Anti-War

The Anti-War Movement:

We have long known that the core of the anti-war movement was naive college students who haven't yet learned how reality works, led by a very few hard-core radicals. Some of these radicals are good people, like the Quaker groups, which are mostly made up of northeastern mothers who just hate the idea of violence. Some are terrible, like the Stalinist group ANSWER, which serves as an apologist for states like the DPRK. Regardless of which, however, there are very few people genuinely committed to the movement. There aren't many Stalinists because the ideology has been slowly exposed as the totalitarian evil that it is. There aren't many Quakers for the reasons explored by the excellent John Wayne film Angel & the Badman (currently available on Hulu, by the way).

The use of the movement by the broader left during the Bush administration made it seem larger than it ever really was. A new video clarifies just how great the falloff has been since the election of a left-wing president. The temporary swell wasn't made up of committed anti-warriors at all. It was made up of some combination of Democratic party partisans, and people who kind of thought the 1960s were cool and were sorry they had missed it. Wouldn't it be fun to go out and protest a war, man?

This is too bad, because the anti-war movement -- at least that good-hearted part of it -- really does serve an important function.

An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.

The pictures are, and ought to be, stunning. It is surely an object lesson on why it is a bad idea to get crosswise with a Field Artillery unit. Perhaps it is also a lesson on the limits of asking an artillery unit to function as a counterinsurgency unit, although such units have functioned very well in Iraq and elsewhere. This response is not out of character for a redleg unit, that is to say; but that is not to say that they haven't operated with restraint up to this point.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the unit in question did anything wrong. The commander will have been advised by a lawyer on his staff; clearly the action was passed for approval all the way up to General Petraeus, given the presence of his biographer in the pre-planned media response 'fires.' Therefore, we can assume that the action was considered by various Staff Judge Advocates and others of their kind, and found to be in accord with military law and the laws of war.

Still, it is the proper function of the anti-war movement -- the good hearted, loyal opposition sort -- to insist on that explanation being made plainly and loudly. This kind of action has to be justified on pretty demanding grounds, including St. Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of double effect.

The 1-320th is clearly doing at least some of the right things from a COIN standpoint, such as holding shuras with the popular leadership to arrange for compensation and rebuilding. That said:

Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.

“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”

Broadwell writes that the operation is ultimately a success, quoting Flynn as saying “As of today, more of the local population talks to us and the government than talk to the Taliban.” That appears to be good enough for higher command. Petraeus, having visited the village and allowing Flynn to personally approve reconstruction projects worth up to $1 million, told his commanders in the south to “take a similar approach to what 1-320th was doing on a grander scale as it applies to the districts north of Arghandab.”

It is not shocking to learn that reconstruction takes more than three months in Afghanistan, given its noted logistical problems. What bothers me -- a man who has, I think it is fair to say, a warrior spirit -- is to learn that this story made no appearance whatever three months ago when it happened. (What was going on three months ago that might have drowned the story, by the way? Let's see... January, December, November.... that would put this right before the elections. Oh, right.)

That the military has the mechanisms to do the right thing I do not doubt. That it is surely going through the process I do not doubt. It is nevertheless part of the moral health of our society to have the explanations made carefully and as part of the public debate. The anti-war movement should be the ones insisting on that; but warriors have a duty to hold each other to the laws of war as well. It is, after all, the souls of our brothers that are at stake.

In demanding such an explanation I do not mean to cast doubt upon the military officers who serve as their lawyers, or even the ones who serve as their chaplains. It is simply a duty that we have to perform.