This anti-war weblogger and this pro-war weblogger agree on an odd proposition — that the number of civilian casualties inflicted on Afghanistan by the United States and its allies is irrelevant in deciding whether or not the war is moral. Well sure, if you throw out centuries worth of thinking about just war theory (which traces its origins in the West back at least to the writings of Aquinas).
Of course the amount of collateral damage matters — it is extremely important in deciding whether or not a given act of war and even wars themselves are morally justifiable. In just war theory this sort of concern falls under the rubric of the proportionality principle. The Center of Concern has a concise definition of the proportionality principle,
In deciding whether or not to enter war, the principle of proportionality requires the assessment that the costs of war in damage and human suffering must be proportionate to the good expected to be achieved by the war.
The proportionality principle has some obvious applications. Would either India or Pakistan be justified in launching a nuclear first strike? Sure, if you think that killing potentially millions of civilians is a worthwhile tradeoff for control of Kashmir. But I suspect most rational people would agree that the suffering imposed would not be anywhere near proportional to the good to be expected.
This sort of thinking also applies to the American war in Afghanistan. I won’t rehash the debate over the number of civilian casualties, but low-end estimates are in the 1,000 to 2,000 range, while some on the Left such as Ted Rall are pushing figures in the 30,000 to 40,000 range, though without any sort of references for such figures (Rall apparently just pulled such high figures out of thin air).
It is completely legitimate to ask whether or not what the United States accomplished in Afghanistan was worth killing that many civilians. And, if we decide that the casualties were disproportional to the good accomplished, then the war was immoral.
The United States has certainly fought immoral wars in the past. Many of the military actions taken against Native Americans in the 19th century clearly fail not only the proportionality principle but other just war principles as well. I also think that the Vietnam War meets all of the tests of a just war except for the proportionality principle. Preventing a Communist takeover of Vietnam was a just goal, but the way the United States fought that war imposed casualties and other problems in disproportion to the good that would have been achieved.
With the war in Afghanistan, however, the proportionality principle is satisfied even if the casualty figures were as high as Rall claims. I would argue further that even if there had been no Sept. 11 terrorist attack, simply removing the Taliban at a cost of 40,000 civilians would have easily met the proportionality test. After all, it is likely that far more people than that died annually from food shortages and official and extrajudicial violence perpetrated by the Taliban. Add in eliminating Afghanistan as a base of operations for Al Qaeda, and I don’t see how it is anything but a slam dunk case for the war easily meeting the proportionality principle.
On the other hand, both the U.S. embargo of Cuba and the U.N. sanctions of Iraq fail both the proportionality principle and other elements of just war theory (and yes, they are both acts of war), and are immoral.
The main problem with just war theory, by the way, is that it is generally only useful in extreme cases before the fact. For example, it is now obvious that the war in Afghanistan imposed very few civilian casualties. But before the war, many on the Left and some NGOs claimed that any war would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths due to famine. The exact opposite actually happened — there were almost certainly fewer famine deaths in Afghanistan than there would have been without the U.S. war.
Just war theory would be great if nation states knew all of the results of their actions ahead of time, but is of little use other than after-the-fact analysis in the real world. We can use it to tell that the Cuban embargo, Iraqi sanctions, and the Vietnam War all should have ended after it was obvious they were imposing disproportional civilian casualties, but on the other hand this was not necessarily at all clear when those actions were initially taken.