,” December 1, 2009; available at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan, p. 3.

32 Cogent arguments along these lines, supported by U.S. intelligence findings, are a recurrent theme In Woodward's narrative of the Obama administration's policy review. See Woodward, Obama's Wars, pp. 70f., 153f., 166–8, 170, 187, 191. See also, Dorronsoro, Fixing a Failed Strategy, pp. 27–29Google Scholar; Biddle, Stephen, “Is It Worth It?: The Difficult Case for War in Afghanistan,” The American Interest, July/August 2009, pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

33 Despite their general opposition to the organizationally separate Pakistani Taliban, 79 percent of Pakistanis in a recent poll want the U.S.-NATO mission in Afghanistan to end now, and 88 percent believe that the United States definitely (78 percent) or probably (10 percent) has a goal of weakening and dividing the Islamic world. See Program on International Policy Attitudes (University of Maryland), “Pakistani Public Opinion on the Swat Conflict, Afghanistan, and the US”; available at www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/jul09/WPO_Pakistan_Jul09_quaire.pdf, Questions 3, 10d-US8, 20, 34a, 37a.

34 On the actual practice of women's rights in Afghanistan, see United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Harmful Traditional Practices and Implementation of the Law on Elimination of Violence against Women in Afghanistan (Kabul: UNAMA, December 2010)Google Scholar. The report notes that police and courts loyal to Kabul themselves impose repressive strictures. Especially in the countryside, they pervasively ignore laws protecting women's rights. But traditional strictures are enforced by punishing women for “moral crimes,” such as running away from brutal husbands. One half of women in government jails are imprisoned for “moral crimes.” See pp. 61–62. See also Barfield, Afghanistan, pp. 202, 262.

35 Concerns about these “new crazy guys” are vigorously expressed by experienced Taliban leaders in Tom Coghlan, “The Taliban in Helmand: An Oral History,” Antonio Giustozzi, ed., Decoding the New Taliban, p. 133. Linschoten, Alex Strick van and Kuehn, Felix trenchantly describe this dangerous side-effect of the counter-insurgency in Separating the Taliban from al-Qaeda (New York: NYU Center on International Cooperation, 2011), pp. 9–11Google Scholar.

36 Through the start of 2011, the United States has only publicly supported negotiations between the Karzai administration and Taliban commanders which are basically aimed at their surrender and reintegration. A Wikileaked cable from the U.S. embassy in New Delhi on January 28, 2010 reported assurances to the Indian Foreign Secretary by Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan that “the United States cannot be party” to any “political negotiations designed to give Taliban elements a share of power . . . because the Taliban is allied with al Qaeda and the social programs of the Taliban are unpalatable.” See “U.S. Embassy Cables: No Power-Sharing with the Taliban, Holbrooke Pledges,” Guardian, December 2, 2010, p. 3. Subsequently, while the U.S. sometimes facilitated further informal discussions, Holbrooke publicly insisted that all talks “follow the ‘red lines’ that are absolutely critical because we have a strategic interest here,” including red lines that seemed to preclude genuine accommodation (“anyone deciding to rejoin the political system in Afghanistan has to . . . lay down their arms and participate in the constitution with particular attention to role of . . . women.”) See Erik Kirschbaum, “Holbrooke Warns against Exaggerating Afghan Talks,” Reuters, October 11, 2010.

37 Without shrinking the broad swathe of districts in the Pashtun South and East that UNAMA rates as “very high risk” because of insurgent activity, the fall 2010 offensive was associated with a net upgrading of fourteen districts elsewhere to “high risk.” See Trofimov, Yaroslav, “Afghan Security Deteriorates,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2010Google Scholar.

38 The 2007 killing of the chief Taliban commander in Afghanistan, Mullah Dadullah, is a significant past example. See Shahzad, Pakistan, the Taliban and Dadullah; “Afghan Taleban Commander Killed.” BBC News, May 13, 2007. On the continued endangerment of opportunities for a political settlement, see van Linkschoten and Kuehn, Separating the Taliban from al-Qaeda, pp. 9–11.

39 I am greatly indebted to Gary Langer, Director of Langer Research Associates, which conducted the poll, for this information about provincial responses. In the country as a whole, 59 percent wanted U.S.-NATO forces to leave sooner if the security situation got much better, while 41 percent wanted these forces to leave sooner if it got much worse. These responses about pace followed a question about when withdrawal should start. Nationwide, 27 percent preferred that forces begin to leave in the summer of 2011, 28 percent said that they should leave sooner than that, while 17 percent said they should stay longer, and 26 percent volunteered “depends on the security situation.” Nationwide, 65 percent said that they were willing (37 percent, very willing) to “accept an agreement between the central government and the Taliban.” See ABC News, “Afghanistan Poll: Where Things Stand 2010”, and the ABC News/BBC/ARD/Washington Post Poll, “Afghan Views Worsen as Setbacks Counter U.S. Progress in Helmand,” questions 31, 36–38.

40 Woodward, Obama's Wars, p. 247.

41 Ibid., p. 127.

42 U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, “Hearing to Receive Testimony on Afghanistan,” December 2, 2009, pp. 6f.; Gates, Robert, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar.

