Leftover beans

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War is an ugly business.  It’s even uglier when it entails bean counting, that “macabre calculus” whereby we compute acceptable levels of collateral damage and civilian casualties before “taking out” a target.  In American military practice, this calculus is always in play, because we are an ethical people concerned about loss of innocent lives.  Of course, we haven’t yet learned the ethics of avoiding armed struggle altogether, except as a last resort.

Even Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate who has consistently opposed the Iraq war, now sees Afghanistan as a legitimate theater of operations, as if the Taliban are any greater or more menacing a threat than Islamic nut balls anywhere else.  His reasoning is that the Afghan government of yesterday protected Osama bin Laden, and that ousted government now comprises today’s Afghan insurgents.  True, but even the discredited idea of spreading democracy abroad is a more noble justification for war than naked revenge, and if vengeance isn’t what Obama is getting at, it is incumbent upon the Democratic presidential candidate to explicate exactly why the Taliban—or for that matter, Osama bin Laden, who could be anywhere, after all—must be opposed in Afghanistan by American might.

President Hamid Karzai has demanded that we discontinue the air war in Afghanistan to reduce civilian casualties, but it’s a macabre calculus indeed that would remove our air advantage from the bean-counting calculations.  And that’s in the end what’s wrong with our entire foreign policy, because although war is ugly, there are things even uglier, and one of those things is deciding whether a jihadi with an AK-47 is worth the life of a little girl and her pregnant mother.  In a just war, that reprehensible choice is a lot easier, because our very survival is part of the calculus.  In reality, our leaders have a dilemma precisely because the conditions for a just use of American military force do not prevail, even though the Taliban is admittedly the very embodiment of evil.

Does this mean I am against taking the fight to jihadists in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere? Not at all, but effective counter-terrorism methods I can support would not much resemble our current entrenched and protracted military entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fact is, we could have bought a lot of anti-terror success for the trillion dollars we’ve spent spreading democracy. I am no pacifist, as such, but I strongly believe our great and awesome military, staffed by courageous American men and women, should never be used in police actions or “nation-building” exercises, but only in nation-destroying missions when left with no other choice.

Then it would be a lot less repulsive to count the beans.