Peace at what cost?

Last week, I attended a conference on women in Afghanistan hosted by the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Estonian Atlantic Treaty Association. One panelist was from a women's organization that seemed to be a better-organized European equivalent to Code Pink. She ruffled a few feathers when she claimed that nothing had improved for women in Afghanistan in the last few years (despite the statistics offered by other panelists that would say otherwise). Later in her speech, she claimed that war, that violence and guns, is never the answer, and that we needed UN peacekeepers, not NATO soldiers. At the very least, this took guts for her to say. A security conference is not likely to attract a crowd that is sympathetic to her argument. A faint murmur arose in the audience, many (myself included) scribbled furiously in their notebooks. The man next to me shook his head in disbelief and said to his colleague, "Absolutely from another planet, this one..."

First of all, kudos to the EMFA and EATA for including her on the panel. Honestly, I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to include someone with such strong anti-war views in a conference on security: when the goal is to discuss how to move forward on a particular UN resolution in Afghanistan, and someone doesn't think we have a right to be there in the first place, a part of me would think that this person may be counter-productive, and maybe the conference should ask someone else to speak. Having listened to the woman in the context of this conference, I still think what she had to say was a little counter-productive and distracting. However, I am glad she was there, and glad she spoke. We can all say we have considered what she told us, and our own arguments are better for having done so.

When she first told us that guns are never the answer, what I wrote down next to her name was, "Hitler, anyone?" That is one of the most clear-cut cases of when the guns must come out: madman is trying to take over a continent, trying to eliminate any undesirables in his path, and peaceful appeasement clearly had not worked. If the world stood by as this was going on because of this lofty idea that guns are never the answer, the result would have been far worse than the Srebrenica massacre- when over 8000 Bosnians were killed as UN peacekeepers watched- legally unable to do anything unless they had not been fired upon themselves. Clearly, guns are effective. But are they necessary?

Consider then the Cold War. The Soviet Empire eventually fell, and we never fought against the empire directly. (I would argue "directly" is the key word in that sentence.) However, Hitler was stopped much more quickly. Depending on when you start counting, it took anywhere from 24 years (starting the year he assumed leadership of the precursor to the Nazi party) to 6 years (starting with the invasion of Poland.) The Soviet Union lasted much longer, killed far more people within the Soviet Union- and that's before you start counting the people killed in the proxy wars. If we ignore the proxy wars for a moment, would anyone actually argue that the Cold War was morally superior to World War II? I suppose the argument would then boil down to whether more people would have died fighting the Soviets directly with guns in the short term than would have been killed by the Soviets in the long term. Of course, you'd never know the answer to this, but given that both parties involved were nuclear powers, it's plausible that a hot war would have killed more people. Of course, Afghanistan isn't nuclear (yet), so I'm not sure you can apply this argument so cleanly to the conflict in Afghanistan.

If bad people exist, and they come to power, at what point is it a moral imperative to stop them? Hitler and Stalin are extreme examples: Death tolls were in the millions, and they both had a way of making life miserable for neighboring countries. But what do you do when the death toll is in the hundred thousands? Thousands? Hundreds? Or if the injustice doesn't have a regional spillover effect? For practical reasons, a line must be drawn. For better or worse, I don't think the world wants to be in a constant state of war in order to try to maintain a perpetual peace. NATO and several partner countries have already committed themselves to Afghanistan, but NATO has had to struggle constantly against its own members placing strong caveats on the use of their troops. America is tired and overstretched. I think Europe is still traumatized from the 20th century wars, and perhaps really enjoys having the NATO safety net instead of forming stronger defenses of their own. I think many would be nervous having Russia or China police the worlds' human rights abuses. In such an era, how do you choose what is worth fighting for? It is often asked for what should we die. This question has a logical mate, but it's one we don't hear quite so often. For what should we kill? I can't pretend I have an answer, but I am quite grateful to Ms. Ebbe for bringing the question to the forefront of my mind.