> Perhaps the thing "wrong" with traditional just war theory in this
> context is that it points the other way: After 9/11 the Taliban
> government had an obligation to reveal everything it knew about the
> perpetrators, and to turn over all the perpetrators and all the
> material witnesses it could find to the United States government as
> the U.S. government undertook its own investigation.
>
> The failure of the Taliban government to fulfill its obligation was a
> casus belli.
.
I don't disagree with the thrust of this, but I'm curious: In your view,
does this obligation-to-extradite principle of just-war theory apply to
every state, or just to Afghanistan? For example, the US has repeatedly
refused to hand over to Haiti the ex-paramilitary leader Emmanuel Constant,
who was responsible for the deaths of maybe 5000-10,000 people. Is that a
casus belli? If you turned on CNN and saw that the J. Edgar Hoover building
on Pennsylvania Ave. had been bombed, would you sigh and say it was
collateral damage? If your friends were outraged and said the Haitians
should have chosen a more peaceful way to pursue their grievances, would you
call them loony pacifists?
Seth