My position is neither pacifist nor unequivocal. I do believe that the use of force could conceivably be justified. But it hasn't been. This I find hard to dispute - where is the justification for threatening to starve a few million people?
What I oppose is not war itself but this particular war. Actually, I might not oppose it if certain facts turned up: that the US had seriously attempted to bargain with the Taliban, that Osama could be found guilty in a court of law, and most importantly, that there is seriously strong sociology behind the proposition that the current inflamation of tempers across the Islamic world won't translate into more terror, and so on But unfortunately, the opposite facts are turning up: that the US repeatedly ignored or failed to recognise Taliban overtures on bin Laden, that there is a weak case to bin Laden himself, that there is massive growth in support of bin Laden, and so on...
Maybe you don't like the word "surely" - fair enough. But as sure as anything is, when some guy with a beard and a holy appearance says all this stuff about the US and it materialises before his audience's eyes, jeez, more people stop to listen. Maybe all those people with bin Laden posters are just into the iconography of it all, I don't know. Somehow I think that he's getting mega kudos from the current war. What's the US going to do about that? A smear campaign?
You may regard my comment as overheated. Fine. I hope to god I am out of touch with reality, and that the death toll is only a little, rather than colossal, pyramid of skulls. I imagine that this analogy is fairly mild in comparison to the apocalyptic imagery now fashionable with Islamic radicals. More to the point, however: whether a few million people are killed by known facists or by people who promote x,y,z philosophy is almost completely immaterial. The fact is that people die, to buy safety for other people according to the calculus of either facism or x,,y,z philosophy. But it is not obvious to me that our philosophy, or rather that of the US Government, is so brilliant as to justify killing, or threatening to kill, millions of people. You are willing to gamble on it, but it isn't you who has to pay the real cost - that is left for folks out in Afghanistan to shoulder. (That's the reckless bit, in my opinion) What if millions of Afghans die in the name of your justice? Would the comparison to the Khmer Rouge be unwarranted then? Why even risk this horrible scenario? Specially, when there were overtures by the Taliban, etc...
There is, then, a "philosophical" aspect to my criticism. It isn't whether we are allowed to take people's lives or not. We are, but only if there is pressing danger and convincing proof that the life-taking will prevent our own deaths or a significantly greater number of deaths. It thus relies on whether the sociological predictions involved in deducing that war will eliminate terror are valid. I have very little faith in the predictive power of sociology, and even less faith in the capacity of your equivocal experts to decide one way or another on objective grounds. Worse, it is virtually certain, and conceded by you, that the present action will cause more Afghan deaths than Americans have so far died. That simply fails my test for when it is right to kill somone.
I suppose that just as you find me overheated, I find you likening to the present bombing campaign to a police beat astonishingly cold. But since you like that analogy, let me work with it. Near where I used to live in Rio there was a fairly squalid neighbourhood known as Cidade de Deus ("City of God"). Many folks there hate drugs and gangsters, but they hate the police even more. When the police comes in, they wreck everything and hassle everybody, then piss off, leaving the folks who side with them unprotected - the gangsters, on the other hand, win people over with demagogic gifts and 'protection', which everyone realises comes at a huge cost of insecurity. I think the reasonable way out of this impasse is obviously not to try to blow up the gangsters at any cost, a process which would (and in fact does) entrench their position as 'defenders' of the community.
Stretching the analogy, if Afghanistan were a ghetto, should the police encircle it and toss molotov coctails in the general direction of suspect gangsters, until one comes running out? I think we'd all be better off without such "police" forces. Should the police force do deals with the gangsters? Hopefully, that would be unecessary, but it might be. (I am tempted to say: what is the police but state-endorsed gangsters...) The thing to do, from a police , rather than military, perspective, is to extent the rule of law into the ghetto - a process which involves, amongst other things, the modification of the modus operandi of the police and compromise with the inhabitants. Crucially, this involves behaving in such a way that the support for the gangster's demagogic gambits fails. The point: military action is what you take to people there can be no negotiation with - but the problems we have, in Rio slum and the middle east "alike" , I think, are brought about from the lack of reasonable and honest negotiations. People are blown towards extremists and gangsters on the gale swept up by police intolerance and the exasperation of 50 years of American meddling.
You find concessions to Al-Qaeda repulsive. We need not deal with them; what I meant was concessions such as may undermine their support - not necessarily concessions with them. As for deals with the Taliban, we've done that already, numerous times. We've also made deals with all manner of facists. Heck, the US has even installed a few here and there, the usual explanation being "national security" or security for "interests". I hate this logic, I find it all repulsive - it is only a little better than killing a lot of people.
Anyway: if you accept that my position is about as uncertain as yours, I cannot see how you can support or acquiesce to a bombing, which is just as unlikely (rather : the odds are unknown) to solve the problem as doing nothing or doing deals - and has the added "bonus" of potentially killing millions. I just simply don't understand this. Maybe I should never have read any choice theory.
Thiago Oppermann