The Pragmatist

Larry B, longtime friend of the Agenda and, not incidentally, my neighbor, has a problem:  skunks.  Recently, a small troupe of these odoriferous little fellows set up camp underneath his chicken coop, most likely intent on enjoying a daily bounty of eggs; a desire that Larry is not happy to indulge.  As a descendent of good farming stock (around here, I guess that most of us are), Larry is not one to take any guff from free-loading wildlife, so this week he set about the grim job of trapping the invaders and removing them from temptation.

By “removing” I mean “killing,” and if that shocks you, then I probably don’t need to remind you to renew your PETA membership.  I should say, though, that I am more than certain that Larry takes no pleasure in the dispatching of the skunks.  It is a dark task, but if he is to have eggs, and his chickens peace, then the skunks must go.  Releasing them is no good:  the skunks know where the chickens are and they will return; and, so far as I know, there is no skunk adoption program–what makes a skunk a skunk also makes them difficult housemates.

The elimination of critters is not something that decent folk brag about, but it does need to be done on occasion; even Gandhi said that if monkeys are eating your vegetables, and the choice is between you and the monkeys, well–the monkeys ought not be long for this world.

It is somewhat along these lines that I imagine the Obama administration is thinking in regards to the war in Afghanistan.  More is supposedly “at stake” than a few eggs, but the principle remains the same, at least, in principle.  The Taliban and Al Qaeda have each, to varying degrees, disrupted the peace of their home country, their neighboring country, and, at least once, our own country.  They have shown themselves to be unwilling to go along with the rules we have set, and since we’re the Dungeon Master, they’ve got to go.  It appears we’re still at a “you’re either with us or against us” mentality–although with these two groups, I’d believe it’s pretty hard to find a common ground.

I’m not willing to concede that this is the proper way of thinking about Afghanistan; the caveat is that I don’t have any better ideas (the caveat to that is that a lack of alternatives doesn’t make war a good idea).  It does seem that we’re locked into this war in many ways, and out of decency, we should try to finish it.  But, out of decency, does it have to cost so many civilian lives?

I may be putting words into Larry’s mouth, but I don’t suspect that he’d be willing to kill even all of his skunks if it cost the life of one of his chickens.  And another thought on this:  There is no such thing as “collateral” damage–it is all consequential.

The pragmatist understands this, but to a point.  Consequences are carefully tabulated and amassed in reams of papers analyzing the ratios of terrorists killed to terrorists created; if it comes out greater than one, success is nigh.  Stalin was either exaggerating or had his terms wrong when he said that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths are a statistic.  These days, every death is a tragedy so long as it’s one of ours–anything else is a statistic, one or a million.

What is lacking in the Afghanistan war is not numbers–there’s plenty of those to go around–it’s the flesh and bone and breath that those numbers were supposed to represent in the first place.  A sense of decency and consequence, which is another way of saying responsibility.  A responsible policy would be to supply more farmers and builders than bombs and bullets; it would redirect our faith from the fleeting luck of trajectory towards the slower, more nourishing arc of a harvested crop, a sewer system built, a semester completed.

If this sounds idealistic, consider the enormous fantasy implicit in the idea that in order to save a country you must first reduce it to rubble.  We often think of idealism as rosy, ain’t gonna happen, pie-in-the-sky day dreaming, but there are negative idealisms, too:  war may be the darkest idealism of them all.

Ironically, Obama campaigned with a message of democratic idealism, heavily invoking that soaring American mythos of “Yes We Can” that saturates our high school history textbooks.  And while we may be seeing some of that reflected in his domestic policy, we have yet to see it in the ways that America projects itself to the world, especially those parts of the world that we are actively engaged in destroying.  What may seem like a responsible pragmatism–”we have to face the world as it is”–is in reality nothing more than intellectual, imaginative, and political laziness.  Of course, a pragmatism that is not rooted in a healthy idealism will always be just that:  an anemic practicality that does nothing to improve a problem, but slogs along, fueled by the gas of its own rhetoric.