Happy New Year to everyone! Besides conducting the normal routine of Catholic ministry in this country, I have the happy pastime of counting down the days until I go on R&R (rest and relaxation) leave and return to California for a two-week respite. Today being the fifth of January, the count is 20. Oohrah! I look forward to seeing many of you during this brief vacation.

This letter will be significantly different than the rest you have read from me. It is occasioned by an article that has appeared—both online and in print—in The Valley Catholic, the newspaper of the Diocese of San Jose. For my non-Catholic friends reading this online, the diocese constitutes the Catholic Church in my home county of Santa Clara. Its head is the Bishop of San Jose, to whom I owe obedience as a priest and in a very real sense is my earthly boss. The current bishop is not only my boss but the bishop who ordained me to the priesthood, who assigned me to both the Cathedral Basilica as a baby priest and now at St. Victor Parish, and it is he who permits me to serve as a naval chaplain. In my world he is far more than the “average Joe,” as soldiers might say.

One of the many hats he wears is that of newspaper publisher. The paper contains a mix of local and syndicated content. It is a syndicated article appearing in the November issue that is the subject of this letter. It is entitled, “Afghanistan: Another immoral war.” Those online can read it at http://www.valleycatholiconline.com/viewnews.php?newsid=894&id=15. The author works at a parish in Baltimore, Maryland. I have no idea what academic credentials the author has nor do I really care: I prefer to engage the article on its own merits. The world’s best ethicist was Our Lord Jesus Christ and I’ve never seen a Ph.D behind his name.

If I believed the author was right in his argumentation, I would resign my officer’s commission in a heartbeat. Or raise such a fuss that my commanders would have me removed from Afghanistan. And if you, my parishioners, believe his argumentation, you should demand that I be removed from this military ministry and perhaps from the pastorate of St. Victor, since I would be an accomplice to mass murder by participating in a manifestly unjust war.

Needless to say, I do not agree with this article. To give the author’s argument more clarity than it deserves, he accuses the American war effort in Afghanistan of violating two principles of the Just War Theory (in its Catholic guise): the principle of discrimination and the principle of proportionality. I will point out his misstatements of these two principles, demonstrate one instance of self-contradiction, and hope that this letter will give you some guidelines from the Catholic Tradition on how to evaluate our effort in Afghanistan without insulting your intelligence and “giving you the (pre-ordained) answer.” As for being in Afghanistan or not, I don’t have an answer. Believe it or not, some of the best arguments I’ve heard against the war as we currently conduct it come from service members stationed here—and I have no problem with their views. Same with those in favor of our presence. They are informed and reflective, using the reality on the ground as we experience it. They are far from the “straw man” argument Mr. Magliano has advanced.

The principle of discrimination states that innocent noncombatants (civilians) may never be intentionally targeted by military forces. Mr. Magliano misstates the principle as “noncombatants may not be attacked,” leaving out the crucial element of intentionality. Perhaps every war ever fought has had some civilian deaths associated with it. By his interpretation, most (and probably all wars)—offensive and defensive—would be unjust on this principle alone. There would not be a need for other principles as his version would hold every war unjust, even a defensive war fighting an invasion. The Catholic Church would have to be an absolutely pacifist church, which She manifestly is not. Any examination of Just War writings demonstrates the concern of ethicists for the civilian population and the Law of Armed Conflict, to which the U.S. is a signatory, goes to great length to distinguish noncombatants from combatants. It is a war crime for American soldiers to kill or mistreat noncombatants and combatant prisoners. In the news recently are the impending courts martial of three Navy Seals who allegedly slapped a captured Taliban commander across the face. Does this strike you as indicative of a military force that intentionally kills civilians?

Mr. Magliano assigns particular blame to attacks from aircraft, describing “a massive air assault among one of the poorest countries on earth.” Poor Afghanistan is: the poorest in Asia and fourth poorest per capita in the world. Under massive air assault it is not. The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes n. 80 outrightly condemns “every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” These words were written with the two atomic bomb drops upon Japan and the Allied area bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan in mind. If Mr. Magliano has evidence that the U.S. Air Force has violated its own doctrine by conducting such an attack here, I wish he would bring forth his evidence. As for me, I live on the outskirts of the sixth-largest city in Afghanistan and have not observed evidence of such attacks, past or present. On the contrary, I have seen the firing of mortars stopped because some cattle walked near the target point. Not only do we want to avoid killing civilians but also their livestock! We would rather lose a battle and have Americans killed than engage the enemy where civilians could conceivably be killed—a standard higher than the Just War Theory and Laws of War call for. I have met soldiers (Afghan and US) and Marines who are now dead because we held back on artillery and airpower for fear of causing civilian casualties. One such brave warrior’s blood was all over my uniform’s T-shirt: I couldn’t bear to throw it in the trash given the sacrifice the blood represented so I had it burned with some dignity at the base’s burn pit. I also got to sit outside for three hours attending to a mortally wounded Afghan soldier from battle, keeping the flies from bothering him and praying over him until his buddies returned from the battle and carried him to his nearby hometown where he died in the family home, a bullet having gone straight through his left eye and into the brain. If we had obliterated the target village, which was well within our ability to do so, both of those soldiers probably would have lived. But we didn’t.

