Also in chapter 3, I propose a general rule of thumb: Any government which is controlled by a country’s military or otherwise ruled by force is by definition not a legitimate government and does not need to be recognized as such by the world community.

Bearing these sentiments in mind, I watched in dismay as, first in Kenya and then in Zimbabwe, violent ethno-political strife was triggered when an opposition party leader apparently won a Presidential election and the ruling party refused to concede. In both cases, neither the African Union nor the United Nations was able to provide effective peacekeeping or conflict resolution.

In Kenya, impartial observers stated there was clear evidence of ballot rigging in the Presidential election held in the last week of December, 2007. The ruling party’s incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, won by a very slight margin; if the election had not been rigged, then presumably the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, would have won indisputably. The immediate aftermath of the rigged election was a horrible bloodbath that dragged on for two months until the opposing sides eventually agreed to a power-sharing arrangement in the government at the end of February 2008. Former United Nations Secretary-General Khofi Annan did a great thing: he was able to negotiate peace where none seemed possible. Ending the violence was more important than any political outcome, and rightly so.

Unfortunately this set a terrible precedent, for now disgruntled factions in emerging democracies the world over have seen that violence, not the will of the people, may determine the outcome of an election.

Zimbabwe held its own Presidential election on March 29, 2008, just a month after the resolution of the crisis in Kenya. International observers generally agreed that the initial Zimbabwe election was conducted properly; but then the ruling government, headed by President Robert Mugabe, refused to release the election results for more than a month, leading many observers both within and outside the country to believe that the opposition party had probably won, and that Mugabe was stalling so he could rig the results in his own favor. Meanwhile, there were indications that Mugabe had launched a campaign of violent intimidation against opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai’s supporters, even before the election results were announced. Eventually Tsvangirai had no choice but to agree to a runoff election; and that is when the full-fledged crimes against humanity began in earnest.

The army and police forces as well as groups of Mugabe’s thugs carried out a brutal campaign of violence against Tsvangirai’s supporters, with systematic beatings, widespread arrests, torture, and politically motivated rape and murder of innocent civilians. By the time the "runoff election" took place, at least 86 Tsvangirai supporters had been murdered (some say the number is closer to 100), about 5,000 people were abducted, and some 200,000 people had been forced from their homes by Mugabe loyalists. In the end, Tsvangirai was forced to withdraw from the election and take refuge in the Dutch embassy to avoid being arrested on charges of treason; "treason" in this case meaning "daring to be the opposition candidate." Though some criticized Tsvangirai’s decision to withdraw, I believe it was the most noble decision he could have made, for although in the end he could not stop the violence, withdrawing from the sham election was at that point the only thing he could do to try to protect his supporters’ lives.

On June 27, Mugabe went ahead and held the runoff election unopposed; and he used the army, police, threats and intimidation to force people to go to the polls and vote for him. Rural voters were warned that failure to vote would cost them benefits or even their farms. Some villagers were driven to the polling stations by the army or by the henchmen of the ruling party. Many voters reported that, far from being a secret ballot, elections workers were writing down the names of everyone who voted, and who they voted for. Members of the opposition party who did make it to the polling places found that their voter registration had been suspended. Meanwhile, reporters for Reuters and al-Jazeera news agencies were arrested. Click here to read more about what a sham the election was.

Months later, the two sides have agreed to hold talks, but those talks are going nowhere, and should not reasonably be expected to go anywhere.

All this is worse than disturbing: it is disgusting, as is the world community’s failure to act in response. There have been one or two verbal condemnations, and the imposition of economic sanctions which will hurt the people worse than they hurt the government; but nothing was done to stop the violence while it was ongoing. This seems to fit a pattern of inaction by the world community in the face of blatant ongoing crimes against humanity. In keeping with the general rule of thumb proposed above, I believe that by using violence to retain power, Mugabe’s government has lost any claim to legitimacy: it is now unquestionably a dictatorship, not a democracy.

Bearing all this in mind I find myself grappling with the question, when is it appropriate to intervene? I feel let down that after decades of ongoing violence the world continues to stand idly by and watch while atrocities are committed in Africa.

Yet any intervention would certainly have let to additional loss of life, even if the long-term result of that intervention was relative stability.

