Should war be given a chance?

Let me appear to be cynical for once. I’m constantly arguing that war can be avoided and even pre-empted if would-be war criminals are arrested and stopped in their tracks. But what if the way to end a war is not to intervene, not to help, but to encourage the likely winner to get on with it and get the job done?

In effect, this is how President Joe Biden has decided to act with Afghanistan. The US is now leaving the Taliban to do their darndest. There will no longer be US and NATO forces to support the government. The Taliban will probably swoosh to victory in no time at all, just as the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese did a generation ago when the US lost heart and retreated home with its tail between its legs.

France seems to be making a similar retreat in West Africa. After nine years of trying to support five governments, President Emmanuel Macron announced in June that French troops will be pulled out. It is obvious that these African governments on their own cannot defeat the jihadists, many of them loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda. Before long they could well be overthrown. But the French government has decided that the cost is not worth the candle.

Islamic autocracies – if the jihadists win the day – are not ideal but at least they will replace the breakdown of civil order in much of the countryside with some semblance of law and order. We tolerate the justice system of Islamic fundamentalist countries in parts of the Middle East. Why shouldn’t we in Africa- if it avoids more deaths from war?

This perhaps cynical point of view ignores, as with Afghanistan, the consequences of withdrawal – the probable curtailment of girls’ education and a diminution of the effort to bring about the equal status for women. It will be the end of justice as we know it – it will tend towards the arbitrary and cruel. It will probably be a quasi-dictatorship, precarious because of the intra-rivalry of warlords. However, it may end the growing of poppies which the American and European militaries tolerated even though Afghanistan is the source of most of Europe’s illegal heroin.

As withdrawal is now almost completed, the killings will wind down. At least 250,000 Afghans have died in the 20 years since the US intervened and much of the economy and society turned upside down. Over 2,300 American soldiers have died. It is reckoned that the US alone has spent $824 billion on fighting the war.

In a provocative essay in Foreign Affairs in July 1999, titled “Give War a Chance”, Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, wrote: “An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence”.

Luttwak has little time for UN peace-making which tries to be even-handed. What it should be doing is “to help the strong defeat the weak faster and more decisively.” Too often, he says of the UN, its peacekeepers become passive spectators to outrages and massacres, as in Bosnia.

I disagree with Luttwak on many points- UN peacekeeping has often brought peace- as with Namibia, Cyprus and most of Congo. In ex-Yugoslavia one can argue that the UN was not given enough resources to imprint its will on the situation. On other issues- Afghanistan and Syria- I agree with Luttwak because the damage done by intervention (including encouraging the growing in Afghanistan of opium poppies that are the main source of Europe’s illegal heroin) far outweighs the good things it has brought about.

In sum, I’m half with Luttwak and half against him. Each situation has to be treated on its merits. There can be no hard and fast rules, but I would say a rule of thumb should be no military intervention by the big powers and the deployment of an adequate numbers of lightly armed troops when the UN Security Council orders peacekeeping. There are no guarantees when it comes to the question of how to lessen war but I believe that following these two rules would be the way to building a more peaceful world.