JME and Afghanistan Twenty Years On

Abstract

“Fear and I were born twins together,” said Hobbes, alluding to the Spanish armada-borne scare of 1588. The year 2001 birthed a similarly synergistic pair, the attacks of 9/11 and this journal, Journal of Military Ethics, or JME among friends: the dramatic catalyst of at least two wars, that is, and a journal focusing on the ethics of war. “The editing of this first issue was completed before 11 September 2001,” wrote Norwegian Major Dr Bård Mæland in his introduction, “so contributions related to terrorism and counter-terrorism will find their place in the next issue [...].” And the next, he might have added, and the next, and so on for twenty years and counting. Not surprisingly, it is a rare issue of the journal that lacks an article motivated or at least influenced by the wars of this century. At about the same time as JME’s first issue was undergoing final edits, George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War appeared in bookstores, recounting how the US had cooperated with Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and many western nations to support the successful mujahedeen resistance against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. In 1989, the Soviets retreated, and so the story might have ended, but publication came just late enough for Crile to insert the 9/11 attacks along with a book-ending caveat: “To call these final pages an epilogue is probably a misnomer. Epilogues indicate that the story has been wrapped up, the chapter finished. This one, sadly, is far from over” (Crile 2003, 523). Six years later Universal Pictures released Charlie Wilson’s War, the film based on Crile’s book. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin condensed Crile’s sense of unfinished business into the two-word refrain of an anecdote recited by Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the real-life CIA operative Gust Avrokotos, whenever Tom Hanks’s Congressman Charlie Wilson naively believes the good guys have won once and for all: “We’ll see.” Those two words capture a widespread sense of uncertainty since 9/11/2001, and perhaps a similar failure to converge on a single narrative will apply to 8/2021 as well. It surprised the literary world when one of the greatest English-language novelists of our time, John Banville, skewered a novel about this century’s wars by another of the greats, Ian McEwan. “If we all have a novel in us, nowadays it is likely to be a September 11 novel. It would have seemed that McEwan was one of the few who might profitably bring his out,” wrote Banville in the process of eviscerating McEwan’s Saturday. “[...] Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of the various fanaticisms which threaten us, that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and, in many ways, ridiculous novel as this?” (Banville 2005) Hindsight is not just 20/20, as the saying goes; it is emotionally easy compared with the struggle to understand the events of one’s own times and react appropriately. So, Henry V won at Agincourt but died just seven years later, while ultimately the House of Valois triumphed in the Hundred [and sixteen] Years’ War. One can know those things but still get a good night’s sleep in the twenty-first century. Similarly, seeing a great novelist mock another’s reaction to twenty-first-century terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is one thing; watching a new US president diverge so dramatically from his former boss’s