Reforging the just war in Afghanistan

[CHIMO]

An interesting contradiction lies at the heart of President Obama's revival of just war theory at his Nobel prize acceptance speech. On the one hand, the Afghanistan war is an effort "to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks". His duty to protect his nation does not allow him to "stand idle in the face of threats to the American people". On the other, the war was not "only necessary but morally justified" and, in one of his well-known rhetorical flourishes, Obama appealed to "that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls".

The legitimacy of defensive war when under attack has been a moral and legal constant throughout history and is the basis of international law. Why the appeal, however, to just war theory?

The idea of a just war appeared first in the Roman jus fetiale – a combination of religious rituals and legal regulation – but its first consistent theory was developed by the church, in an attempt to serve Caesar without totally abandoning its pledges to God. For Augustine and Aquinas, just war restores the violated religious and moral order. As a result, medieval theology concentrated on defining the justice of the cause (the jus ad bellum) and neglected the regulation of its conduct (the jus in bello). The moral duty to punish infidel and heretic made the prosecution of war limitless. It justified the unremitting violence of the Crusades, the genocidal attacks on the indigenous people of the newly discovered lands and, later, the atrocities of the religious wars. Obama's religious references were, therefore, fully justified.

The emergence of international law in the 17th and 18th centuries changed this picture. The search for universal moral standards was abandoned and sovereigns rather than priests were recognised as the sole judges of declaring war. A war between sovereigns was "just" because the combatants were formally equal. This secularisation of war was a necessary prerequisite for its legal regulation. Detailed legal rules of proportionality in military action and of discrimination between combatants and civilians gradually developed. But this legalisation of war depended on two crucial exceptions. In the colonial wars against "savages", the constraints of the law of war, premised on a society of Christian sovereigns, did not apply. In a related development, the idea of the "enemies within" emerged. Political and social opposition was seen as a challenge to the social order. Dissidents were treated not as equal opponents but as rebels and bandits to be subjected to police action.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/dec/14/just-war-afghanistan-obama

[Goldstein1984]

1. If "war restores the violated religious and moral order, then

According to Augustine and Aquinas, the religious justification used by Osama bin Laden also meets the requirements of Just War Theory. (He doesn't have a nation state, so the role of a sovereign becomes irrelevant.)

And when cast in this light, then the attacks of 9/11, when compared with the firebombing of Tokyo, Berlin and Dresden, and with the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died, make more sense.

I'm not saying an atrocity ever makes sense or is ever justified--they aren't--only that perspective is a funny thing.

Just throwing it out there for argument. I know it's more complicated than that.

[huntster]

2. If, Then

Just war theory can be meaningfully divided into three parts. These parts are: 1) jus ad bellum, which concerns the justice of resorting to war in the first place; 2) jus in bello, which concerns the justice of conduct within war, after it has begun; and 3) jus post bellum, which concerns the justice of peace agreements and the termination phase of war.

The rules of the first, jus ad bellum, are addressed, first and foremost, to heads of state. Since political leaders are the ones who inaugurate wars, setting their armed forces in motion, they are to be held accountable to jus ad bellum principles. If they fail in that responsibility, then they commit war crimes. In the language of the Nuremberg prosecutors, aggressive leaders who launch unjust wars commit “crimes against peace.” What constitutes a just or unjust resort to armed force is disclosed to us by the rules of jus ad bellum. Just war theory contends that, for any resort to war to be justified, a political community, or state, must fulfill each and every one of the following six requirements:

1. Just Cause
2. Right Intention
3. Proper Authority and Public Declaration
4. Last Resort
5. Probability of Success
6. Proportionality

Just war theory insists all six criteria must each be fulfilled for a particular declaration of war to be justified: it's all or no justification, so to speak. Just war theory is thus quite demanding, as of course it should be, given the gravity of its subject matter. It is important to note that the first three of these six rules are what we might call deontological requirements, otherwise known as duty-based requirements or first-principle requirements. For a war to be just, some core duty must be violated: in this case, the duty not to commit aggression. A war in punishment of this violated duty must itself respect further duties: it must be appropriately motivated, and must be publicly declared by (only) the proper authority for doing so. The next three requirements are consequentialist: given that these first principle requirements have been met, we must also consider the expected consequences of launching a war. Thus, just war theory attempts to provide a common sensical combination of both deontology and consequentialism as applied to the issue of war.

Osama bin Laden failed to meet -- defiantly so, the requirements of Just War Theory.


Orend, Brian, "War", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/war/>.

[MisterP]

3. the idea that American intervention is a humanitarian, altruistic effort to help protect people

"stand up to" world-grabbing totalitarians is as old as Reagan's Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, and Lebanon--and about as incorrect (of course, many Americans still think those five interventions were The Right Thing To Do...)

this combines with the "mission civilatrice," with Lieberman and Lynne Cheney and Sam Harris saying we have to bring Afghanistan "out of the 7th century" (like they're really there) and "from darkness into light" by liberating them from their own wicked, heathen culture. It's just the resurrected ghost of Victorian history-religion-science (each buttressing the other).

and of course, the unprovable assertion that "it would be dangerous to withdraw"

[IndianaGreen]

4. There is nothing 'just' about the war in Afghanistan

anymore than there was anything "just" about our rape of the Philippines during the so-called Philippines Insurrection.