February 1, 2002 A Merciful War By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF One of the uncomfortable realities of the war on terrorism is that we Americans have killed many more people in Afghanistan than died in the attack on the World Trade Center. Over the last couple of months I've tried to tabulate the Afghan death toll. My best guess is that we killed 8,000 to 12,000 Taliban fighters, along with about 1,000 Afghan civilians. So what is the lesson of this? Is it that while pretending to take the high road, we have actually slaughtered more people than Osama bin Laden has? Or that military responses are unjustifiable because huge numbers of innocents inevitably are killed? No, it's just the opposite. Our experience there demonstrates that troops can advance humanitarian goals just as much as doctors or aid workers can. By my calculations, our invasion of Afghanistan may end up saving one million lives over the next decade. Ever since Vietnam, the West has been deeply squeamish about the use of force — particularly European and American liberals, who are often so horrified by bloodshed involving innocents that they believe nothing can justify it. But Afghanistan shows that guns and bombs can save lives as much as scalpels and IV tubes do. Look at the numbers. In each of the last few years, without anyone paying much attention, 225,000 children died in Afghanistan before the age of 5, along with 15,000 women who died during pregnancy or childbirth. There was no way to save those lives under the Taliban; indeed, international organizations were retreating from Afghanistan even before 9/11 because of the arrests of Christian aid workers. But now aid is pouring in and lives are being saved on an enormous scale. Unicef, for example, has vaccinated 734,000 children against measles over the last two months, in a country where virtually no one had been vaccinated against the disease in the previous 10 years. Because measles often led to death in Afghanistan, the vaccination campaign will save at least 35,000 children's lives each year. "You're going to see an immediate jump" in Afghanistan's health statistics and school attendance, says Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the United Nations Development Program. But he adds that truly building the country up will be a hard slog over 10 or 20 years. Of course, the gains depend on stability in Afghanistan, and that is not guaranteed. But if the West lives up to its obligations to help Afghanistan, and not abandon it as we all did a decade ago, then the potential savings in human lives are staggering. Heidi J. Larson of Unicef says that if all goes well, child and maternal mortality rates will drop in half in Afghanistan over the next five years. That would mean 112,000 fewer children and 7,500 fewer pregnant women dying each year. Likewise, a desperate rush to train 20,000 new teachers and open new schools means that some 1.5 million Afghan children will be able to enroll in elementary school when the term begins next month — more than double the number of children who were in school a year ago. Denunciations of the American bombing in Afghanistan pop up regularly in the United States and even more boldly in Europe and the Muslim world. A Pakistani columnist, Humayun Gauhar, described the war in his country's typically subdued prose: "The stench of Afghan flesh, the sweet smell of their children's blood (garnished lightly with one dead American) has overpowered the quest for prime target Osama bin Laden." Yet these critics seemed less exercised by the much larger number of preventable deaths in Afghanistan from routine ailments. I've sat in mud huts with parents sobbing as their children died of diarrhea, and trust me: Their grief is every bit as crushing as that of parents who lose children to bombs. Working from United Nations figures, if Afghanistan eventually improves just to the wretched levels of neighboring Pakistan, that would mean 115,000 fewer deaths a year of children under the age of 5, along with 9,600 fewer women dying in pregnancy each year. All this underscores a simple truth, and enough time has passed since Vietnam that we should be able to acknowledge it: Military intervention, even if it means lost innocent lives on both sides, can serve the most humanitarian of goals. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/01/opinion/01KRIS.html
Great article! I wonder why no one has seen American intervention from the angle before, or have they?
There's no doubt our intervention will help Afghanistan in the long-run. The reason many people don't look at this from a humanitarian standpoint is that this wasn't our aim. We had no problem with the Taliban before OBL did his thing. In fact, if you switched the roles of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, the US would have helped the Taliban overthrow the NA if that helped us get OBL. The humanitarian benefits are great, but I think they just a plus rather than a goal of ours.
