Weighing war in Afghanistan on a moral scale

As US warplanes intensify their strikes on Taliban and terrorist forces with increasingly lethal and close-range firepower, few question the preponderance of American military superiority.

US commanders this week declared the Taliban combat power "eviscerated" and noted that the Afghan militias were often failing to return fire from stepped-up attacks, which brought to well over 2,000 the number of bombs and missiles shot.

Yet in the moral calculus of war, such great strength demands great responsibility to ensure that the goals, targets, and aftermath of armed conflict outweigh the destruction and chaos caused, military ethicists say.

"The United States has military capabilities that no one else in the world has," says James Turner Johnson, an expert on "just war" theory at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Yet such disproportionate power "doesn't mean you have the right to do anything."

Any war - but especially the murky war on terrorism - raises a host of ethical questions:

Are the US and its allies justified in attacking sovereign states to get at terrorists? Who and what should the US-led forces legitimately target? What type of force should be used to minimize civilian casualties?

Another vital question is whether the Bush administration, in fighting for a "just" cause, is also laying the way for a future "just peace" in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

While military commanders often have wide discretion in making decisions on how to fight, they are obliged at least to weigh their actions on a moral scale, Mr. Johnson and other ethicists say, and it appears so far that US officers are doing so.

"Military force is a blunt instrument," says philosophy professor Jeffrey Whitman, also a former Army major who taught "just war" theory at West Point. "I think the US military to this point has done their best," he says, adding, "We recognize if we kill a whole bunch of innocents in Afghanistan, we are no better than the terrorists."

From the decision to go to war to the search for a new peace, the following offers a moral checklist for Washington and gauges the ethical implications of its actions so far.

• Is it justified to attack states and overturn regimes to get at terrorists?

US actions to destroy the power of the Taliban regime are tied directly to the failure of that leadership to meet demands by President Bush to hand over Osama bin Laden and leaders of his Al Qaeda network.

While Afghanistan offers a relatively clear case of holding a regime accountable for harboring terrorists, the links between terrorist groups and other states may be far less obvious. "You have to be sensitive to the nature of the harboring or support," says John Kelsay, a professor of religion at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

• Can the US legitimately target political figures like Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar?

Military ethicists generally agree with the Pentagon view that Mr. Omar is part of the Taliban military "command and control" and therefore represents a legitimate target. Yet they say it is questionable to pinpoint a figure for assassination. "Assassination is a little dicey because it looks too much like murder," Johnson says.

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