For a third party’s (not known for being pro-US) evaluation of how the coalition targeted in Afghanistan in the years 2005-08, please see this: http://www.hrw.org/en/node/75157. Given the current surge and more restricted rules of engagement instituted by General McChrystal, the use of air and artillery is even more circumscribed than described in the article. Genghis Khan we are not.

For accounts of the battle I have obliquely described above, place “Ganjgal battle McClatchy News Service” in an internet search engine to get a series of articles of a reporter at the battle. I was at the Forward Surgical Team site (a small operating room/emergency room) where the casualties were received. But for the great skill of the FST, more would have died that day. Thank you, once again, to the many St. Victor’s parishioners who gave to the FST toy drive for the team’s current work in serving the children of the local population.

Before moving to the second principle, Mr. Magliano, towards the end of this part of his essay, includes a sentence that begins “Although U.S. military strategists have not directly aimed at civilians…” That alone self-refutes his accusation of the violation of the principle of discrimination. Intentionality is a key element of every knowledgeable ethicist’s interpretation of this principle.

At this point, one might object that if Americans are not intentionally targeting Afghan civilians, is there no limit to what weaponry can be used? After all, one could use an atomic weapon to kill a dozen Taliban fighters, but would that be justified given 10,000 civilian Afghans also killed in the blast? This intuitive moral point is called the principle of proportionality. Unfortunately, Mr. Magliano misstates the principle by defining it as “waging war must not cause people greater harm than the harm experienced prior to the war.” On the contrary, the Catechism, the authoritative summary of the Catholic Faith, defines it thus: “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” (CCC no. 2309). Proportionality is a principle that applies from the young lieutenant assessing whether there are civilians inside of a mud house his platoon just took fire from up to four-star generals setting strategy and rules of engagement, the regulations by which an American soldier may engage an enemy.

Because of the cartoonish description Mr. Magliano provides of the Just War Theory, the real moral dilemmas of soldier, Marine, and airman in employment of weapons really aren’t addressed. In his version, if every Al Qaeda and Taliban member in the world was in a room along with one person who possibly was a civilian, no action could be taken. Once again, this is simply his bizarre take on the principle of proportionality rather than Catholic teaching. But the moral question exists nonetheless. Who is to judge the amount of risk the civilian population faces in an insurgency like this where the insurgents hide among the population? How many civilians should be put at risk to capture or kill a Taliban fighter? These types of questions are a good reason why the military has chaplains: to ensure that American service members keep the humanity of everybody in mind as they make their life-and-death decisions on the field of battle.

Mr. Magliano does not address proportionality at the level of the individual warfighter but he does address it at the national level. Yet again he seems to show no understanding of what the Just War Theory really says. With his idiosyncratic definition of proportionality, I picture him viewing this war as a trip to the casino. We walk in the doors with 3,000 chips—those people murdered on 9/11. Once we spend down our cache of chips—once we kill 3,000 Afghan civilians—we are broke and have to leave the building. To him, proportionality is violated once we kill, even without intending to do so, an equal number of Afghans as innocents who were killed on 9/11. I suppose the innocents killed in the Al Qaeda-connected African embassy bombings, the USS COLE, the first World Trade Center, the London and Madrid bombings, and other attacks were freebies as they go unmentioned in the article.

Looking at the real definition of proportionality, is it simply a matter of numbers of those killed? By this measure, our participation in World War Two should have ended in June 1942 after the Battle of Midway: Pearl Harbor was avenged and American and Japanese casualties more-or-less equalized. No, in every war we have to define “the evil to be eliminated” in the words of the Catechism in order to apply this principle.

What is the evil represented by Al Qaeda and its ally the Taliban? The Taliban’s goal is easy to identify: they want to enslave this nation of over thirty million in their version of an Islamic fundamentalist state, which they had done for several years until 9/11 came about. Even most Muslims do not want to live in such a nation. It certainly was an alien regime to the free-wheeling Afghan populace. One reason why we were so successful in 2001 in ejecting the Taliban from the country was that the Afghans at large wanted them gone and were willing to fight alongside us to make it happen.

