David Rohde, “Held By the Taliban,” New York Times, Oct. 17–21, 2009. Last November, Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter David Rohde set out to get the other side of the story on the war. He ended up becoming involuntarily embedded with the Haqqani network.

Karen De Young, “U.S. Official Resigns over Afghan War,” Washington Post, Oct. 27, 2009. Former Marine and newly former Foreign Service Officer Matthew Hoh becomes the first publicized conscientious resignor over the war. Read his resignation letter, too.

Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” New Yorker, Oct. 26, 2009. Mayer explores the tactics—and ethics—of the CIA’s drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mayer’s discussion of the piece on NPR’s Fresh Air is also worth a listen.

Julius Cavendish, “Taliban Attack UN Kabul Guesthouse in Attempt to Upend Afghan Runoff,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 28, 2009. While the headline gives the main details, the article also points out that the attack may have also been intended to frighten the international aid community. Attacks like these, starting with the murder of Ricardo Munguia, have resonated strongly within the aid community. The Times later linked the guesthouse attack to the Haqqani Network and Al Qaeda.

Arthur Bright, “Clinton: Hard to Believe Pakistan Can’t Find Al Qaeda,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 30, 2009. Signalling a break with the Bush Administration, the Secretary of State publicly calls out Pakistan’s failure to crack down on militants on the run from Afghanistan.

Carlotta Gall and Jeff Zeleny, “Out of Race, Karzai Rival Is Harsh Critic of Election,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2009. I’m omitting the election here because it has been front page news everywhere, but here Gall and Zeleny take a hard look at the effect Abdullah Abdullah’s withdrawal will have on Hamid Karzai’s already thin legitimacy.

This week, the main characters.

Hamid Karzai — Elizabeth Rubin, “Karzai in His Labyrinth,” New York Times Magazine, August 4, 2009. Published just prior to the flawed recent elections, Rubin explains why the Afghan president turned to warlords for support.

Mullah Muhammed Omar — Scott Shane, “A Dogged Taliban Chief Rebounds, Vexing U.S.,” New York Times, October 10, 2009. Shane updates us on the status of that other antagonist the U.S. failed to capture in 2001.

Richard Holbrooke — George Packer, “The Last Mission,” New Yorker, September 28, 2009. A detailed biography of the civilian in charge of Pres. Obama’s Afghanistan policy.

And some more general material.

The McChrystal Report. The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan leaked to Bob Woodward last month. It’s frank and surprisingly accessible to non-experts.

Ahmed Rashid, “The Afghanistan Impasse,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 2009. Reviews of Gretchen Peters’s Seeds of Terror, the most extensive examination of the heroin trade to date, and Nicholas Schmidle’s To Live or Perish Forever.

And if that’s not enough for you, George Packer has assembled a thorough list of essential, recent books on Afghanistan and Pakistan over.

Operation Enduring Freedom commenced in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than 30 days after September 11. The debate about the morality of the war barely kept pace with events, and what occurred was muted and heavily one-sided. Writers from the left and right alike agreed that the United States was permitted—possibly required—to respond to the attacks with military force. NPR journalist Scott Simon wrote a typical piece, titled “Even Pacifists Must Support This War.” A Quaker and sometime pacifist, Simon insisted that a war in Afghanistan would be textbook self-defense: “Only American (and British) power can stop more killing.”

Perhaps more significantly, Richard Falk, currently a UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories and a vocal critic of the war in Iraq, concurred that the United States had a just cause to invade Afghanistan. Like Simon, Falk underlined his position by pointing to his own anti-war history: “I have never since my childhood supported a shooting war in which the United States was involved.” Nonetheless, he continued, “the war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II.”

Falk carefully outlined what he considered the just goals of the invasion:

The destruction of both the Taliban regime and the Al Qaeda network, including the apprehension and prosecution of Osama bin Laden and any associates connected with this and past terrorist crimes, are appropriate goals.… With respect to the Taliban, its relation to Al Qaeda is established and intimate enough to attribute primary responsibility, and the case is strengthened to the degree that its governing policies are so oppressive as to give the international community the strongest possible grounds for humanitarian intervention.

Falk’s statement of goals is the prototypical view of what the United States and its allies are permitted to do in Afghanistan. The United States is, of course, permitted to attempt to capture and try Osama Bin Laden and members of Al Qaeda and may also use military force to simply destroy them. Moreover, this permission extends to the Taliban, to whom we may “attribute primary responsibility” for Sept. 11, despite the Taliban having not actually carried out the attacks. Falk also goes the extra mile to claim that the Taliban’s human rights record in and of itself provides the “strongest possible grounds for humanitarian intervention,”—a view which is not widely shared.

(The extension of the permission to capture or kill the perpetrators of Sept. 11 to the Taliban is a position that merits close attention. This view was known for a time as the Bush Doctrine, which holds governments that harbor terrorists accountable for those terrorists’ actions. The strength of one’s belief in the Bush Doctrine, then, may determine one’s current attitude toward the fight against the Taliban. Arguably, a rejection of the Bush Doctrine may lead to a position like that reportedly held by Vice President Biden. Biden has argued for reducing the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan and refocusing strategy away from protecting the Afghan population from the Taliban and toward hunting down Al Qaeda.)

