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War and Peace

Nov 12, 2008 Editorial

On Sunday last, we commemorated Armistice Day or as some prefer, Remembrance Day. Being so far removed in time from WWI (ninety years) and WWII (sixty-three years) many may be wondering why we insist on keeping the memory of those wars, extensive, as they might have been, alive.
But we need occasions to remind us of the reality of wars and of the reasons why nations embark on them so that perchance we may be able to steer a course that does not land us into such conflagrations from which no nation ever emerges unscathed.
Even as this is being written, a major war is being waged in Iraq, which has lasted even longer than WWII. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, more by fellow Iraqis seizing the opportunity to settle old scores than by the Americans who went in ostensibly to remove a dictator who “had amassed weapons of mass-destruction”.
The Americans have also suffered heavy casualties, not to mention pouring trillions from an economy that ended up running a deficit.
Many Americans questioned its administration for embarking on that war, and even more for widening it. The issue became central in the primaries preceding the US general elections and was only displaced from that position by the financial meltdown that percolated into the real economy just before the actual elections last week.
One of the positives of Barack Obama to the American electorate was his early and unequivocal commitment to end America’s involvement in the war in Iraq and to pull out its troops, within sixteen months of his inauguration.
But this does not mean that once President Obama keeps his word on Iraq, war will be over. Towards the end of July 2007 at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC, he had announced: “When I am president, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world’s most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland.”
Some of the elements of Mr Obama’s strategy, notably the one that focused on “restoring our values”, appeared as open-ended as Mr Bush’s commitment to spread “democracy” across the globe and in Iraq specifically.
Recently, however, the first US president since Nixon who would inherit a nation at war, expanded on his commitment to expanding the war in Afghanistan and possibly into Pakistan: “The greatest threat to that security lies in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where terrorists train and insurgents strike into Afghanistan. We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as President, I won’t.
We need a stronger and sustained partnership between Afghanistan, Pakistan and NATO to secure the border, to take out terrorist camps, and to crack down on cross-border insurgents.
We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more predator drones in the Afghan border region. And we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights.”
In this he appeared to be drawing his sights much tighter and possibly harking to Ron Paul’s admonition that, “Terrorism is a tactic. You can’t have a war against a tactic. It’s deliberately vague and nondefinable in order to justify and permit perpetual war anywhere and under any circumstances.”
The effort to take out Al Qaeda, which has taken responsibility for 9/11, must be disjunctured from any quixotic wider mission of “restoring our values” in Afghanistan.
This is a quagmire for which history has served too many lessons against hoping for success. Gen. Dan McNeill, a recent NATO commander in Afghanistan, said 400,000 troops would be needed to control the country.
And even that number did not help Russia to find peace, perpetual or otherwise. But is ‘control” necessary? We hope that President Obama will adopt the multilateral approach, which he had signalled on the economic crisis, in his quest to move the world from war to peace.

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