Dru, your comments here remind me of an interview I saw on CBC Newsworld the other day. Some dude from the NDP (not an MP, a party activist, I think) was talking about Afghanistan and Iraq and how the US shouldn't (or shouldn't have, as the case may be) use force. Don Martin pressed him, "So, if the Taliban were to regroup and try to wrestle for control of the whole country again, the US should just retreat?" The NDP guy responded, "Well, no. But the use of force is never justified. Not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, never." (Again, I am paraphrasing.)

Now, I don't know if you hold this position, but it is at least implied in your comments above. Which raises the question: though Kabul has control of only a small part of the country, if that control were threatened by the Taliban once again, what should we do? It's not an easy question, but I (personally) haven't been satisfied with a lot of the answer I've heard. Wondered what you thought ...

Anyway, I like the re-design of your site. Andy

hi Andy,

Thanks for commenting. I tend to be a little bit flip when I post to misnomer, so you're right to take me to task :>

I don't believe that the use of force is never justified. Terrorizing a country until it switches to the government that the US thinks would be better is most certainly not justifiable. That's the demonstrable aim of material like this.

War--especially the kind that is conducted with 500 pound bombs, kills a lot of people, injures more, cuts off essential humanitarian aid, and creates hundreds of thousands of starving refugees--just cannot be said to be good for the people of a country.

As for your question, I don't think that we should have gone in guns blazing in the first place (much less executing and torturing POWs and taking them prisoner illegally). But now that we're in there, commited to a course of action that made no sense in terms of a) helping Afghanistan or b) curbing terrorist activity, you're right, it is a tough question.

In terms of (a), the US spent $300,000,000 on bombs dropped in Afghanistan alone (before December '01). Now, I'm pretty much convinced that the approx. $1 billion that was used to fight that war could have been used in a way that was much, much better for everyone involved. As for getting rid of terrorists, police action would have been much more effective.

The Taliban declared that they would hand over any terrorists that the US would identify, but the US never even tried that course of action, choosing instead to go in bombing. They ignored the saner alternative in favour of a show of force, and a huge profit opportunity for the defense dept. And as one of the news stories linked above notes, bombing a population into submission doesn't win a lot of friends. It creates new populations of desperate, pissed off people who are willing to repay terror with terror, or at least join the Taliban (who are, in some ways, less barbarous than the northern alliance types.)

Minimally, war should be a last resort, or an exercise in level-headed calculation across the board. The reasons for it should be examined, the people who would be affected by it interviewed, the number of civilian casualties estimated and then documented. A full examination should be carried out of who profits from it, and how much. Most importantly, all alternatives should be examined and then exhausted before people are killed.

These seem to me to be the minimal conditions for military action that isn't abhorrent.

I feel morbidly obligated to add that the US's military action in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Kosovo, Iraq, and now Afghanistan came nowhere close to meeting any of the conditions I described above.