Morality and War: The Fall of Kabul

Morality and War: The Fall of Kabul

By Joel Levin

As we received news from the actual and not metaphorical front, that is, the military situation, then evacuation in Kabul, we were instantly tempted to make a variety of moral judgments. It is quite reasonable and expected for us – as moral individuals, as autonomous persons and as functioning members of a society that is complex and diverse – to assess our conduct and thinking when human lives are at stake. After all – and this ‘after all’ ought to come earlier in the discussion than it often does and not just be a statistical afterthought – 250,000 people, men, women and children with their own lives and loves, projects and dreams, talent and humanity, family, friends and aspirations have died because of this war. Any flight from that reality makes us less human. Any flight forfeits our claim to be concerned about that which we proclaim dear, the safety and liberty we enjoy as individuals and the justice and prosperity we want as a society. Moral judgments we make now about Kabul are drawn in light of those values. Yet the need to make them seems to have come upon us suddenly and unexpectedly, and we tend to make them instinctively and on the spot. That might mean they resemble so many other instant judgments: rash, ill-considered, imprudent, emotional, and worthy of future reconsiderations. That, however, hardly makes them wrong. Sometimes those instant judgments are are clearly right, clearly justified, and clearly worthy.

Here, as we watch the tail end of a 20 year war, we can recall that there have been some successes: removing some of the perpetrators of the 911 slaughter, improving the lives of a large number of Afghanis, particularly women, and paving the way for a more prosperous future society, particularly as to rebuilding infrastructure, and more hopeful futures for the people, at least as to improving tolerance and education. Nevertheless, the failures loom larger, as essentially, the war against the Taliban, 20 brutal years along with thousands of lives gone and billions of dollars gone, is now lost. One could be dismissive and suggest that anytime wars are lost (and someone generally loses them), we are apt to say that the sacrifice of individuals in the losing cause has been wasted. That is a moral judgment that is clearly mistaken.

One could also, continuing to be dismissive, suggest that the exit strategy, which allows further slaughter at the end, is inevitable and, further, as always seems to happen in wars (and one can list them from at least Roman times through the Vietnam War), war everywhere for everyone, involves the unnecessary wholesale loss of lives. Wars waste lives. They waste them as they go, and they waste them at the end, and as we continue to learn, they waste them later when societies taken over by new leadership, or not taken over at all and subject to warlords and gangs, witness slaughter everywhere. In fact, almost all the moral niceties that we worry about – the concerns about individuals being accorded the right degree of autonomy and equality, the right array of liberties, the proper measure of corrective and distributive justice, and the respect of individualized treatment that takes into account each of our special qualities, both the good and bad – are casualties of war. That is, war is fundamentally and inherently an immoral activity and applying moral reasoning to it seems to be a contradiction.

We might want to make a few distinctions here. There are certainly activities that are central to war, and they involve the antithesis of the ethically fundamental: killing and capturing combatants, often torturing or killing them, taking territory, and then holding that territory against people who are hostile to the taking. What is not central, or at least necessary to war, is mass killing, crimes against humanity, torture, the use of chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, and genocide. In that these activities occur, they are often considered to be war crimes, but we might want to properly think of them as crimes accompanying war, but not part of the essential mission of war.

There is a bad taste in all of this, as worrying about how prisoners of war are treated – given enough food, clothing, health care, and other basic necessities – when their comrades are being killed seems to be worrying about a distinction unworthy of a difference, perhaps being worried about the wrong thing altogether. However, war crimes aside, the other large area of moral literature about war is analyzing just and unjust wars.

The problem here is in locating a just war. Obviously, one should not fight a war unnecessarily, and one should be extremely reluctant to engage in one. There are, though, common complaints by nation states against each other and they seem to be the trigger for virtually every war there is: territorial ambition or past injustices, the search for more resources and wealth and trade advantages, treaty obligations that pull nations reluctantly into wars, even principles protecting democracy or human rights or co-religionists or those with ethnic ties, or principles of international law, all play a role in wars. However, none of these reasons, without more, rise to the level of just wars. While just war theory began life as part of Christian philosophy, particularly as set out by Thomas Aquinas, it has been adopted by a wide number of theorists (the best probably is Michael Waltzer, the most critical is Noam Chomsky), who, not surprisingly, have put forward a large array of just war theories. These theories in general call for any war to be based on a just cause and that cause being the reason and not a pretext for war, to be properly begun by the legal processes of the country, to being a last resort, to likely be successful, and to be fought in the least harmful way. Every criterion is controversial, but even when met, they seem almost irrelevant to political reality. Mainly, we see immoral wars starting for immoral purposes and conducted immorally as a matter of course.

