Afghanistan: war without end?

27 February 2011 |permalink | email article

Speaking to West Point cadets last week Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said something that has long needed to be said to the American people: he warned that it would be unwise for the United States to ever again fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

Gates did not directly criticize the Bush administration’s decisions to go to war. Still, his never-again formulation was unusually blunt, especially at a time of upheaval in the Arab world and beyond. 

The conflict in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, with the original intent being to destroy Al Qaeda, and cripple the Taliban that has long given support to Osama bin Laden. America pumps tens of billions a month into a tribal nation while Americans. n and women, taking high casualties, are doing most of the fighting, with limited success, in addition to jousting with corrupt Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Robert W. McElroy, the auxiliary bishop of San Francisco, addressed the issue in America, the Jesuit weekly, suggesting there should be a public debate that does not proceed from a blind commitment to “stay the course.“

McElroy cites the historian David Kennedy of Stanford University who notes a situation in which “the army is at war but the country is not. “We have managed to create and field an armed force that is very lethal without the society in whose name it fights breaking a sweat.”

On a more ominous note, Kennedy warns, this achievement of a sustainable war fighting capacity by the United States has created a “moral hazard for the political leadership to resort to force in the knowledge that the civil society will not be deeply disturbed. This moral hazard has become realized by the decade-long conflagration in Afghanistan and in an independent, elective war major war in Iraq that lasted six years.”

McElroy asks whether the U.S. has entered into a new and radically different relationship with major warfare, and participation without a clear prospect of success. He suggests this and similar questions cannot be addressed in the Catholic community without reference to the universal church’s teaching on war and peace in the atomic age, and increasing skepticism about the legitimacy of warfare.

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