Honour and Duty: The role of the professional soldier

Whilst driving today I heard the sad news on the radio that 3 UK soldiers have been killed by a bomb dropped from a US jet in Helmand Province, Afghanistan (see news.bbc.co.uk, 24.08.07). Hearing this led me to thinking about a British army Captain that was killed defending a dam in Afghanistan some weeks ago, who's parents were friends with some relatives of mine. British operations in Afghanistan have often been criticised as being under resourced and extremely risky for the soldiers involved. As I understand it, this particular operation had been criticised for using the soldiers as sitting ducks, drawing out the Taliban to fight. Which brings me to the question I'm considering in this post; Are the risks faced by British soldiers in Afghanistan, due to the strategy imposed by their military and political commanders, acceptable?

Firstly, I feel it is important to outline my basic opinion on the war in Afghanistan. For me, the decision to join the US in war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was broadly just. My reasoning is as follows. For all the misinformation and propaganda coming from all sides in the so-called 'War on Terror', you have to get pretty far out into the world of conspiracy theories to find people who do not agree that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th 2001. In the fog of the debacle in Iraq, deliberate attempts in Washington to change the nature and definition of human rights, and the sometimes disgraceful way that certain US politicians have dismissed the opinions of the UK government and peoples in the past 6 years, it is easy to forget that the US has been, certainly in military terms but also most likely in political terms, the UK's greatest ally for the past 90 years. Although attempts were no doubt made to blur the distinction between Taliban camps aimed at fighting an internal civil war and al-Qaeda terrorist training camps, and without dismissing the issue of the term 'al-Qaeda' being used to cover such a range of groups and networks that it is starting to become almost useless, the fact is that the Taliban allowed their territory to be used as a shelter for Osama Bin Laden and the central structure of his terror network. Although the UK itself was not attacked by al-Qaeda until after the 'War on Terror' was underway, it is hard to deny that the UK was already, through its involvement in the Gulf Crisis (1990-91) among other issues, intricately linked with the US in the mind of violent jihadists. Finally, with the Taliban’s ideology being firmly based in violent Jihad, and with them having accepted the residence of Osama Bin even after his presence had drawn air strikes against Sudan, it was fairly clear that room to negotiate was minimal at best. So, to summarise, with the mainland of the UK's greatest ally having been attacked by a group that could be expected to hold violent intentions towards the UK and which was being sheltered by a government operating in an easily identifiable sovereign territory that could not be expected to be open to negotiation, I feel that, regardless of which political party or prime minister was in power at the time, the decision to go to war was the only realistic option.

Secondly, it is important that I briefly summarise my general view on the role of professional soldiers in modern warfare. It is clearly preferable that the UK has a fully professional army. Conscription, while having been potentially necessary in the past when the UK mainland was under threat, is in general morally questionable. Professional armies are not only more effective, in that they achieve greater results with less expense and fewer casualties, but tend to behave in a more ethical fashion when in the field. The key to the moral difference between a professional soldier and a civilian is that professional soldiers (more so in some militaries than others) have (for a variety of reasons) generally chosen to be involved in warfare, whereas civilians have not. A key feature of the 'Just War' tradition (much of which was developed before fully professional armies became common during wartime) is that the lives of soldiers must never be prioritised over the lives of civilians. In fact, in more developed concepts of 'Just War', soldiers are expected to put themselves in situation of significant danger in order to ensure the safety of civilians. This is, unfortunately, a concept that has been followed more in words than in deeds. From the carpet bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, through to the decision of NATO planners to launch an air campaign rather than a ground invasion in Kosovo, the lives of soldiers have consistently been prioritised over those of civilians. The fact that the vast majority of casualties of war since 1945 have been civilians should be a point of significant shame for all of mankind. In my opinion, if those states and their militaries who seek to assert that they act for the moral good made efforts to redress this balance and shift the risk back away from civilians it would hugely add to the legitimacy of their causes, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, then, my feelings are as follows. The decision to got war in the first place was just, and now that the UK has assisted in removing the Taliban, the only acceptable reason to leave before the Taliban is defeated would be if that was the best thing for the Afghan people. On the other hand, there has to be a conceivable exit strategy for British forces, otherwise their presence would simply be a sort of involuntary colonisation. The Taliban, I suspect, would be happy to sit back and wait for the NATO forces to leave before launching an attempt at regaining power. The one thing that is stopping them from doing this is that they recognise that if they allow Afghanistan to develop whilst under occupation into a state much better able to provide for its citizens, the people would not support them in their attempts to return and their chances would be slim. They have no choice then but to try to hold areas of territory from which to launch attacks aimed at disrupting development efforts. In order to prevent this strategy from being successful, British and other NATO forces must protect the development projects and not allow the Taliban to feel safe enough to build their strength in the territories in which they are mainly based. This strategy is currently the best available not only to the British army but, crucially, to the civilian population of Afghanistan who were terrorised when the Taliban were in power, and could expect the same on their return, worse so for those thought to have collaborated in their downfall. The strategy holds risks for British soldiers, and they should be supported in every way possible, but we should not forget that those in the field chose to accept a career that holds this particular combination of honour and duty.