America, in Afghanistan (although clearly not in in Iraq), may well be on the right side of just war theory, or at least it started out that way. However, war almost never goes well ethically. Even that paradigm of a just war in its onset and conduct, W.W. II, presents severe ethical lapses by America, from the bombing of civilian cities of little military value or with enormous vulnerable civilian populations from Dresden to Hiroshima to Nagasaki, to individualized atrocities, including, according to J. Robert Lilly’s Taken by Force, 11,040 rapes by US soldiers of German women alone. Even that aside, and that should not be put aside, the issues we see today of war’s end – the feeling of being in a lost cause, the waste of persons and wealth, and the abandonment of victims (particularly women) to the pernicious inclinations of the winners – all stand apart from the issues of international treaties and just war theory. How should we address them, or even begin to address them?

This Afghan war is large, terrible, unwieldy, complex, and full of moral misconduct. In short, it is typical, if not for America, at least for war. What we ought to recognize, given the fundamental evil and inhumanity of war, though, in this hour of reproach and regret, are the following: continuing wars rarely make them better; lives are wasted on the losing side, but they are also wasted in a real sense in the winning side; exiting or ending a war often fails to end the bloodshed, it often enhances it; wars are unpredictable, making reproach and the chest-thumping valid but sadly commonplace; and, finally, the victor and the vanquished are not always who they seem. Each of these points is worthy of and already fills volumes, but a few comments here in the context of Afghanistan might be worth stating.

Wars of any length have an ebb and flow. America might be thought to have been ahead early in Afghanistan, having chased Al-Qaeda and displaced the Taliban. But early ahead is not necessarily always ahead later. France won all the battles in the early Napoleonic Wars, as did the Germans in W.W. II, the Americans in the Korean War, the Confederacy in the Civil War, and the British in the American Revolutionary War. None enjoyed a happy ending. The tradition of uncertainty, dating at least to the Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.E.), where 300 troops under King Leonidas of Sparta dramatically and against all odds turned back Xerxes’ legendary million soldier Persian army, and changed, perhaps once and for all, the likelihood of Europe becoming a colony under Asian (if not its own European) despotism. In any war, there will be optimists and pessimists at the onset, and, depending on how the war goes, some will be able to say that they were right and everyone should have known it and listened to them. However, that is largely unjustified, perhaps reminiscent of those people who pick early stocks (often irrationally, perhaps thinking against all odds that Google would beat Yahoo in internet search domination) and later say any fool could have seen that they were right. Given the large number of people who make predictions, and given the fact that many of the predictions are not well-founded, but turn out to be true anyway, stocks, like wars, are easy to second-guess, but hard to predict. Nassim Taleb demonstrated that, more or less, about predictions in the stock market in his book, Fooled by Randomness, while endless scholarly volumes of history proves it again and again with war after war.

The reasons for reversal and disappointment are large, but here often focus on the unwillingness of individual Afghan soldiers to continue the fight, not a widely expected attitude. Our inability to predict that mindset early on of a social group in stressful situation and physical danger who live for years in the most treacherous of scenarios was devastating. One is reminded here of the analysis provided in Leo Tolstoy’s iconic novel, War and Peace, on the French invasion of Russia in the wars of the early 19th century. He attributed victory to the attitude of each and every individual soldier on the days of fighting. “A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.” Almost anything and everything can change a mindset. The change is easy to miss.

A different criticism arises in the manner of the evacuation of Kabul. In the exodus from the Afghan conflict generally, there is the justified concern of wasting American lives. The military logistics aside, two moral points need to be raised. We might begin with the BLM mantra that even the lives of the least well off and the most oppressed and poorly treated have value. No group’s lives are privileged. About 1% of the casualties in this war are Americans, and the other 99% involve people who are just as dead and gone as Americans. They clearly deserve the same degree of mourning and regret, particularly in light of the basis of our own American political ideology and justification as a nation rooted in the Enlightenment notion of equality. Even if that proclamation of equality was originally hypocritical, often hypocrisy pays tribute to the aspirational. “All men are created equal“ was a variation of the greater watchword of the Enlightenment put forward by Immanuel Kant that individuals should be treated only as ends and never as means. Given that, and given that the losses are staggering, it is not clear why any special consideration should be given to a small number of them without further justification.

The other moral point takes into account who these fatalities are, whether soldiers or civilians, conscripts or volunteers, whether tribal advocates or believers of a particular religion. Most all of them are, by any notion, pawns of more powerful actors, victims of religion or ideology or tribalism or simply bad information, young and naive soldiers, luckless and helpless civilians. People are people, and all count the same. George Bernard Shaw, asked to sign a letter condemning the bombing of civilians as opposed to soldiers during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), refused, making that point clearly. “The notion that the killing of civilians, women and children is worse than the killing of soldiers can be held only by horrified people who have not thought out the subject.” We might conclude that all loss is tragic, winner or loser, and to have fought for a losing cause is not necessarily the more so. The Greeks thought doing a thing of value well was the essence of virtue, and that ought to be enough for anyone. Perhaps it is.

