Indiscriminate warfare: Although combat frequently results in unintended civilian casualties, the collateral damage in our "war on terrorism" shows insufficient concern for the innocent. (Morality of War).

Within hours of the terrorist attack upon our country, President George W. Bush promised that hose responsible for that atrocity would be brought to justice. He also warned, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." This warning was directed primarily at the Taliban regime then controlling Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had set up his base and training camps.

Under what the Constitution refers to as he "law of nations," a government sheltering and supporting terrorists is implicated in their despicable acts. But using military force to root out bin Laden and his minions faced both practical and moral obstacles. As the September 24th issue of Newsweek noted, bin Laden's terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan presented a very challenging target. "If the goal is to coerce the Taliban into handing him over, the prospects are ... bleak," reported the journal. "Afghanistan's shattered rural economy has almost no targets vulnerable to airstrikes, which would mainly make a lot of rubble jump."

Within the Afghan "rubble" could be found many innocent noncombatants who, unlike bin Laden's terrorist cadres, couldn't protect themselves from airstrikes. The most accessible Afghan targets for military action were a few scattered training camps, cities, and villages, as well as the Tora Bora cave complex. However, those targets were located either within, or in proximity to, civilian population centers, making it difficult at best for a military campaign against Afghanistan to comply with the "Just War" principle of "discrimination" between belligerents and noncombatants.

Compounding this difficulty was the logistical challenge of conducting missile strikes and bombing attacks against land-locked targets from thousands of miles away, and the use of the Northern Alliance -- a motley assortment of tribal warriors -- as ground-based surrogates for the U.S.-led assault.

According to the Bush administration and much of the major media, the military campaign against the Taliban and bin Laden's Afghan network was entirely successful and miraculously free of "collateral damage" to innocent civilians. But bin Laden and his top leaders are still at large, and substantial numbers of Taliban fighters continue to put up armed resistance across the Afghan countryside. This suggests that declaring victory is premature.

Furthermore, there is ample cause to believe that the bombing campaign, which employed some of the largest non-nuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal, was hardly the antiseptic exercise that the Bush administration insists. In fact, official statements from administration officials, especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, indicate that discriminating between combatants and civilians was not a compelling priority.

Of course, civilian casualties tragically occur in any war, even those fought responsibly on behalf of the most righteous causes. With thousands of Americans dead from murderous attacks on our nation, a military response against those who perpetrated those attacks is entirely appropriate -- assuming that it is carried out morally and under the proper authority.

The previous article illustrated that the war on Afghanistan has not been carried out in harmony with the Just War concept of "war decision law," requiring that the proper public authority (in our case, the U.S. Congress) must make the decision to commit a nation to war. We must now examine whether the campaign satisfies the "war conduct law" of the Just War doctrine.

Who's Responsible?

"We did not start this war," observed Secretary Rumsfeld at a Defense Department news briefing. "So understand, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they're innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the AlQaeda and the Taliban."

Rumsfeld's statement is impossible to reconcile with the "war conduct law," under which those who fight just defensive wars are morally responsible for avoidable civilian deaths. The logic of the terrorist, however, justifies indiscriminate use of lethal violence because of the supposed righteousness of the cause -- and the "responsibility" for innocent people dying supposedly rests with those who do not submit to terrorist demands. Obviously, there is no moral equivalence between Osama bin Laden's motives and the stated objectives of the "war on terrorism"; thus it is more than a little unsettling to see Secretary Rumsfeld embracing a moral standard of war conduct similar to bin Laden's.

Secretary Rumsfeld also made unsettling comments regarding the treatment of hostile Afghans attempting to surrender. Referring to the Mazar-e-Sharif battle in which some 500 pro-Taliban fighters were killed, Rumsfeld was quoted as saying that "no quarter" would be given to troops trying to surrender.

"The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders," stated Rumsfeld in a November 9th press briefing, insisting that the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was in a better position to negotiate. "If people try to [surrender], we are declining. That is not what we're there to do, is to begin accepting prisoners and impounding them in some way or making judgments."

According to the official account, most of the killings at Mazar-e-Sharif were carried out by the Northern Alliance, with support and guidance from U.S. forces, for the purpose of putting down a prisoner uprising. Under time-honored laws governing warfare, armed prisoner revolt can be put down with severity. However, after the dust settled around the prison fortress and Red Cross workers were allowed to remove the bodies, evidence emerged that some of the dead pro-Taliban prisoners had their arms tied behind their backs.

Whether carried out by U.S. forces or our allies, summary execution of prisoners would seriously violate the Geneva Convention. Just as importantly, it would violate our nation's long established moral traditions in warfare. General George S. Patton, an exemplar of that tradition, urged his soldiers: "Kill all the Germans you can, but do not put them up against a wall and kill them. Do your killing while they are still fighting. After a man has surrendered, he should be treated exactly in accordance with the Rules of Land Warfare, and just as you would hope to be treated if you were foolish enough to surrender. Americans do not kick people in the teeth after they are down."

Serious questions were also raised about a December 1st U.S. bombing raid that destroyed villages outside Kabul. Over 100 civilians were reportedly killed in the village of Kama Ado, despite residents insisting that no al-Qaeda terrorists were ever there. The December 4th Seattle Times noted, "anti-Taliban leaders say local villagers, not terrorists, are dying in the raids because Americans are using faulty intelligence."