43 See Wines, Michael, “China Willing to Spend Big on Afghan Commerce,” New York Times, December 30, 2009Google Scholar; World Bank, World Development Indicators 2010, Table 4.2.

44 National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, memorandum of February 7, 1965, in Department of Defense, The Pentagon Papers: The Senator Gravel Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, n.d.), iii, p. 690.

45 Gelb, Leslie, “Four More Years of War,” Daily Beast, October 24, 2010, p. 1Google Scholar.

46 Gelb, “Necessity, Choice, and Common Sense,” Foreign Affairs 88.3 (May/June 2009), pp. 72, 56.

47 Walt, “High Cost, Low Odds,” The Nation, October 21, 2009.

48 Walt, , Taming American Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), p. 219Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., p. 41.

50 See McMahan, , “Just Cause for War,” Ethics & International Affairs 19 (2005), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As a historical example approximating unjust yet justified war, he offers Russia's invasion of Finland to create coastal defenses needed to keep Leningrad from being easy prey to Nazi Germany.

51 The previous analogy between an attack within a war and a war within a project of maintaining a balance of power suggests that this burden of justification might not require a strong warrant for believing that the grave losses would solely result from a failure to violently draw the line in the particular country in question.

52 For a much fuller account of relevant episodes, see Miller, Richard W., Globalizing Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 166–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998, p. 76 [but not in the shorter edition sent to the United States]; “How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen,” Counterpunch, October 8, 2001, www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski/html (whole interview in English translation).

54 See Human Rights Watch, “Military Assistance to the Afghan Opposition”; Rashid, Ahmed, “Analysing Anarchic Afghanistan,” Third World Quarterly 16 (1995), p. 737 (estimate of over 100,000 killed as a result of civil conflict from mid-1992 through 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baldauf, Scott, “Life under Taliban Cuts Two Ways,” Christian Science Monitor, September 20, 2001 (estimate of 400,000 civilian deaths in the 1990s as a result of the humanitarian crisis due to the civil war)Google Scholar.

55 Engelberg, Stephen, “Iran and Iraq Got ‘Doctored’ Data, U.S. Officials Say,” New York Times, January 12, 1987, p. A1Google Scholar.

56 Descriptions of the objective by a senior Air Force officer “who played a central role in the air campaign but declined to be named” and an unnamed “Air Force planner,” reported in Barton Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq,” Washington Post, June 23, 1991, p. A1. Gellman attributes similar characterizations of this goal of “long-term leverage,” in less pithy formulations, to Colonel John A. Warden III, then the deputy director of strategy, doctrine, and plans for the Air Force.

57 See Ginsberg, Thomas, “War's Toll: 158,000 Iraqis and a Researcher's Position,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 5, 2003, p. A05Google Scholar; Cockburn, Andrew and Cockburn, Patrick, Out of the Ashes (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 23, 38, 39Google Scholar; Boustany, Nora, “Violence Reported Spreading in Iraq; Army Units Clash,” Washington Post, March 6, 1991, p. A26Google Scholar; Boustany, , “U.S. Troops Witness Iraqi Attack on Town in Horror, Frustration,” Washington Post, March 31, 1991, p. A20Google Scholar.

58 See Richard Garfield, “Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi Children from 1990 through 1998” (1999); available at www.casi.org.uk/info/garfield/dr-garfield.html; Ali, Mohamed, Blacker, John and Jones, Gareth, “Annual Mortality Rates and Excess Deaths of Children under Five in Iraq, 1991–98,” Population Studies 57 (2003): 217–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Joy, “Cool War,” Harper's Magazine, November 2002Google Scholar, www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html.

59 See Burnham, Gilbert, Lafta, Riyadh, Doocy, Shannon and Roberts, Les, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” The Lancet 368 (2006): 1421–8 (mid-point estimate of 654,965 excess deaths in the forty months after the invasion, 601,027 of them violent)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Alkhuzai, Amir, “Violence-related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006,” New England Journal of Medicine 2008 (358): 484–93 (entailing about 400,000 excess deaths in the same period, with an estimate of 151,000 violent deaths, after attempted compensation for the omission of 10 percent of the initial sample because of inadequate local security)Google ScholarPubMed; Opinion Research Business, “New analysis ‘confirms’ 1 million+ Iraq casualties,” January 28, 2008; available at www.opinion.co.uk/Documents/Revised%20Casulaty%20Data%20-%20Press%20release.doc (based on a poll shortly after the fourth and most violent post-invasion year, asking Iraqis how many members of their household had died as a result of violence in the conflict since 2003, yielding an estimate of about a million such deaths).

60 See Gibson, James William, The Perfect War (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), pp. 229–30.Google Scholar; Lewy, Guenter, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 442–53Google Scholar.

61 See Przeworski, Adam and Vreeland, James Raymond, “The Effect of IMF Programs on Economic Growth,” Journal of Development Economics 62 (2000), p. 297CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dreher, Axel, “IMF and Economic Growth,” World Development 34 (2006), p. 779CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Przeworski and Vreeland analyze data for structural adjustment in 135 developing countries from 1970 through 1990. Dreher analyzes data for structural adjustment in 98 developing countries from 1970 through 2000.