I understand that in its present form the United Nations does not have the necessary authority for rapid response deployment of peacekeeping forces with kill orders; and throughout chapter 3 I advocate changing the UN charter to make sure it will be able to do this in the future. I understand that this is a long-term goal; but it is critical for the well-being of people around the world.

Although such a thing could not be compelled from the outside, I would also advocate a revision of the African Union charter, to make that continent an economically and politically unified community like the European Union and the United States of America. The federalization of Africa could potentially create a more effective local peacekeeping system to safeguard elections processes and to protect civilians from militias. The economic benefits could also help to improve standards of living in one of the poorest regions of the world, a region possessed of a wealth of the world’s biodiversity, a region with a long terrible history of slavery, colonialism, and conflict; a region with a projected future of environmental calamity due to the effects of global climate change.

While calling for amendments to the U.N. and A.U. charters, I continue to struggle with the philosophical question of when intervention is appropriate. At what threshold does a local disturbance become a crime against humanity? How will the international communities recognize such situations early, without impeding the rights of the people? I feel that this threshold was crossed in both of the elections described above, but I have been unable to agree with myself about what mechanism should trigger the deployment of international peacekeeping forces and what specific plan should be followed in such a deployment. I welcome readers’ thoughts on this matter.

I state in 3.2.3 Defending the Homeland that my other long-term proposals regarding the restructuring of the armed forces cannot be pursued until after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been brought to a conclusion. However, nowhere in the book do I propose a plan for bringing the Afghanistan conflict to a resolution.

Afghanistan is not one of the many rival countries and entities discussed under section 3.2.2. (Neither, I should note, is Iraq, which DID receive its own troop drawdown proposal.) Afghanistan was intentionally omitted from this list because under its present government the country itself poses no military threat to the United States homeland.  Subsequent to the ouster of the Taliban, Afghanistan is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism, and despite the lack of security there, the people of that country have shown great bravery in supporting democratic change.  (Neighboring Pakistan, on the other hand, does receive a section detailing the threats it poses to the security of the United States and some of the considerations which could mitigate those threats.)

In fact, other than noting the cost of the war, the text takes no position on the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. That is because the Afghan war is very different from the war in Iraq for a number of key reasons. In Afghanistan, the pursuit of Osama bin Laden was a clearly defined rational objective. Not only were the Taliban brutal human rights abusers; but in their refusal to turn over bin Laden, their government associated itself with the September 11 attacks and in a sense assumed responsibility, by extension, ex post facto. Thus, there was a legitimate purpose for the invasion.

Furthermore, in Afghanistan, ongoing security operations are under the control of NATO alliance forces. Granted that, as in Iraq, these forces are largely American and British, still this is an important difference in the chain of command: rather than being responsible to the heads of state of individual nations, NATO forces take their orders from an international organization. It is the position of the text that in dealing with problems of international conflict, solutions involving many nations working together will be required. (In contrast, the unilateral model can only increase international conflict, if the rationale behind it were to be widely adopted.)  In this sense, the concept of international peacekeeping forces should be considered a model for future world security crisis resolutions.

However there are many problems with the Afghanistan conflict. The most tragic of these is the excessive “collateral damage”: the people of Afghanistan have been repeatedly subjected to bombings that are misdirected, or based on faulty intelligence, or called in without consideration for civilian casualties. More than once a wedding was turned to a funeral by these bombing campaigns.

Updated 7-30-2008: It becomes increasingly difficult to defend the concept of the United States presence in Afghanistan as our forces continue to kill large numbers of civilians in airstrikes that turn out to be mistakes. As reported by the Associated Press, United States bombs killed 47 people in a wedding party on July 4, 2008. A commission led by Afghan Senate deputy chairman Burhanullah Shinwari was dispatched to the area by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to investigate the incident. After extensive interviews, the commission concluded that not one single person who died in the attack had any connections with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Not one! Of the 47 people killed, 39 were women and children, including the bride. Such deadly carelessness on the part of our armed services is simply inexcusable.

Yet just two weeks later, on the night of July 19, US and NATO forces mistakenly killed 13 more Afghans in two separate incidents. At least four, possibly more, were killed by misdirected mortar fire, which is tragic although not necessarily criminal; but in the other incident, United States forces called in an airstrike on Afghan police officers, killing 9 and badly wounding the provincial police chief. If we are attempting to build up Afghanistan’s internal security apparatus, this seems like a really stupid way of going about it.

