As this country's response to the events of Sept. 11 evolves from nationwide pep rally to reasoned discussion, University of South Florida-St. Petersburg weighed in with a panel on Central Asia and the ethics of war. The panel, which was held on Oct. 30, had originally been scheduled for Oct. 3 but was postponed as the university waited for the emotional climate to cool a few degrees. The event was the beginning of a series of panels USF will sponsor on the issues surrounding America's war on terrorism. "It's on everybody's mind," said USF-St. Petersburg spokesperson Deborah Kurelik. "We have a lot of intellectual power here that we want to use and educate with."
The power on last week's panel came from geography professor and Pakistan native Daanesh Mustafa, government and international relations professor Thomas Smith and environmental sciences and policy professor Mary Matthews. The panel was hosted by WTVT-Ch. 13 news personality Kathy Fountain and was attended by about 35 people from the community, said Kurelik. The attendance was not what the university had hoped for, but it is what they're used to. "For an academic event 35 isn't bad," Kurelik noted.
The audience may have been small, but the scope of the discussion was large. Smith spoke on the subject of wartime ethics and law and their application in the war on terrorism. While this may be a new kind of war with its focus on a widespread group of people rather than a nation, the ethics involved go back to ancient civilizations when the idea of a "just" war was first formulated, said Smith.
Just war is waged for the sake of justice and not merely for the sake of advancing one's own agenda. "The kinds of questions that arise are things like, is your cause just, do you have the rightful authority to declare war or to wage war in the first place?" Smith told the audience. "And you've noticed the United States has very carefully taken its case to the United Nations. We have formally invoked article 51 of the UN Charter, which has to do with self-defense. …
"Other questions that arise are, is your response proportional; that is, does the punishment fit the crime? And probably the most important rule … is called noncombatant immunity," said Smith.
Noncombatant immunity, the idea that civilian populations are exempt from attack, is a primary issue in Afghanistan. When defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld states repeatedly that the United States does not intend to attack civilian targets, he's following the tradition of just war. Unfortunately killing civilians in spite of their "immunity" is also a just war tradition, said Smith.
"So I want to make the point when Rumsfeld says we don't intentionally target civilians, yes that is true; however, the U.S. does make a number of very deliberate calculations."
These deliberate calculations involve what Smith called "the rule of double effect." This rule says that its OK to cause civilian casualties, even those that are foreseeable, as long as those casualties weren't intended. Not buying it? According to Smith many ethicists don't either.
While Smith reached back to empires long gone, panel member Mustafa stuck with more recent history as he explained the current attitudes of the Pakistanis and the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In a later interview, Mustafa discussed how that history has come full circle. Mustafa has been in the U.S. since 1987 but has still managed to spend considerable amounts of time in his native Pakistan.
The relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan, which began roughly in 1949, has always been one of convenience, said Mustafa. The U.S. was interested in gaining an ally against the Soviet Union during the cold war, whereas Pakistanis were primarily interested in gaining an ally in their conflict with India. "Neither side was terribly sympathetic to the other side's primary motive for the friendship, but each side expected the other to do the needful."
During the cold war the "needful" for the United States was to participate in what is called the Afghanistan Jihad, the mission to drive Russia out of Afghanistan. It didn't matter that achieving this mission meant getting involved with various fundamentalist factions whose motives were suspect, said Mustafa.
Once Russia was gone, the United States essentially walked away, leaving a mess for Afghanistan and neighboring U.S. ally Pakistan.
"Once the Soviets left, all of these young men, who knew how to shoot, couldn't get a job something had to be done with them," Mustafa said of the time after the Afghanistan Jihad.
These well-armed young men then began using their firepower to wage war with one another. "It brought incredible misery to the Afghan people. This was a huge mess, a disaster," he said.
Saudi Arabia has taken a lot of heat for its role in the funding of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, but Mustafa believes there's enough blame to go around between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. "I think they're both equally culpable," he said.
The Saudis were involved in the Afghanistan Jihad, Mustafa asserts, but billions in U.S. money was too, not to mention the weapons, training, propaganda and the recruitment of fundamentalist militants by the CIA. So how can we learn from this history? "I think I have been repeating over and over again, Americans need to have better oversight over what its government does internationally."
Of course in order to do oversee government actions abroad, Americans would have to be better informed, and that's no mean feat. "It seems to be that the media is doing its level best to make sure the American public doesn't know, at least the mainstream media."
In the Vietnam era there was investigative reporting, Mustafa said, but now reporters are primarily reporting what government spokespersons tell them. This sort of reporting doesn't give the most balanced or informative view of what our government is doing.
Another lesson to be learned from previous mistakes in Afghanistan and in other parts of the world is that covert operations don't work. In Latin America covert operations have brought an increase in drugs flowing into the United States, said Mustafa. In Pakistan there's also been an increase in drugs and terrorism, which have spread across Europe.
The United States also needs to reevaluate its relations with other countries, primarily Saudi Arabia and Israel, if we want to win the war on terrorism, Mustafa said. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have been and continue to be funded by groups within Saudi Arabian borders, and it's no coincidence that many of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks were Saudis, said Mustafa. The United States should begin to promote democracy in Saudi Arabia, whose laws in some instances don't appear to be any more humane than the Taliban's. "What is it that the Taliban has done to women that Saudi Arabia doesn't do? Public hangings? Saudi Arabia does public beheadings."
Reliance on Saudi oil is a dilemma that doesn't have an easy solution, he admitted, but oil isn't a reason to maintain the status quo or tiptoe around human rights issues. "The Saudi regime is going to collapse, it's not a question of if but when, and when it does it's going to be something that's going to be very scary to contemplate."
Most frightening is the possibility that a generation of Saudi Arabians might see U.S. support of the current regime as complicity in human rights violations. If this happens, forget about the oil supply; our very lives could be in danger. Israeli relations should be reevaluated in terms of monetary and military assistance, said Mustafa, but more importantly in terms of diplomatic relations. "I'm not questioning Israel's right to exist; I doubt any sane person would. It's a reality; it's there. … Mainstream Palestinians don't even question its right to exist," Mustafa said. "But I don't think that Israeli policies toward Palestinians are just."
Israel's policies have been catastrophic for Palestinian life and have resulted in incredible resentment in the Muslim world, he said.
In Israel, there is a range of views on policies toward Palestinians, said Mustafa, and there is a lot of debate. "Even some Israelis are uncomfortable with it," he said.
But there's much less debate here in the U.S. "Here, there's a complete block, that anything you say against Israel is anti-Semitism," he said.
This block against debate is not going to bring about peace, said Mustafa. "If you can't do it through dialogue, discussion and debate what other means are there?"
USF-St. Petersburg is planning its next panel for later this month, with discussions focusing on women under the Taliban. Later panels will include discussion on the media and civil liberties. Dates for the events have not yet been set. Contact Staff Writer Rochelle Renford at 813-248-8888, ext. 163 or rochelle.renford@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2001.