Tag: Ted Rall

Ted Rall vs. Wendy Chamberlain

Glenn Reynolds posted a link today to a massively stupid article by Ted Rall rehashing the lame conspiracy theory that the war in Afghanistan is really about oil. There are so many things wrong with Rall’s version of this conspiracy theory, that it’s difficult to know where to begin. So let me just stick to one of the early targets in Rall’s essay, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain. Here’s what Rall says about Chamberlain,

U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain met with PakistanÂ’s oil minister to discuss reviving the old Unocal deal on the third day of the bombing campaign, October 10, 2001. This was when the U.S.-aligned Northern Alliance still controlled just five percent of the country and defeat of the Taliban was still anything but guaranteed.[xxiii]

[xxiii] Frontier Post, Peshawar, Pakistan, October 11, 2001.

If you do a Google search on Wendy Chamberlain and Unocal you will find hundreds of left wing web sites repeating this claim. Rall makes an apparent error in his citation, though. Every other left wing conspiracy site puts this story as appearing in the Frontier Post on October 10, 2001, not on the 11th.

Unfortunately, the Frontier Post does not apparently maintain archives of its web site, so tracking down what the Frontier Post actually wrote about Chamberlain’s meeting is not easy. However, doing Google searches I ran across a web discussion group where someone had the entire text of the Frontier Post’s October 10, 2001 story on Chamberlain’s meeting. Here it is:

From The Pakistan Frontier Post

ISLAMABAD: The US Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain paid a courtesy call on the Federal Minister for Petroleum and Natural Resources, Usman Aminuddin here Tuesday and discussed with him matters pertaining to Pak-US cooperation in the oil and gas sector.

During the meeting the Petroleum Minister briefed the US Envoy on the ongoing and future development activities in the oil, gas and mineral sectors, privatization process, salient features of the new onshore and offshore exploration policies and opportunities for the prospective investors.

Usman Aminuddin said that the government was attaching high priority to the promotion of these vital fields of the economy aimed at accelerating socio-economic progress in the country.

He said that Pakistan is endowed with the fifth largest coal reserves in the world and the government is focusing specific attention to exploit them as soon as possible with a view to reduce the heavy dependence on oil and gas.

The Petroleum Minister said that a number of US oil and gas companies were successfully operating in Pakistan and were playing a tremendous role in the oil and gas exploration activities.

He invited the US investors to increase their participation in the petroleum and coal sector activities for the mutual benefit.

Usman Aminduddin also briefed the Ambassador on the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline project and said that this project opens up new avenues of multi dimensional regional cooperation particularly in view of the recent geo-political developments in the region.

Ms Wendy Chamberlain said that the United States attaches great importance to its relations with Pakistan.

She informed that the US Government had lifted a number sanctions ton Pakistan which would help revive it s national economy.

The Ambassador expressed the hope that the US investors would avail the opportunities in the oil, gas and mineral sectors of Pakistan.

Rall casts the article as claiming that Chamberlain met with the Petroleum Minister to talk about reviving the Unocal pipeline project, whereas the Frontier Post article is quite clear that this was a general meeting about petroleum and coal-related issues where the Pakistani Petroleum Minister raised the issue of the pipeline and apparently had to brief Chamberlain on the details of that proposal. Reading between the lines, Chamberlain appears to have been noncommittal (and for good reason — the pipeline is a nonstart for business reasons even with the Taliban out of the way).

Now, Rall could conceivably be referring to some other article the Frontier Post published about Chamberlain’s meeting. He should either produce that article or withdraw his claim about Wendy Chamberlain plotting to restart the Unocal pipeline project.

Source:

Peshawar Frontier Post article.

Of Course Casualties Matter

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.