A selection of the latest news from Afghanistan.

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.

There is no denying that international borders—coercively upheld and protected—are a huge factor in determining the distribution of wealth and opportunities throughout the world. From education and health care, to access to credit and the rule of law, a host of factors that influence quality of life depend simply on which side of a border a person is born on. Yet what could be more arbitrary, morally speaking, than where a person happens to be born? And why is it that inequality and poverty traceable back to this factor is generally considered less objectionable than deprivations that result from factors such as race, ethnicity or gender?

To get a grip on these questions, Public Ethics Radio discussed immigration and citizenship policies with Christopher Heath Wellman. Wellman is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, and a Professorial Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre. His views on immigration are also set out in his recent, “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” Ethics 119, no. 1 (2008): 109–141.

Click here to download the episode (34:45, 8.0 mb, MP3), or click on the online media player below. You can also download the transcript. Music in this episode was provided by Liberty.

Resources

The introductory data on life expectancy in Haiti and the Dominican Republic came from the 2007/2008 Human Development Report. For more on the problem of illegal migration in those countries, see the excellent report by James Ferguson of Minority Rights International, “Migration in the Caribbean: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Beyond.”

The introduction also quotes the Canadian philosopher Joseph Carens on immigration policy as “feudal privilege.” The line is from his “Aliens and Citizens: The Case from Open Borders,” Review of Politics 42, no. 2 (1987): 251-273. For more on his work, see Carens’s “The Case for Amnesty: A Forum on Immigration,” Boston Review 34, no. 3 (2009), along with several responses.

Wellman notes that Elizabeth Anderson, among others, don’t believe that caring about equality entails negating the effects of luck. For more on Anderson’s views on equality and luck, see her “What is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109 (1999): 287-337.

Warren Buffett is a renowned investor—this year the second richest person in the world. In fairness to Buffett, in 2006 he announced that he would give the vast majority of his wealth to charity.

There is a fierce debate over the effectiveness of aid; that is, whether development and humanitarian assistance improves the lives of those to whom it is targeted. Dambisa Moyo and William Easterly have recently made prominent contributions to the argument that, roughly, aid does not help. Prominent proponents of the opposing view (that aid does help) include Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier. Sachs and Moyo recently got into a typically heated debate on the issue on the Huffington Post: Sachs’s post; Moyo’s reply; Sachs’s reply.

Wellman refers to an argument by David Miller about who benefits from open borders, the poorest of the poor or the relatively well-off. See David Miller “Immigration: the Case for Limits” in Andrew I Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman, eds., Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.)

Remittances, money sent from emigrants back to their home countries, do indeed represent a substantial transfer of wealth from affluent to developing countries. The World Bank provides some estimates: in 2008, roughly $300 billion was sent to developing countries.

Wellman refers to Gillian Brock’s recent book. The full reference is: Gillian Brock, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Michael Walzer’s classic treatment of immigration can be found in his Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). The book was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Ronald Dworkin; see that review and Walzer’s reply.

Michael Blake has written extensively on immigration. For one major example, available for free online, see Michael Blake, “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no 3 (2001): 257-296.

Once a week or so, we’ll be rounding up recent reading material on Afghanistan. After the jump, the inaugural list.

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.

This post is the first in a series of examination of the moral issues at stake in the war in Afghanistan. Today: the initial assessment of the resort to war in 2001.

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.

I’m pleased an announce a special project for Public Ethics Radio. Christian and I, along with the talented producer Barbara Clare, are in the process of producing a special episode on the war in Afghanistan. The roots of this project are simple: we want to understand the war. As any observer can tell you, this isn’t easy.

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.

The widespread agreement on the importance of human rights in liberal democracies masks sharp differences between governments’ methods of protecting these rights. What does a country gain by enacting a bill of rights? Do countries that lack bills of rights, like Australia, protect human rights as well as those, like the United States and Canada, that have them? Does it make a difference if such rights are written into a foundational government document, as they in the United States, or if they are at least ostensibily on par with all other legislation, as they are in the United Kingdom?

In this episode of Public Ethics Radio, human-rights lawyer Hilary Charlesworth leads us through the challenging questions posed by the institutionalization of human rights.

Hilary Charlesworth is Professor of International Law and Human Rights in the Australian National University College of Law and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice at the ANU.

Click here to download the episode (41:10, 9.4 mb, MP3), or click on the online media player below. You can also download the transcript.

Resources

The Hamilton quote from the introduction is from Federalist no. 84.