Using that rational, Hitler was an okay guy since saving and improving germany was his goal. His methods were horrible and most of the side effects blew chunks. I think George W went the distance learning from his father's and Clinton's (not as big as Bush's) mistakes which ended up hurting the Kurds, Americans, Somalians, etc. The US could have just went in and done its goals and let Afganistan's different factions fight it out for power instead of accomplishing our goals and promoting stability.
Ummm... I don't think that's entirely relevent. Even if we accept the analogy for a moment, I don't think one can simply separate one's vision of a goal... and the goal itself that much. I mean, using your standards... one could easily say that the goal of any individual is to bring about a perfect world. Problem is, we just all have different visions of utopia. Bush... is currently pathing the way for the worst foreign relations the US has ever had.
<B>Hitler was an okay guy since saving and improving germany was his goal. His methods were horrible and most of the side effects blew chunks. </B> No one's saying that the methods and side-effects aren't important. It's just that the US's objective is not humanitarian in nature. The fact that it worked out that way is great and helps us generate support around the world, but that wasn't and isn't our aim and mission. That certainly isn't saying that good things unrelated to our objectives didn't come out of this. For example, say the NA and Taliban were switched. The stories we would have heard is how the NA allows the abuse and selling of kids for sex purposes and trades in opium. Afghanistan is currently ruled by a minority faction of their society. Along with our mission, we're going in there to help the Taliban get control over the land and eliminate these problems. They will crack down on the drug trade and the dispicable treatment of children and things will be much better. The subsequent treatment of women by new Taliban government really wouldn't be covered, just as the new real government's allowance of the abuse of children isn't covered. All I'm saying is that the US can rightfully claim that we helped free people from oppression, etc, but we shouldn't claim that was our mission, because it wasn't.
Assuming, of course, that the current government turns out to be significantly better. I had an ethical dilemma on this issue. On one hand, I thought the US could really help by staying and assisting in some "democracy building." However, that might appear to akin to cultural imperialism to he Islamic world. *sigh*
Bingo. This is my point. Just because our primary focus was getting OBL, the fact that the US attacked in a way that enabled Afganistan to help itself shouldn't be belittled, which I took Major and Jeff to be doing. If I took your comments the wrong way sorry. The Hitler reference was a little extreme, but I needed an example to show how ones actions towards a goal are as important as the goal. I am not in a good mood which is why I'm not as tactful and noncontroversial as usual.
Major, I got a different interpretation from the article than you did. I took your comments as attacking the US's methods in Afganistan, but I think you're more focused on the argument in the article. First off, I have always assumed the war in Afganistan is to save American Lives through what our government sees as justice for people that have killed and intend to kill us. In our clumsiness as war isn't perfect, we've killed more innocent lives than have been killed on our soil. The article is trying to justify the losses of innocents which you never really can do. The US people don't like it when our military slaughters innocent people of another country so we've always tried to help out areas that we've messed up with the whole Isreal mess being an exception. I don't see where the article says the US primary or secondary goal is to free the people there. It is implied in the article that removing the people from Taliban's tyranny is a priority, but that's only because the Taliban were the US's current problem. I think the article does show that we try to limit the collateral damage and by doing so has really helped out.
It's always a shame when innocent people lose lives. And this article is an attempt to justify that. It's better to have a plus side than not. I for one am glad that there is something good that could happen, because so often, the possibility does not even exist. As for the government of the region... I'm really torn on the issue. I love America and our republic (since technically, it is not a true democray). The "Middle East" is a region of such deep history. Although Afghanistan is not part of the "Middle East", it's roots are probably similar or at least affected by the rest of the region. Islam ruled the region from 610 ad until the 1900's. And, in the beginning especially, it worked well. The Islamic Empire was the leader in the arts, sciences, math, and they were the first to translate Greek texts. They were extremely tolerant of other religious groups and lived harmoniously with them. Once the Industrial Revolution hit though, all that changed and Europe rushed in to colonize. I guess I'm saying that I support America and the "war" and the side effects of war. They need a new government and I hope we can help with that, but maybe democracy won't be the best thing for them. Living under Islamic rules was not the problem in Afghanistan. The problem was the Taliban and their interpretation of the Quran and Islamic law.
