"Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones."
Martin Luther King Jr
No matter what, war has and always will be the worst of men. One can defend or question the morality of war, even its justice and legality. But in the end, one of the natures of the human condition cries out so loud by holding such actions with so intense violence, destruction and murder.
The vision of a common good with the loss of the few to save the many can in ways be regarded as acceptable as it is unacceptable. The true meaning of life has no respect in any corner of the world, for only power is the ultimate choice, only vengeance is the highest standard. While mankind persists, having the right or not, to engage into actions and reactions of war, the belief of an evolving species will always be left behind. War, terrorism, or any kind of violent offense against someone, is the upmost way of demonstrating how ugly we are, of how frightening we can act. War and violence will persist as long as evil lives within us.
The fight for war is in many cases the wrong answer. The fight for peace has to be always the right action. Easier said than done, the variables that lay before us are dreadfully challenging. The right to defend ourselves cannot help us avoiding the "difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other" as said by President Obama on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, that I advise to read or watch for his vision of war and peace, the truths and nature of both, and the questions he unfolds trying to find ways to understand the need and the way to conduct war.
I raise these questions. Can wars be just? Can it be a means to achieve a just peace? How to fight with honor and respect? Is that possible? How to avoid the loss of people's lives and save broken societies that war brings upon them?
The undeniable truth is that the codes of war are frequently broken, because even in the best effort to avoid it, war is simply war. There is no such thing as a clean war, a simple war, a deathless war. In war we hate, in war we kill, in war we die. Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, collateral damages happen. That is the terrible reality of war. Because wars between armies have always gave way to wars upon people, who suffer the most in their innocent or neutral side. War is the power over life and death.
The romanticized wars never happened. It is the ideology behind those conflicts that drive men into battle. The pursuit of objectives are most likely to find means that bend the notions of legality, ethics and sanity.
War is no video-game. It isn't an adrenaline addiction, rising when some feel the thrill of combat forgetting or disregarding the victim's horrifying pain in their struggle for survival.
This fight in Afghanistan has been going on for too long. It is history repeating. The XIXth century British army failed. The XXth century Soviet army failed. The XXIst century US and allied armies walk to failure. These Afghan War Logs provide us facts and proof of how bad and how wrong a war can be faught, on how political strategies are often misguided, on how war is ultimatley the final standing point of a killing machine that brings no results. The way to end this war must be put in practice. The concepts that the West upholds are falling every day with every soldier and every children wounded or dead.
The fight for freedom and justice is paramount when we engage against the Taliban, a clear and present danger to Afghan society, specialy to women. And against Al-Qaeda as a worldwide threat. But if we lose our integrity and our values, half of the enemy's struggle has already won. Iraq and Afghanistan are the living dead proof of that. What have these wars been good for?
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