Although the recourse to war was deemed just by many on the left, support was not universal. Howard Zinn dissented, calling the war a “gross violation of human rights.” Zinn admitted that the cause in Afghanistan—limited, specifically, to “ending terrorism”—was just. But the war itself was not, he argued: “Civilian casualties are certain. The outcome is uncertain.” The United States failed to employ every means other than war to bring Bin Laden to justice. And aerial bombardment, the primary means employed to prosecute the war (at least by Dec. 2001, when Zinn was writing), was wildly disproportionate. For the United States, “the history of bombing… is a history of endless atrocities.”

Darrel Moellendorf, in one of the few scholarly assessments of the war, took a relatively similar position to Zinn. Taking a statist, Rawlsian line that roughly endorses the Bush Doctrine, Moellendorf asserts that “a state that gives refuge to terrorists who plan and execute foreign attacks that intentionally result in the deaths of more than two thousand civilians of other states is certainly one whose domestic policy results in serious international injustices.”

On his view, there was sufficient evidence to tie Bin Laden and the Taliban to Sept. 11, and so there was a just cause for war in Afghanistan. The problem for Moellendorf, as for Zinn, was that the means might not be sufficient to achieve the ends. He singles out the just war criterion of “reasonable likelihood of success.” Simply put, if the war’s prosecutors are unlikely to achieve their goals, regardless of how desirable those goals are, then the war ought not to be undertaken. Moellendorf doubts that the United States will be able to actually destroy Al Qaeda’s ability to kill civilians, given the organization’s amorphous, multi-national structure. Moreover, the war is unlikely to deter future terrorists, since they are already hardened radicals willing to die for their causes. Although a war may succeed in the short run, Moellendorf is ultimately skeptical about the long term since doing so may produce a backlash against the United States:

It would seem that resentment could be limited to some degree if three policy restrictions were observed. First, counter-terrorist wars should seek multi-lateral legitimacy. Second, they should scrupulously observe the requirements of jus in bello. And third they should be accompanied by a more just US foreign policy.

Given recent U.S. experiences in the Middle East, Moellendorf finds little reason to believe that these three criteria will be met.

Finally, Moellendorf also discounts the “last resort” condition of just war. This condition demands that no non-violent alternatives to war be available when the war begins. Moellendorf finds that the Bush Administration made no serious attempt to negotiate with the Taliban, and thus concludes that “the war in Afghanistan is not a war of last resort.” As a result, and despite the existence of a just cause, Moellendorf finds the resort to war unjust. This “mixed” conclusion entails that, although the war ought not to have been started in October 2001, “once the war began it may have been the lesser of two evils.”

Looking back, one finds a remarkably wide consensus, supported by even the most die-hard anti-war activists, that the United States had a just cause for war in Afghanistan. Beyond this narrow point of consensus, however, opinion diverged considerably. Assessments of the intial resort to war rested heavily on one’s view of the facts, both about the nature of the enemy and of its pursuer. For some, the cause was so important that there was no choice but to pursue Al Qaeda and the Taliban, regardless of the cost. For others, the enemy was too elusive, and its host country too fragile, to make any kind of just conclusion to war easily foreseeable. And for the sharpest critics of American power, the United States was incapable of waging a responsible war against an enemy hidden within an impoverished, isolated country. As we now know, history has not been kind to those in the first camp.

Over the coming weeks, we will take a moral lens to the conduct of the war, in hopes of finding the tools to understand what has gone wrong—and right—and to prepare ourselves for what is to come.

My own impression, having loosely followed discussion of the war since its inception, is that Afghanistan has not received nearly the same depth of scholarly attention as the war in Iraq. This is understandable—there was a fairly wide consensus in the early years that the war in Afghanistan was just. It was straightforward self-defense against aggression. This consensus on the rightness of the war endured largely throughout the Bush presidency, but has very publicly begun to erode along with the nascence of “Obama’s war.” Clearly Afghanistan is in a very different state today than it was in 2001. But what is this state? Have the goals that were set out at the time of invasion been met? When would it be appropriate to leave Afghanistan, or ought we to have left already? Are the tactics we employ undermining our successes? Should we be trying to create a new, democratic, right-respecting government in Kabul, or should U.S. and NATO soldiers aim simply to hunt down Al Qaeda and the exporters of international terrorism?

These are just a few of the questions that spring to mind when we contemplate Afghanistan. While we slowly piece together what we hope will be an enlightening show on these questions, we’ll be posting a series of discussions of just war theory as it applies to Afghanistan. The first is a look back at 2001 and the initial discussions of jus ad bellum, or the justice of the resort to war. More will follow shortly. We’ll also post round-ups of good reporting and analysis. Stay tuned.