What about Al Qaeda? Their goals are a bit more expansive: reestablishment of the caliphate and the borders of Islam—and destruction or conversion to Islam by the sword of those who would oppose it. That would be us. For the uninitiated, the borders of Islam include those lands where Islam was once dominant politically but now is not. That would include the nations of India and Israel, much of sub-Saharan Africa, most of southeast Europe, the entire littoral of the Black Sea, the islands of Sicily and Mindanao, and the southern two-thirds of Spain and Portugal. For those who like numbers that is in the neighborhood of one-and-a-half billion people to be enslaved, a quarter of the world’s population.

One might argue that AQ is too small to accomplish such an ambitious project. In a world without nuclear weapons I would agree. But if the Empire of Japan in 1945 was forced to surrender in the first time in its history after two atomic bomb drops, who is to say that the far-less disciplined United States of 2010 would not do so after two bombs in shipping containers annihilate large parts of the cities of New York and Seattle? Or New Orleans and Los Angeles? Or any of the other great American shipping ports? How about London and Rotterdam? Spain dropped out of Iraq after the Madrid subway attacks killed 191 whereas 9/11 drove us to war. America is far more resolute than most of our European allies, but faced with the loss of millions of American lives, a worldwide Great Depression, and the uncertainty of future attacks, are you sure that we wouldn’t surrender? Are we sure Pakistan is stable enough that its nukes aren’t stolen? That, to my mind, is a better evaluation of the principle of proportionality than a body count. It certainly is more congruent with the Just War Theory.

To give Mr. Magliano a little credit, he addresses some salient issues towards the end of his article when he speaks about finances. Unfortunately he misidentifies them as issues of justice instead of prudence. In reality, it is possible for a potential war to be justly fought but not prudently so. In the case of 9/11, we could have drafted a million men and overrun Afghanistan, created a Fortress America of 100% border security, mass expulsions of aliens from suspect countries, and 100% airline passenger and container checks. The choice to do so would have destroyed world trade, crippled the domestic airline industry, cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and probably triggered a worldwide economic depression on the scale of the 1930s, but we could have done it. Presidents Bush and Obama and the Congress have chosen war on the current scale. I don’t fault them for doing so even though our limited approach has increased the odds of losing this war.

Is this the case in 2010? It is clear that the Afghan War has been under-resourced. Even if we had adequate resources I don’t know that we would spend them in an efficient manner. I’m partial to this American blogger who works in Afghanistan (much of the time in Jalalabad) who is critical of coalition efforts so far and who gets results at a fraction of the cost of military’s way of doing business: http://freerangeinternational.com/blog.

I have never met an American service member here who considers himself a murderer. I have had a few who have concerns about collateral damage to civilians and proportionality in specific cases. Once again, that is why we have chaplains: once we treat the Afghans as the Soviet Union once did it is time to get out—for our sake. War is terrible. No wonder there is a Just War principle called “Last Resort.” No, those here who doubt our mission are those who doubt that it is prudent. In their view, it costs us too much in money and lives lost for too little to show for it. How many of the troops here think this? I have no idea. Honestly, people here look at this as a job: I do my job to the best of my ability and I trust that my buddies and superiors do the same. If Americans back home think that table conversation is about whether we should be in Afghanistan or not they are badly mistaken. A much more likely subject of conversation is the NFL game on the television in the dining facility or the quality of the food we are putting into our mouths. Or the last battle fought. Or the last soldier who was killed-in-action or wounded.

I hope the conversation at home about this war stays grounded in reality and not ill-informed bias such as the article contained. In my opinion—and this hurts my American pride to say so— we do not determine whether we win or lose this war in Afghanistan. That is up to the Afghan population. By being militarily superior to the Taliban and other assorted bad guys—something the Soviet Union was not able to accomplish with the mujahadeen—we have given the Afghan population the opportunity to choose a future different than the dark vision of the Taliban or the country’s historical mean of living slightly above complete political anarchy. But we really have little ability to influence the numerous ethnic groups and tribes: they are the ultimate decision-makers here.

If The Valley Catholic wanted somebody from Baltimore to comment on the war, then it should have asked the Archbishop of Baltimore, the Most Reverend Edwin O’Brien, to do so. He is the previous Archbishop for the Military Services, USA and a careful thinker. He’s also a good writer and would have composed a better letter in half the space than I have. There are other serious Just War ethicists available too. I apologize to the parishioners of St. Victor who had to read such an inadequate treatment of an important topic on their dime in the TVC, since all the money of the diocese and parish comes from the Catholic faithful. I hope that this letter does what the article should have done, to help you think about this war in an authentically Catholic manner.

Yours in Christ, Fr. Michael