The particulars of the last days of the pre-Taliban return to Kabul have a mesmerizing, can’t-stop-watching-the-car-wreck aspect to them. That said, the last days of war often involve individuals seeking revenge, and take on a weary inevitability. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s evocative film about Italian fascism, The Conformist, the final scene involves such revenge, a denunciation of a former homosexual lover as a homosexual (true) and a fascist (false) to a monarchist crowd set to lynch anyone with either of these qualities. The victors typically seek out their earlier adversaries, often treating them in the most brutal manner. Of course, such brutality requires moral condemnation. In Kabul, it seems clear the Americans, with better preparation, could have taken in more people and flown more out, but it was also clear that much larger swaths of the population, from women to members of rival tribes to entrepreneurs (however small time) to the educated, were doomed and would be doomed no matter how much preparation the Americans made.

There is a more important concern here. The end of a war is rarely the end of war. Fighting continues in a number of ways, from rebellion against the victors to bands of soldiers from the losing side creating local havoc to ethnic repression and cleansing to new wars, civil and revolutionary. Take just one example, World War I, the war to end all wars, and consider what happened after the November 11, 1918 Armistice. As Robert Gerwarth sets out in The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, the conclusion of the original war triggered five years of related new wars: the Russian Revolution and Civil Wars, the Greco-Turkish War, the Polish-Russian War, the Romanian-Hungary War, the fascist coup in Italy, the Bulgarian coup, the Turkish War of Independence, and the trigger of (accelerated) nationalist conflict in Ireland, India, Israel, the Middle East, China and much of the European colonial empires. The mass killing was horrendous, but now only dimly remembered. Yet, to take but one example, in the German-Baltic conflict of 1919, rape followed by femicide was a recurring theme. “The Baltic Germans showed no mercy. They did not see their youth or their charm. They only saw the face of the devil as they were beating, shooting, stabbing them to death, wherever they showed. On 22 May 1919, four hundred rifle women were lying in their blood in the streets of Riga. Callously the nailed boots of the marching German volunteers stepped over them.” (Quoted by Gerwarth, p. 74). Wars have bad immediate endings often followed by disastrous long-term, worse outcomes. America won W.W. I, and yet all this happened. Could Afghanistan really have been better?

All this suggests the unpredictability of events and the dubious ethical conduct of various parties to conflict. That is not to suggest false equivalency. By any measure, Americans in World War II were consistently and relentlessly doing the right thing, while the Germans and the Japanese were consistently and relentlessly doing the wrong thing. However, America’s most valuable ally, Joseph Stalin and the U.S.S.R., consistently did the wrong thing and continued to do so after the war, while America’s enemies, Germany and Japan, quickly became its foremost (along with England and Canada) postwar allies. Moreover, in that war, it is fair to say there were any number of ambiguous and shady characters from Francisco Franco in Spain to Antonio Salazar in Portugal to Juan Peron in Argentina to the entire Kuomintang in China. Trying to do any kind of careful ethical analysis, and figure out the moral niceties that we think of when we analyze such issues as euthanasia and end of life, abortion and the beginning of life, the proper punishment for individuals, the scope of freedom of speech, environmental sanity and protecting future generations, freedom of religion and freedom of press: these all seem of little point when these larger conflicts come into play.

Of course, if war is too important to be left to the generals, it is too ethically fraught to be left to either the soldiers or the politicians. It is unquestionably a good moral idea to ban certain kinds of weaponry, to protect civilians, to force dispute resolution to arbitration, to put a high bar before allowing any armed conflict to be initiated, to protect minorities and women, and, in general, to guard against anything that might look in any way like a war crime. However, those tragically seem to be of only modest scope given the moral insanity of war. While we should be careful about worrying about how to exit any armed conflict in a manner that would minimize the last minute loss of life, the greater and graver concern is the continuation of a war of dubious success with the certainty of large numbers of atrocities and fatalities followed by the day coming when, at the end, there will be the final fatalities anyway.

In all this, including the video and the memory of the harrowing last moments of flight from the Saigon Embassy in 1975, we also have the example of the North Vietnamese generally, an enemy we vilified, often rightly for their misconduct toward civilians, mistreatment of their prisoners, and ruthlessness toward the enemies. Today they are our trading partners, our allies against the Chinese, the victors over the barbaric Khmer Rouge of the Cambodian killing fields, and a favored tourist destination. The Taliban now seems much worse than last generation’s Vietcong or North Vietnamese (and one cannot minimize the Taliban’s degradation and punishment of women, religious intolerance, massacre of civilians, intolerance of critics, and human trafficking), and radical Islam more incorrigible than Marxist communism. But, as we have seen, we ought to be extremely cautious about predictions that arise during and immediately after war, and even more cautious about engaging in war itself.