Charlesworth mentions Australia’s National Human Rights Consultation. More details here.

If you’re interested, you can read the Australian constitution here. Wikipedia also has a nice, detailed article on it. The U.S. Bill of Rights consists of the first ten amendements to the U.S. constitution (Wikipedia). And the Canadian Charter is online here (Wikipedia).

Charlesworth mentions John Stanhope, the Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory or ACT (where Canberra and the Australian National University are located) who introduced the ACT Human Rigths Act; he is still in office.

You can read the text of the British Human Rights Act here.

Charlesworth’s ANU research project on the Human Rights Act is ACTHRA, the ACT Human Rights Act Research Project.

Christian asked a question about “post-Trudeau Canada.” By this he refers to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who was responsible for Canada’s adoption of the Canadian Charter in 1982.

The article describing a dialogue between the various branches of government due to the Canadian charter is available for free online. It is: Peter W. Hogg and Allison A. Bushell, “The Charter Dialogue between Courts and Legislatures (Or Perhaps the Charter of Rights Isn’t Such a Bad Thing After All),” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 35, no. 1 (1997): 75–124.

For the record, Charlesworth is correct that only eight amendments to the Australian constitution have been enacted. Details on the failed 1988 attempt to extend rights protection here.

See the New Zealand Human Rights Act here (Wikipedia), the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights here (Wikipedia), and the European Convention on Human Rights here (Wikipedia).

Listeners unfamiliar with the notion of “wrongful life” might want to check out this helpful post over on the Genomics Law Report. Adam Doerr explains:

In a typical wrongful life case, a physician or geneticist fails to diagnose a severe genetic problem in a fetus. The problem is typically so severe that the parents allege that they would have terminated the pregnancy if they had known of the problem. When the child—or a parent acting on the child’s behalf—brings a claim in court alleging that the physician or geneticist was negligent in failing to diagnose the problem, it is referred to as a “wrongful life” claim.

Charlesworth mentions a recent case where Australian legislators didn’t vote along party lines. You can read one Liberal legislator’s thoughts on the issue in a speech a gave to Parliament.

Here is the backstory on Al-Kateb v. Godwin. Read the justices’ reasoning here.

And finally, you can find out more about the European Court of Human Rights on its website.

Can we infringe individual rights to promote public health? Should, say, individuals be allowed to determine for themselves when they are too infectious to get on a plane? What happens when an individual contracts a new disease that is of unknown virulence? How do we deal with patients who don’t take their prescriptions correctly and risk allowing dangerous pathogens to mutate?

These urgent questions are the domain of the bioethics of infectious disease. On this episode of Public Ethics Radio, we are aided in the search for answers by the philosopher and tuberculosis expert Michael Selgelid.

Michael Selgelid is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and the Menzies Centre for Health Policy at the Australian National University, where he is also Deputy Director of the National Centre for Biosecurity. He is also the director of the new World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Bioethics at the ANU.

Click here to download the episode (33:58, 7.7 mb, MP3), or click on the online media player below. You can also download the transcript.

Resources

In my introduction, I refer to the case of Andrew Speaker, the tuberculosis sufferer who traveled in violation of CDC recommendations. The New York Times has a collection of articles on his case here.

Christian opens the discussion by quoting Onora O’Neill. The passages he cites are from the introduction to her “Public Health or Clinical Ethics: Thinking Beyond Borders,” Ethics & International Affairs 16, no. 2 (2002): 35-45.

Michael’s reply to the O’Neill quotes refers to an paper he presented in 2002 on the inattention to infectious disease within the discipline of bioethics. That paper has since been published: Michael Selgelid, “Ethics and Infectious Disease,” Bioethics 19, no. 3 (2005): 272-289. (The full text is not available for free, but you can read the abstract on the linked page.)

Rony Brauman, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières to whom Christian refers, described the opposition between epidemiological statistics and “people of real flesh and blood” in a debate at the Carnegie Council in New York. You can read the transcript here.

Michael mentions a colleague who advocates paying for compliance with TB medication regimes; the colleague is Dr. Lee Reichman. He serves with Michael on the World Health Organization’s Task Force on Addressing Ethical Issues in Tuberculosis Control Programmes.

For listeners who are unfamiliar with SARS—Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—Wikipedia has a very detailed entry on it.

The other colleague Michael mentions is Dr. Christian Enemark of the University of Sydney. He has published a number of articles on the securitization of infectious disease, including a piece with Michael in Bioethics.

