Afghanistan v. Iraq
There seem to be more and more people questioning whether we should be sending additional troops to Afghanistan (or, for that matter, questioning if we should still be there at all). I’m not sure where I stand on this, though I definitely think it’s good that we’re having the discussion, rather than just accepting the assumption that the US should stay there. That said, it appears to me that there are two main reasons we would stay. The first is a selfish national security motive. If we left, the argument goes, the Taliban or Al Qaeda or something similar would take over and send more terrorist attacks to the US and Europe. It seems really clear to me that on that front we can get 90% of the benefit of being there very easily by just maintaining a base from which we can shut down training camps, sending drones over the area, and so forth. A really large presence wouldn’t be necessary. We wouldn’t be able to get rid of the longer-term threat by giving everyone there a great modern education, but that is unlikely anyway.
The other argument for staying is a moral one. We invaded and took over the country, and now we have an obligation not to leave until doing so doesn’t mean horrible things for the lives of people there. This has been a primary reason given for us staying in Iraq, and I actually think it’s a much better argument there than it is for Afghanistan. Iraq was, I think most people would now agree, a war of choice. It might have seemed like it would have national security benefits, but it definitely didn’t seem like we were forced into it. The only thing that made it seem urgent was the supposed WMDs, and the US clearly has to take responsibility for that error. The only act of war, as far as I know, was the shooting at planes patrolling the no-fly zones, and no one seemed to think that that on its own deserved anything more than the occasional retaliatory missile strike. Afghanistan, though, was clearly a case of self-defense. The government there (through its close relationship with Al Qaeda) used its territory to train people to attack the United States. That’s an act of war, and the government was a continuing threat. There was little alternative than to displace the government.
Consider the analogous situation for an individual. You’re attacked by a mugger, but happen to have a knife on you and would them in self-defense. Are you liable for the medical bills? Of course not. Now, it’s easy to point out that a country isn’t a unitary actor, and that many of the people in Afghanistan who would be hurt by the US leaving (say, children and women) had no role in allowing the Taliban to control the country. I still think, though, that the analogy works perfectly well. Say instead of wounding your attacker, you had to kill him, and that the attacker had a child. Would you be obligated to take care of the child? Clearly the child did nothing wrong and is in a horrible situation. To some extent, any random passerby (or better yet, society overall through the government) would have an obligation to help, but I don’t think your obligation is any greater because you’re the one that killed its father.
I think the same applies to Afghanistan. If the reason we’re staying is more humanitarian than self-interested, we have to acknowledge that the Afghanis in question have no greater claim to US resources than to the resources of any other country, and that Afghanis in horrible poverty or lacking liberty are no more deserving of help than any other poor or oppressed person anywhere else on the planet.
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2 Responses to “Afghanistan v. Iraq”
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Going into Afghanistan was necessary. Targeting the Taliban and taking responsibility for the government there was monumentally dumb.
I can understand thinking it was dumb to take responsibility for the government – we could have just let the Northern Alliance install whoever they wanted or whatever. I don’t understand how it was stupid to target the Taliban. If we weren’t going to target the Taliban, then what exactly was it you wanted us to *do* in Afghanistan?