From The New Republic.
Indicative excerpt:
"In other words, this war is moral because it protects American lives. But it is also moral because it protects Afghan lives. For the number of innocent Afghans who have died in America's war to overthrow the Taliban is dwarfed by the number who will die if the Taliban remain in power."
TRB FROM WASHINGTON
Life Support
by Peter Beinart
Post date 11.08.01 | Issue date 11.19.01
In the eyes of the world, we are told, the United States is losing the moral high ground in the war against terrorism. The reason: We are killing innocent Afghans. And if we kill innocent Afghans in retaliation for the killing of innocent Americans, how are we different from the Taliban?
One obvious difference, of course, is intent: For the United States, killing civilians is a tragic by-product of war, not its purpose. But the question suggests another difference: We are killing innocent Afghans "in retaliation." Even if--God forbid--the United States killed as many people in Afghanistan as it lost at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we would still not be the Taliban's equivalent because we kill in self-defense. Killing close to 5,000 Americans on September 11 wasn't necessary to save Afghan lives. But killing 5,000 Afghans could indeed be necessary to save American lives--if that were the only way to destroy a terrorist government that, if allowed to endure, would surely kill more Americans in the future. America may have killed more German civilians in World War II than Germany killed American civilians, but the American government's continued existence didn't threaten German lives, whereas the German government's continued existence mortally threatened American lives. The reason a government kills matters, because it determines whether that government will kill again.
In other words, this war is moral because it protects American lives. But it is also moral because it protects Afghan lives. For the number of innocent Afghans who have died in America's war to overthrow the Taliban is dwarfed by the number who will die if the Taliban remain in power.
How do we know? First, by estimating how many Afghan civilians the United States has killed. The Taliban say 1,000. But they won't allow foreign journalists to independently verify that number, which offers a clue as to how reliable it is. The Pentagon says the death toll is far less. The best guess I've heard comes from Major Charles Heyman, editor of the military journal Jane's World Armies. His estimate, based on conversations with aid agencies, is 50.
Assume it's ten times that high. Then consider the events of August 8, 1998. On that day, the Taliban took Mazar-e-Sharif from the Northern Alliance. They entered a multi-ethnic city with a substantial population of Hazaras, a Persian-speaking, Shia minority clustered near the Iranian border. The Taliban despised the Hazaras--first, because the Hazaras had fiercely opposed their rule, and second, because the Sunni Taliban considered the Shia Hazaras to be infidels.
And so the conquering Taliban governor addressed the Hazaras from the loudspeaker of a city mosque. According to Human Rights Watch, Mullah Manon Niazi declared that, "Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shia. They are kofr [infidels].... If you do not show your loyalty, we will burn your houses and we will kill you. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan." With that, Taliban soldiers went door to door. They looked for people with Asiatic features, supposedly a Hazara characteristic. Hazaras were told to convert on the spot--and say a Sunni prayer as proof. Those who did not were killed immediately or taken to the city jail from which many were transported to the countryside and then executed. To teach the few remaining Hazaras a lesson, Manon Niazi decreed that the dead bodies remain on the streets for close to a week. Asiaweek estimated the dead at over 6,000.
This is what the Taliban--which now wail about America's "genocide of Afghan civilians"--did in a couple of days. Surely, then, even if you cared only about Afghan lives, and not at all about American ones, a moral accounting would lead you to support America's war. And yet we are told that civilian deaths are turning the Muslim world against the war. How can this be? One answer is that people in Muslim countries are not aware of the Taliban's crimes. This may be true. Even in ostensibly pro-Western countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the state-controlled media skips over abuses by Muslim governments in order to concentrate on abuses by Israel and the United States.
But this just hints at a deeper answer: The people who shape opinion in the Muslim world skip over abuses by Muslim governments because they do not see them as the moral equivalent of abuses by non-Muslim governments. Even if Syria commits greater human rights violations than Israel, Israel's are worse because it is a foreign occupier. Even if the Taliban kill more Afghans than America kills in its campaign to overthrow the Taliban, America's actions are worse because they are the actions of an outside power.
These assumptions have ideological roots. Realists have generally argued that sovereignty matters more than individual rights--and, therefore, a government's mistreatment of its own people can never justify foreign intervention, even by a more benign power. Secular leftists--the intelligentsia in most Arab and Muslim countries--also cherish sovereignty because they see it as the opposite of colonialism, which is the great historical evil. Violence by a Western government is imperialist. But violence by a Muslim government is anti-imperialist, and therefore potentially legitimate. Osama bin Laden gives the same argument a religious hue: Violence aimed at ridding the Muslim world of infidels is justified; violence by infidels against Muslims is not.
In all these arguments, the moral offense is not the killing of civilians per se. And that's what the Western media misses when it juxtaposes scenes of dead Afghans with scenes of anti-American demonstrations in the Muslim world. The former is not really causing the latter. What outrages people in the Muslim world is not how many Afghans America kills, but the fact that America is killing Afghans in order to extend its political, cultural, and military reach.
None of this is to say Americans shouldn't worry about civilian casualties. Of course we should. And, ironically, one way to limit them might be to escalate the war--by flying some planes at lower altitudes, so their bombs will be more accurate, and putting more U.S. troops on the ground to help guide American planes to their targets. But worrying about civilian casualties isn't the same as worrying about the anger in other parts of the world over civilian casualties--because much of that anger does not stem from the same liberal premises as our own.
The truth is that in much of the Muslim world, people would see the United States as the evil party in Afghanistan even if we took not a single civilian life. We are, by definition, the bully--our very presence in the world makes us scapegoats for societies confused and enraged by their economic and political failures. It is easy for them to dwell on the fact that the United States now threatens Afghan lives. And it is much harder to focus on the Afghans killed by a Muslim government pursuing a Muslim ideology, far from America's reach or gaze. But that doesn't make the lives of the Hazaras of Mazar-e-Sharif any less precious. And it is on their behalf--as well as our own--that we are bombing Afghanistan today.
PETER BEINART is the Editor of TNR.
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