Afghanistan's Guillotine Syndrome

"He got up in the dark to go to the place of execution," Albert Camus wrote in his essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, regarding his father's experience of watching a man being killed in public. "Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children [allegedly murdered by the condemned man], he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off." When the elder Camus returned home, he vomited, and never spoke of the case again to Albert.

In Reflections on the Guillotine, Camus argues that while authorities claim public executions provide justice and meaning, they and their backers do not, or can not, speak directly about the event, and so they remain foggy on what that justice and meaning is exactly. Recently there has been a growing fog clouding over the meaning of the ongoing Afghan War, and I've come to see it as a similar predicament to that regarding the guillotine.

NATO leaders and citizens, as well as their local Afghan supporters, argue well that global terrorism conducted by al-Qaeda, and theocratic fascism championed by both al-Qaeda and the Taliban must be stopped; just as the same would argue that an unknown murderer must be stopped from killing during peacetime.

However, the greatest champions for an aggressive war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan today tend, like the champions of capital punishment, to arm their argument with discussion about the strength and the accuracy of forces, weapons, and killing instruments, and the need to unleash them without impediment, rather than discussion of what killing achieves or who the enemy or alleged enemy is and what might otherwise alter the choices they make.

Even when leaders in the governments and armed forces involved in the fighting, including General Stanley McChrystal and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, decide to swim into that fog of mis/understanding and potentially address the motivations of the enemy, the champions of aggressive war recoil.

They understand reducing the numbers of civilians blown to pieces in bombing accidents, and they believe in the theory of paying rebels or community leaders in cash or aid to change sides. But the complex nuances of sustainably mitigating local factors of conflict, treating locals as equals, and removing colonial arrogance which are critical to winning peace remain like mystical music heard only by peaceniks and farmers.

War is not won by soldiers. It is won by ambivalent members of the local population who after a painful time of impartiality, confusion, or frustration caught in the crossfire of warring groups finally shift so much of their support to one side in the war that the other fighting group loses public consent and falters.

Could it really be that 100,000 armed men and women turning the tables on 50,000 hidden enemies by increasing the rate of killing could be more effective at bringing an end to conflict than the shifting support of twenty or forty million people upon whose support those fighting groups rely in the first place?

And yet Western as well as Islamic media continue to rally discussion about the conduct of war and the pursuit of goals, if not peace, around the soldier's perspective, better, more powerful weaponry, and fewer limits to their use of force, ahead of the perspective of the wives, grandparents, traders, and clergy who hold the home village together while they are firing at each other.

Why do politicians and public discussants use the soldier's perspective as the starting point rather than that of the local civilian? Because debating the effectiveness of killing is just so much more interesting than figuring out what great nourishment one can suck out of flour, sand, bitterness, and loss among the general population. Sadly, basing the pursuit of peace on the conduct of war from the soldier's perspective is doomed to backfire.

There has been a great deal of rhetoric about counter-insurgency in terms of winning the local population, building civil partnerships, and aid, but nearly all of it fails because it is delivered by a war machine. The great paradox of counter-insurgency is that, while arms are sometimes necessary to protect a population, building peace cannot be done by those who are armed. And this is hard to know when the wielders of war power refuse to honestly open minds to consider what might prevent the enemy not just from striking, but from wishing to strike in the first place. 

Photo credit: ISAF Media