What’s problematic for the ongoing security situation is the resurgence of the Taliban and their increasing reliance on suicide bombers, as well as their apparently improving ability to launch large coordinated attacks sometimes employing hundreds of militants.

Updated 6-27-2008: The Pentagon released two reports today regarding the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan. According to a statement by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, some of the more optimistic assessments made in the reports may have been written prior to incidents on the ground which have adversely affected the security situation in the past few months. Still, the report concludes that the Taliban have regrouped into a more effective insurgency, and that they are likely to at least maintain and probably increase both the number and scale of their attacks in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, according to the assessment, the Afghan Army and police forces are few in number and insufficiently trained. Finally, according to Gates’ statement, the negotiated truce between the new government of Pakistan and the tribal groups of the border region effectively guarantees Taliban fighters safe passage to wage a campaign of cross-border raids and violence against allied troops and Afghani civilians.

Updated 7-30-2008: In the predawn hours of July 13, 2008, some 200 militants from several different groups, including Pakistani extremists and Afghan rebels, launched a joint attack against a U.S. base just outside the village of Wanat, apparently with the foreknowledge and assistance of the locals, who were understandably upset about the 47 people killed in the US airstrike against the wedding party, described above, which had recently occurred in the same area. Are we winning their hearts and minds? I think not. Furthermore, during the sneak attack, militants armed with machine guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades were able to force their way into the base, killing more US soldiers than have died in any other single incident since 2005.

We invaded Afghanistan to pursue Osama bin Laden, and in so doing, ousted the Taliban. Both bin Laden and the Taliban fled across the border into the mountainous region of western Pakistan, and there they have remained, growing stronger, recruiting and training new members, planning and plotting and launching incursions into Afghanistan. The irony, as I mention in the book, is that the United States government has supplied the Pakistani government with more than $10 billion in mostly military aid since 2001; yet Pakistan views NATO incursions into its territory as a threat against its sovereignty, and refuses to allow operations targeting or pursuing Taliban or al-Qaeda members. Unofficially, NATO forces have been firing missiles across the border and from drones, targeting militant locations; officially, one of those missiles recently killed a number of Pakistani soldiers, an incident which raises a number of interesting questions. Some of those questions might be, Why did we invade Afghanistan to pursue bin Laden, yet we balk at invading Pakistan to pursue bin Laden? Is it because Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons? Is it because we really only invaded Afghanistan to secure a pipeline deal for Unocal? Or is it because our armed forces are overstretched fighting a two-front land war in Asia? Personally I blame the latter: we quickly toppled the Taliban, then promptly, with swaggering hubris, devoted the majority of our resources to an unrelated conflict. Later, with our forces bogged down by the war in Iraq dragging on and on, we were unable to rapidly deploy personnel or equipment to reinforce the border regions of Afghanistan when indications began to show that the Taliban were re-forming. Emboldened by our inability to stop them, Taliban forces are increasingly running amok all over the country and have even been able to capture and hold entire towns, including a district quite close to the capital city.

In Iraq we have as a policy, if imperfectly, attempted to help rebuild the army and police; yet in Afghanistan we do not seem to have pursued similar goals, with the predictable result that the still-fledgling government is ill-equipped to defend itself, much less assert its authority. Afghanistan will require a large armed service contingent to maintain its border and to deal with the ongoing instability. Additionally they will require the assistance of intelligence experts from developed nations as they attempt to prevent terrorist attacks by capturing or killing the individuals who are responsible for organizing and financing the Taliban. Under the auspices of NATO, I think it is reasonable for the United States to continue to maintain a presence in Afghanistan until perhaps 2012; but it is imperative that we use that time wisely.

To me, the most obvious solution follows from the policy advocated in the book: hand over security duties in Iraq to that country’s government and internal security apparatus. This would allow the United States armed services to transfer needed manpower and equipment to Afghanistan; and this would allow our service men and women who have already served several tours of duty to come home and move on with their lives. Withdrawing from Iraq is the imperative first step whose time has come.

In addition to the security considerations, Afghanistan will require a great deal of infrastructure investment on the part of donor nations to modernize its economy and improve the standard of living for its people. Making these improvements will be critical to the future stability of this war-torn region of so much historical and potential greatness.