A problem with criticism of the Afghanistan War:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to make of the US intervention in Afghanistan. Some targets of legitimiate criticism are such things like use of UAVs that end up missing targets and killing innocent people, things like eschewing an offer to co-operate with the Islamic Republic of Iran on an issue (which in hindsight takes on an uglier edge than it did at the time) and to a very real extent bailing out of this war to go fight Iraq a second time. Another reality is that he's risking either war or much greater involvement of Pakistan, and if we go to war with Pakistan it magnifies every disastrous consequence of a war with Iran sixfold or more.

One area that I neither understand nor consider legitimate is to attack the current President over how he's handling things like the (complete lack of leadership on the part of) the government run by Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan's been in one or another war since Leonid Brezhnev approved the Soviet Armed Forces' invasion of it. This was a long and bloody conflict, and once the Soviets withdrew there was a civil war that the Taliban proved the most formidable faction in until we came in. Either way, this will be in December 30 years of war in Afghanistan.

Thirty years of war in Germany were sufficient to level the place and critically weaken it. Germany didn't recover for a matter of centuries. 27 years of war in what is now the People's Republic of China arguably contributed a great deal to why the PRC is what is today. Long periods of war tend to malform societies affected by them, and they tend also to encourage corruption, graft, and to weaken over time desire to participate in or to even bother with the infrastructure of society. Afghanistan's already seen the results of one superpower fighting in it, and in October the USA will have spent eight years there. And if we still have significant number of troops there in October 2011 then we will have been at war there as long as the Soviets were.

President Obama is an average leader. He's capable of more than even his supporters sometimes profess that he is, but he's also capable of seeing through at least enough of a military victory to suppress the Taliban. President Obama has inherited a crisis 30 years in the making, and IMHO, while as noted there are many legitimate criticisms of his war effort there to make, I feel that the President should be given some leg room to fight the war as he wishes, by both his supporters and his critics, to shape up what's not working and to improve what is. Because to expect an average leader to improve on a legacy that started with Premier Brezhnev is frankly to expect him to work miracles. The President is just a man, and he does make mistakes.

I suppose if I were to sum this up in a sentence or two it would be that Afghanistan's been in chaos for 30 years. President Obama as an average leader has more promise to work through the legacy of 30 years of war than his predecessors. Yet it is not fair to blame him for all the mistakes dating back to President Carter and the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev.

Comments

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

They're not special in that regard. Every time Congress votes down caps on the price of a certain medical drug, or expanding unemployment benefits, or stricter safety standards for industrial waste dumping, or just allocates some funds to advertising Earth Day on TV that could go directly to needle exchanges, that has a predictable, knowable body count, it doesn't take an act of war to cause death. All of this is justified because the primary stated goal of the legislation isn't to kill people. You start caring about collateral damage the whole system by which a large-scale government is run breaks down.

We didn't go into Afghanistan to exact some Hammurabic vengeance against the Afghan people, therefore we're certainly not going to stop because we've killed "enough". Just like any sanctioned legal action, so long as we're not actively maximizing civilian death as part of state policy civilian deaths are unintentional and therefore irrelevant. Sure, in practice it actually does matter, but so long as we're playing pretend that a centralized state authority with global influence is anything short of one long drawn-out mass murder it's not fair to cherrypick which dead civilians you care about, it's an all-or-nothing proposition.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

All of this is justified because the primary stated goal of the legislation isn't to kill people.

No, in actual fact all of the examples you give are justified because they are either intended to minimize deaths, or the death are not a direct result, merely permitted to happen.

The real dividing line in what would otherwise make the actions of the U.S. government utterly immoral and unconscionable in the eyes of the people is the fact that the civilians being killed are not Americans, and thus for most Americans they have no value in the moral costs/benefit equation.

[ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com]

Um, nothing I mentioned could be construed as being intended to "minimize deaths", that's why I chose the examples I did. That they're "permitted to happen" as an irrelevant but known and predictable collateral damage to achieving the stated goal (just like civilian deaths in wartime) was exactly my point, I'm not even sure why you rephrased it since it doesn't even sound nicer in your formulation.

Using state violence to kill American citizens en masse would certainly be crossing a line, the whole idea behind Constitutional government which most of the country seems to subscribe to is that so long as government is held back by certain limitations (no military action against its own citizens being one) it can save itself from becoming totally depraved. It's a line we've been toeing for a good long while without most people raising too much of a stink, though.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

That they're "permitted to happen" as an irrelevant but known and predictable collateral damage to achieving the stated goal (just like civilian deaths in wartime) was exactly my point, I'm not even sure why you rephrased it since it doesn't even sound nicer in your formulation.

No, that's incorrect. The agent causing those deaths is different in the examples you gave. When the U.S. government does not prevent industries polluting and incidentally causing death, it is morally different from the U.S. government sending troops to Afghanistan and incidentally causing civilian death.

The U.S. Armed Forces are a moral agent acting on the direct instructions of the U.S. government. Civilians deaths in Afghanistan caused by U.S. forces, unintentional or not are a direct moral consequence of the U.S. governments decisions.

The fact that people don't have jobs and might die because they don't receive unemployment benefits, or people who die because of industrial pollution that Congress didn't prevent aren't the moral consequences of actions by Congress.

There is a clear moral distinction between consequences of positive actions and those resulting after an omission to act.