The CIA report on infectious disease threats dates to 2000 and is available online: The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States. And background on the UN Security Council’s special session on HIV/AIDS as a security threat is here.

For details of the SARS riots in China, head over to the New York Times.

In other good news, we’re thrilled to announce that PER has been awarded a grant by the Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences E-Research and E-Learning Sub-Committee. We’re very grateful to the university for its support.

Hi, everybody.

I’m very pleased to say that Public Ethics Radio is back from a little impromptu hiatus. We’ve recorded three brand new episodes: Michael Selgelid on infectious diseases, Christopher Heath Wellman on the theory and practice of immigration, and Hilary Charlesworth on bills of rights. We’ll start posting these very, very soon.

The evolving global order has liberalized trade in goods, capital, ideas, and, to a lesser extent, people within a multilateral and market-oriented framework. Debates on globalization have focused on the question of whether this order is morally defensible.

The arguments are as diverse as they are forceful. Some decry the order entirely, or claim that at the very least it is much inferior to alternative forms of globalization. Others object that is coercively imposed by powerful, affluent countries—a new and pernicious kind of imperial control. Even apparently voluntary processes, such as learning English or joining the World Trade Organization, are viewed as the result of the use of power of a morally problematic sort. Still others have rushed to defend globalization in its current form, arguing that it is certainly the best that can be feasibly be hoped for, at least for now. These enthusiasts argue that increasing globalization is developing not through the use of power, but through the free choices of people and countries throughout the world.

How is one to make sense of this debate and evaluate these claims? Today on Public Ethics Radio, we discuss globalization with David Grewal of Harvard University.

To explain how power can be at work in apparently voluntary processes, Grewal introduces the concept of “network power.” He argues that this dynamic drives many key aspects of globalization. A network is united via a standard: a shared norm or convention that enables coordination among its users, such as a language. A widely used standard is more valuable than a less used one, simply because it governs access to a larger network of people.

The idea of network power generalizes this fact to describe globalization as the rise to global dominance of standards that have achieved critical mass in language, high technology, trade, law, and many other areas. It also characterizes the rise to dominance of a successful standard as involving a form of power.

While these new standards allow for global coordination, they also eclipse local standards, rendering them unviable to the extent that they prove incompatible with dominant ones. Therefore many of the choices driving globalization are only formally free and, in fact, are constrained because the network power of a dominant standard makes it the only effectively available option. It is this dynamic that generates much of the resentment against globalization and the criticism that it reflects a new imperialism. Grewal discusses various strategies for coping better with network power.

David Grewal, is a graduate of Yale Law School and is author of Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, published in 2008 by Yale University Press. He has been elected recently to the Harvard Society of Fellows, which he will join formally in the summer of 2009. He also recently presented material from his book at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Click here to download the episode (30:23, 7.3 mb, MP3), or click on the online media player below. You can also download the transcript.

Resources

The literature on globalization is incredibly rich. Here are a selection of readings for readers interested in learning more about the concepts discussed in today’s episode (all of which require subscriptions, unfortunately):

• David Grewal, “Network Power and Globalization,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2003).
• David Grewal, “Is Globalization Working?” Ethics & International Affairs 20, no. 2 (2006).
• David Grewal, “Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization” (presentation to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Dec. 3, 2008, New York, N.Y.)
• Robert Hunter Wade, “The Invisible Hand of American Empire,” Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2 (2003).
• Sanjay Reddy, “The Dilemmas of Globalization,” Ethics & International Affairs 15, no. 1 (2001).

On to the episode itself.

For starters, 77 percent of Mac owners use MS Word, according to Macworld.

David mentions the social theorists Karl Marx and Max Weber. For more on them, check out their entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Marx, Weber.

For more on language death, you can start with the Wikipedia entry, and then move on to David Crystal’s book.

David discusses the World Trade Organization (WTO) in some depth. There’s far too much out there to summarize it well here, although I should mention that Christian has a great book on trade and labor standards with Sanjay Reddy. Otherwise, you can start by comparing the real WTO page with this great spoof.

Ditto for the MAI, or Multilateral Agreement on Investment, although there’s no spoof. The skeptical group Public Citizen maintains a page of critiques.

Also, FYI, the GATT, or General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, is the predecessor agreement to the WTO. The trade agreements represented by the GATT and WTO have evolved through various “rounds” of trade agreements, the latest being (nominally) conducted in Doha, Qatar—thus receiving the name of Doha Round.