Concerns were also raised over the bombing of Kandahar, a city regarded as an al-Qaeda stronghold. "In Kandahar, the hope remains that Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces will surrender, but we have reason to believe that [terrorist leader Mullah] Omar may have instructed his forces to continue fighting, which of course is putting the civilian population in Kandahar and the region at risk," Rumsfeld told reporters. "Indeed, hiding in the city, the Taliban are in effect using the civilian population of Kandahar as shields." In any case, Rumsfeld assured reporters, "We know this much for certain - the United States has taken extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties in this campaign."

But these statements contradict each other. If the U.S. was aware that al-Qaeda fighters were hiding within a village of several hundred innocent people, bombing the village from the air would be an indiscriminate measure, producing a grossly disproportionate combatant-to-civilian death ratio. Once again, a useful ethical benchmark was offered by General Patton, who in the middle of World War II condemned "the seemingly barbaric bombardment of the centers of cities" by both Allied and Axis forces.

Human Cost

In his study of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, University of New Hampshire Professor Marc W. Herold observes: "A legacy of the ten years of civil war during the 80s is that many military garrisons and facilities are located in urban areas where the Soviet-backed government had placed them since they could be better protected there from attacks by the rural mujahideen. Successor Afghan governments [including the Taliban] inherited these emplacements." This meant that many of the legitimate military targets of the anti-Taliban air campaign were located in the middle of urban centers.

Using figures derived from a variety of independent media and humanitarian sources, and other eyewitness accounts, Professor Herold compiled a civilian death toll of 3,767 Afghans for the first two months of the military campaign -- a figure eerily similar to the body count of those killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. "What causes the documented high level of civilian casualties ... in the U.S. air war upon Afghanistan?" wrote Professor Herold. "The explanation is the apparent willingness of U.S. military strategists to fire missiles into, and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan."

Again, there is no moral equivalence between Osama bin Laden's motives in organizing the terrorist attack upon American civilians, and the stated objectives of the U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan. The innocent dead in New York City and at the Pentagon were specifically targeted for the purpose of sowing terror; this is not true of the innocent civilians killed due to the Afghan bombing campaign. But if those thousands of civilians were killed as a result of our policymakers' guilty negligence, it would seriously undermine the moral stature of our anti-terrorism campaign.

Why should we worry about the death of Afghan noncombatants? Aren't we entitled, because of the obvious righteousness of our cause and the precedents set in previous wars, to use drastic measures to punish the terrorists and prevent further attacks? Conservative columnist Ann Coulter certainly thinks so, and her remarks in a post-September 11th column express the views of many Americans. "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," wrote Coulter. "We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities, we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

As the war proceeds, predicts David Brooks of the neo-conservative journal Weekly Standard, "We will care a lot more about ends -- winning the war -- than we will about means. We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about biological attacks. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory."

There is an ominous echo in Brooks' casual denigration of "bourgeois virtues." During World War II and the Cold War, after all, America's identified enemies were totalitarian socialist regimes that loudly condemned "bourgeois virtues" and extolled "ruthlessness." The Bush administration and its media surrogates tirelessly warn that bin Laden and his comrades are seeking to destroy Western civilization -- but if we cast aside the moral restrictions embodied in the Christian Just War tradition, we would accomplish that diabolical task all by ourselves.

New World "Justice"

Because the Bush administration has chosen to conduct the "war on terrorism" as a UN-supervised campaign, our nation faces several unprecedented dangers. For example, U.S. military personnel could find themselves being investigated, or even prosecuted, by the UN for carrying out policies violating the customary rules of warfare.

In 1995, Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic was welcomed as a "guarantor" of the UN-administered Bosnian peace accord, despite accusations that he was guilty of war crimes in the Bosnian civil war. Four years later, NATO, a UN affiliate, launched a bombing campaign against Serbia that killed hundreds of civilians and wrecked much of Serbia's economic infrastructure. Early last year, Milosevic was extradited to The Hague to stand trial before a UN tribunal - the first time the world body has arraigned a former head of state for prosecution. Significantly, the indictment against Milosevic includes charges relating to his conduct before 1995 -- atrocities for which he was allegedly responsible before the "international community" embraced him as a "peacemaker."

Is it unreasonable to believe that if the empowerment of the UN and its judicial organs proceeds apace, U.S. military leaders and policymakers might someday face arraignment for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, and in other battlefields of the "war on terrorism"? Significantly, Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor for the UN tribunal in The Hague, investigated charges that U.S. pilots committed war crimes during the NATO bombing of Serbia. And UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson has suggested that the treatment of captured Afghan fighters at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may violate UN "human rights" standards. (Typical of the UN, Robinson has not uttered a syllable of condemnation for Fidel Castro's gulags, which have operated for decades on the same island.)

Our present course combines two of the worst alternatives: It undermines the historic Just War standards that help define us as a society, while fortifying the UN's spurious system of "international law." The potential damage if we persist in this course would easily eclipse anything that bin Laden's minions could inflict upon us.