to Kill

[muse]

The act of killing
Ejaz Haider



Here is a dilemma. How would I report from Swat at this point? Here’s the intro:

“The military operation in Swat continues and security forces are notching successes against the Taliban extremists. Public opinion in the area seems to have turned against the Taliban and that fact, combined with good intelligence and effective planning and execution, has allowed the security forces to gain ground against the Taliban.”

Clear, concise, straight, simple, deadpan?

Is it really that simple? What, for instance, does a military operation entail? What does notching successes mean? What does gaining ground against the Taliban mean?

Use of the military means the use of force. Use of force means to capture, maim or kill. Shorn of any value judgement or without taking any partisan position on either side of an armed conflict, it means one human being using a lethal weapon to take the life of another human being.

Notching successes therefore means the army is capturing, maiming and killing more Taliban than losing its own men. If it were a failure, the Taliban would have been capturing, maiming, beheading and killing more soldiers than losing own cadres.

If one commits to this or that side of the conflict, perhaps there may be relief in seeing the adversary go down; or there may be sorrow at seeing own side losing out. But if one were to detach oneself from the conflict, it would be obvious that humans are getting killed on either side of the conflict.

There is nothing profound in what I have said. It is the most obvious, in-the-face fact.

What is perhaps less obvious, or at least ignored, is how difficult it is to take the decision to kill. What calculus must one use to do so?

It needn’t be emphasised that whatever the calculus, it must presuppose some extraordinary circumstances, some break from normal life and its functioning. Even during normal circumstances, the function of violence is given over to the state, which exercises it through its designated agencies. By doing so, citizens, by and large, are shielded from the direct spectacle of violence or its exercise.

All other things being equal, and assuming the citizens consider the state legitimate, the management of violence internally and externally by the state almost goes unnoticed or, in case of an insurgency or external conflict, draws heavily on partisan sentiment. Someone has threatened our way of life and that threat must be neutralised or taken out.

The baseline in this case, or call it the unit of analysis, is the state. If the state is secure, so are the people. In fact, people have created a state and relinquished to it the right of violence because that is the only way to make themselves secure. And if security demands perpetrating violence, so be it.

There is of course self-preservation involved here, just like an individual will kill if he is certain that moral procrastination will cause his own death at the hands of another. Collections too operate on the basis of self-preservation — indeed, states are prepared to pre-empt, even wage preventive wars, regardless of the moral hazards involved, to secure themselves and their interests.

But where “otherness” is a more concrete category, the sense of threat is acute and made easily acceptable, palatable and even necessary through iteration of the other’s “otherness”. This friend-enemy distinction is the essence of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political:

“To the state as an essentially political entity belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the entity...” (The Concept of the Political)

Pheng Cheah notices what he calls “the nation’s seemingly inevitable affinity with death” but argues that it “is paradoxically inseparable from the desire for life. For the destructive, or, better yet, sacrificial, tendencies of nationalism are part of an attempt to protect or maximise the capacity for life”. (“Spectral Nationality: The Living On [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neo-colonial Globalisation”)

Self-preservation as the ultimate goal wedded to the survival of a collection is then the easiest way to work out a calculus to accept violence, even demand it, as happened in the case of Swat — why is the army not going in; why are the Taliban not being defeated etc.

Sometimes, however, the decision becomes even more difficult. Assume a commander who has two battalions this side of the river and one stuck across as the enemy advances. Should he blow up the bridge to delay the enemy’s advance? I would. But that would also mean allowing my own men across the river to get captured, maimed and killed by the enemy. The decision, however, has to be made — and quick. The calculus: if I don’t blow up the bridge, I won’t be able to save those left across and I will also be endangering the lives of those, greater in numbers, who I could possibly save.

Some are sacrificed to save more. It’s a sensible, even humane calculus in an extraordinary situation, but not a literary one. Every man who goes down across the river can be the central tragic figure of a novel or a poem. No one’s pain can be mitigated, not his who falls; not of those whose dear ones have fallen.

So are the hundreds of thousands now fleeing the war zone in Swat: men, old and young, women, and children. They have left their homes and hearths. They are exposed to the elements and any number of hazards. Each is a protagonist. Yet, while the nation makes every effort to ameliorate their plight, the operation is deemed too vital for the nation’s overall survival. Some cost must be paid.

The calculus here is not only about saving much greater numbers but also about saving a way of life. Also, the more the state delays and hems and haws, the more it would inflate the negative spinoffs of the use of force.

The dilemma is heart-rending. One cannot dismiss the plight of anyone, even a single individual. But neither can the policy-maker sit back and allow a situation to get out of hand. While the heart bleeds, as it must, the hand must wield what is necessary.

Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk

 

[muse]

The act of killing II
Ejaz Haider



Writing is lonely business. It’s always a pleasure, therefore, to get a reader to sit up and take notice. Here I reproduce, with permission, what Cyril Almeida, a fine writer himself, wrote to me:

“I must confess, have been scratching my head a bit lately trying to figure out what you wanted to say in your article captioned ‘The act of killing’. Yes, warfare is serious business, but what about it? Were you trying to touch upon various theorists or make a point or ramble or what? I really couldn’t tell. Hope you believe that more than mere brash criticism, it is genuine confusion on the part of a longstanding reader.”

Let me revisit the article and my argument(s).

The background to the piece was the “confused” debate in this country over what needs to be done; who is the enemy; can “this” enemy be “othered”; should we use violence against those “presumed” to be our own; who uses “violence” or can legitimately use it, when and under what circumstances; or is violence unacceptable per se.

The first prerequisite of a response to any threat is a clear understanding of its nature, extent and severity. If there are multiple views on the very nature of the threat; worse, if there is a body of opinion within a collection that refuses to accept that there is a threat, that collection cannot be expected to mount a response.

Indeed, given the obvious physical manifestation of the threat this kind of response could even make one think that the state, as currently constituted, is perhaps unacceptable to the people and the violence generated by the other side, far from being a threat to the people, is a liberating struggle.

And yet, we have seen in recent weeks that the people, at least the majority, do not consider the Taliban a liberating force. What’s the problem with the debate then?

Much of the debate on tv channels and also in newspaper columns, if it can be called informed, structured debate, suffers from what in the army is referred to as situating the appreciation rather than appreciating the situation.

This was the rationale for my article. This is why I began by looking at the idea of use of force, i.e., generating violence, without taking a partisan position — “if one were to detach oneself from the conflict, it would be obvious that humans are getting killed on either side of the conflict.”

This can be the absolutist position of a pacifist, for instance. But is it tenable, short of presuming that the world and its affairs so far can be erased from the slate and we can begin with the Lockean tabula rasa? Further, assuming that that could actually happen, could the new writing on the slate actually help create a different world, one that is shorn of violence and all that is presently unjust? William Golding tried that experiment in Lord of the Flies. It failed, as it has throughout history.

What then?

One would then need to contextualise violence and create a baseline, some unit of analysis that can be used to justify the act of killing. This is akin to supposing the value of x — arbitrary, but essential.

I wrote: “What is...ignored is how difficult it is to make the decision to kill. What calculus must one use to do so?”

Fortunately, because the act of killing is always an extreme act, it must presuppose exceptional circumstances. In that sense, the calculus is provided by the nature of such exceptions. I can kill another man in self-defence. A situation where someone is attacked physically in a way that can lead to his death must be called exceptional. His retaliation is determined by a simple calculus: If I don’t resist I will get killed.

At the collective level, our unit of analysis is the state, the entity to which we relinquish our individual right to generate violence and by doing so give it the monopoly of violence.

Here too, however, the state’s monopoly of violence does not mean a virtual carte blanche. Internally, as well as externally, states have to observe some norms and legalities in the exercise of violence. These are codified. When they are broken, officials representing the state are punished. Even states are punished.

Yet, and this is the problem area in Just War theory, when and how can emergency ethics be used and justified? In World War II, German and Japanese cities were bombed with the specific objective of killing civilians — to break the enemy’s will to fight. Why? Presumably because it was thought that that was the only way to bring the war to a quicker end. The calculus: killing X number now will save Y number in the coming days, Y number presumed to be much greater than X.

The other crucial strand in that decision was to save one’s way of life. That is always the clincher. A state decides to wage war (kill) and the people back it up because the “other” wants to kill and, in extreme cases, destroy their way of life or impose its own.

In a way, the two pillars of Just War theory that have evolved in modern times, jus ad bellum (decision to wage war) and jus in bello (how to wage war) denote the same exception that Schmitt talked about as defining sovereignty. The decision of who must be killed, when and why, is the mother of all exceptions. Achille Mbembe was expressing the same thought when he noted that “to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes”.

The idea was to somehow save the debate from the uninformed platitudes mouthed by most on tv and some in the press. To try and figure out the nature of the threat; to see if violence is a justified response; to determine if a way of life is under threat; to argue if reference to the state is indeed the unit of analysis that we should use.

Cyril concluded his message with the following: “I must tip my hat to perhaps the best sentence I have read recently on Pak: ‘The calculus here is not only about saving much greater numbers but also about saving a way of life.’ Fabulous.”

Thanks my dear, but this sentence was the logical upshot of my entire argument in that article!
Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk