On an average night more than 2,100 Syrians cross the border into Jordan, seeking refuge from the violence and instability in their own country.

It’s the new normal, the head of a large humanitarian aid organization working in the Za’atari refugee camp told me recently. “We’ve come to expect several thousand refugees each night.”

March 15 marks the second anniversary of the Syrian revolution. According to the United Nations, in those two short years more than 70,000 Syrians have been killed and over 3 million have been uprooted from their homes. Some 2.3 million are internally displaced, and another million are refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt.

Bedouin Hospitality

According to the Jordanian government, more than 400,000 Syrians now live in Jordan, a country of only 6.5 million people with a long history of welcoming refugees. Because of the harsh desert climate, the Bedouin have long offered a minimum of three days of hospitality to anyone who passed by their tents.

“The house is always opened to guests,” says Dr. Kamal Abu Jaber, the former foreign minister of Jordan and son of a Jordanian Bedouin father and Palestinian mother. “Once you eat bread and salt together you are bound together as family.” To call a Jordanian “generous,” he adds, is the highest compliment.

Well over half the population of Jordan is made up of newcomers who arrived during the past 60 years. Jordan has opened its arms to 2.7 million Palestinians (the original refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars, and their descendants); half a million Iraqis; thousands of Somalis, Sudanese, and Libyans; and now hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

“It’s a miracle that this poor country can do this,” says Abu Jaber.

Za’atari Refugee Camp

In early March, I visited the sprawling Za’atari refugee camp only six miles from the Syrian border and just outside the northern Jordanian city of Mafraq.

All new Syrian arrivals in Jordan are brought first to Za’atari. Those few who are fortunate enough to find a Jordanian citizen to sponsor them are free to leave the camp, which is surrounded by a high fence and guarded by Jordanian security. Others must stay in the camp.

The camp is now home to as many as 140,000 Syrians. No one seems to know the exact number. The situation is fluid and volatile by anyone’s definition. There are frequent protests and riots.

Photo: ACT Alliance/Paul Jeffrey

According to aid workers, many of the refugees come from middle-class households and are quick to express frustration about the camp’s limited services and fragile infrastructure. In spite of heroic efforts, U.N. and aid agencies are simply not able to keep pace with the thousands who arrive daily.

Za’atari is in the middle of a high-altitude desert that is cold and wet in the winter and stiflingly hot with sand storms in the summer. Newcomers live in tents. Eventually families are transferred to small one-room “caravans.”

The main street of the camp is packed with pedestrians and lined with vendors selling fruits, vegetables, household supplies, and even washing machines.

Eighty-eight-year-old Um Omar (names have been changed for security reasons) welcomed us in her 10-foot-by-15-foot caravan with no furnishings except mats on the floor. She served us tea, with heaping plates of bananas and oranges.

Um Omar came to Za’atari from Dara’a five months ago, along with two grown sons, who carried her across the border, and a gaggle of grandchildren. Dara’a is where Syria’s revolution began in March 2011, when several young boys were arrested for painting graffiti about Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Um Omar’s grandchildren do not go to school because it is too far away from their caravan. Indeed, the camp is so massive that many residents no longer live within easy walking distance of schools, medical facilities, or other services. Her son, Omar, fears that the Syrian regime might fire Scud missiles at Za’atari because it is so close to the border.

Urban Refugees

But contrary to popular images, the vast majority of Syrians in Jordan do not live in refugee camps. Most arrived before Za’atari was opened in late July 2012.

These “urban refugees” live with Jordanian families or rent small rooms or apartments in cities like Amman, Irbid, Mafraq, and Zarqa. Sometimes three or four families live in an apartment with only three or four rooms.

More than 75 percent of the Syrian refugees in Jordan are women and children. Many arrive traumatized by the violence they have witnessed in Syria. In addition to feelings of isolation and trauma, refugees express fears about meeting their current needs and uncertainty about the future.

Some 316,000 Syrians have registered or are in the process of registering with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), qualifying them to receive rent assistance, medical care, access to Jordanian public schools, and other humanitarian aid.

Yet as many as 100,000 Syrians have chosen not to register, some out of fear that there will be reprisals from the Syrian government.

Humanitarian Responses

The UN and aid agencies estimate it will cost $1 billion to cover the costs of Syrian refugees in the region just for the six months from January to June 2013.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), an international humanitarian agency of Anabaptist churches, partners with local agencies in Jordan to distribute shipments of MCC relief kits, school kits, and blankets; dispense infant milk powder, diapers, and children’s shoes purchased in local markets; and provide non-formal education and psychological-social support to the refugees.

Since 2005, MCC has also partnered with Caritas Jordan, a humanitarian nongovernmental organization affiliated with the Catholic Church, supporting an innovative HIV- and AIDS-awareness project, a revolving loan fund for low-income Jordanian students, and distribution of school kits and milk powder to vulnerable families.

With tensions increasing between Jordanian host communities and an increasingly diverse and vulnerable group of Syrian refugees, Caritas has added a peace-building component to its services, training teams of Syrian refugees and Jordanians to work together to provide an effective response to the crisis.

Another key role for MCC is to share stories and needs of the refugees in the United States and Canada. Many refugees are eager to share, but do not wish to have their pictures taken or to give their full names, fearing the Syrian regime will retaliate against them.

Still Working with Refugees

Caritas Jordan was established in 1967 to respond to the refugee and humanitarian crisis caused by the Six-Day War in neighboring Israel-Palestine. Some 45 years later, it is still working with refugees. Guided by the vision of affirming the dignity of every human, with a special concern for the poor, Caritas offers services to Christians and Muslims.

“We look at the refugees’ needs and try to answer it,” says executive director Wael Sulieman.

Caritas Jordan works closely with local churches, often using parish facilities as distribution centers. The organization has registered more than 75,000 Syrian refugees at its centers in Amman, Husson, Irbid, Madaba, Mafraq, Ramtha, Salt, and Zarqa, doing family needs assessments before distributing humanitarian assistance and providing medical and educational resources.

Caritas tries to avoid duplicating services provided by UNHCR. “Our work with the vulnerable Jordanian families has never stopped,” says Sulieman. “Nonetheless Caritas gives a helping hand to any refugee community who needs help, beginning with Palestinians in the 1960s, Iraqis in the 1990s, and now with Syrians.”

The Burdens of Hospitality

Such hospitality has its costs.

Whether or not they work for humanitarian organizations, “Jordanians are heavily involved in serving and hosting the Syrians,” says Wafa Goussous, director of the Initiative of the Heads of the Orthodox Churches of the Middle East. “With the heavy load that Jordan is taking, part of the load is definitely carried by its citizens.”

The influx of refugees is straining Jordan’s budget and infrastructure and, in some cases, increasing social tensions between the refugees and Jordanian host communities. Some Jordanians have begun to complain about rising food and housing costs they believe are linked to yet another wave of refugees. Jordan’s Economic and Social Council recently reported that the cost of hosting the refugees for the past 18 months exceeded $833 million, representing about 3 percent of Jordan’s gross domestic product.

More than 29,000 Syrian children are enrolled in Jordanian public schools at a cost of $19.8 million. Still, some Syrians report being turned away from public schools due to overcrowding. And according to MCC partner Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), many Syrian families cannot afford to send their children to public school kindergarten, for which the fees have not been waived.

Photo: ACT Alliance/Paul Jeffrey

But many refugees don’t simply want hand outs. When one JRS staff member recently encouraged a Syrian woman to register with UNHCR so she would qualify for a range of benefits, she responded, “I don’t want 50 Jordanian dinars (about $70 US) from UNHCR. I want to work!”

The need for employment has strained the Jordanian economy as well. So far 38,000 jobs have been offered to Syrians, contributing to growing unemployment rates in Jordan. Some wealthier Syrians are moving their businesses to Jordan, creating stiff competition for Jordanian companies.

“Syrians are managing to cut production costs by operating from apartments, hiring refugees, and avoiding taxation,” garment factory owner Ebrahim Hadad recently told The Media Line.  “Syrians are welcomed; this country is comprised of refugees,” Hadad continued. “However, they are hurting our businesses. I am unable to compete with them.”

But many refugees with fewer resources report that they are often exploited by Jordanian employers and made to work long hours at low wages because they do not have work permits. Some married Syrian women work at low-wage farms. Syrian male heads of household in Amman are reported to work in low-wage jobs as bakers, construction workers, and security guards. According to Caritas Jordan, Syrian youth are often spotted as street peddlers, beggars and market helpers, instead of attending school or summer camps.

Balancing the needs of Jordanians and refugees is critical. In order to reduce tensions between refugees and the resource-stretched host communities, the Jordanian government now requires 30 percent of international humanitarian aid be made available for vulnerable Jordanian families.
And hospitality is not without risks.

Jordan has long had a reputation as one of the most stable countries in the Middle East. But some analysts say ferment is growing. They fear that the new influx of Syrian refugees might push Jordan’s tottering social stability over the edge.

Others fear that groups like al-Qaeda will infiltrate the refugees and attack targets in Jordan. There are also reports of skirmishes on the Syrian-Jordanian border, as Jordanian forces help refugees enter the country and the Syrian regime responds.

Still, Jordan continues to follow an open-door policy and provides health care and access to public education for Syrians who register with UNHCR.
Some Syrians express optimism that they will be able to return home soon. Others believe it will take many years, just as has been the case with Palestinians and Iraqis still living in Jordan.

“They all wish the fighting in Syria will end tomorrow,” says George Akil, a program manager for Caritas Jordan. “They are all eager to go back to their homes once the fighting ends.”

While some Jordanian officials hint that they may eventually close the border, Dr. Abu Jaber, who now heads the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies, disagrees.

“There is no way by our tradition, our culture, or our religion that we can close the door,” he reflects. “How can you close the door when women and children are suffering and without food?”

But with thousands of Syrians continuing to arrive every night, and with UNHCR estimating that 660,000 Syrians will be in Jordan by the end of 2013, it will take another miracle for this small country to absorb them all.

J. Daryl Byler is a regional representative for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC),  based in Amman, Jordan. He blogs at cindydarylbyler.wordpress.com. MCC implements disaster relief, sustainable community development, and peace-building projects through local partners in 60 countries.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: In Pakistan, the U.S. government’s use of armed drones to target militants continues to strain relations between the countries. In the past, the administration has avoided talking about its drone program, but on Monday (April 30), a top White House official strongly defended use of the controversial technology. At the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, called weaponized drones both legal and ethical and said their use is consistent with the country’s right to defend itself:

John Brennan: “There is nothing in international law that bans the use of remotely piloted aircraft for this purpose or that prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield.”

ABERNETHY: For more on this, Kim Lawton is here. She is managing editor of this program. We are joined by Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School and author of The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama. He joins us from New Haven. Professor Carter, welcome to you.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN CARTER (Yale Law School): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: John Brennan said that the use of drones is legal, perfectly legal. You agree with that?

CARTER: I think the administration is right. We’re a nation at war, and in time of war a belligerent certainly has the right to target the leaders of the other side who are in the chain of command, and that’s what we are doing.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: But if the battlefield in essence here has become the entire globe, how does that change the moral calculus of when and how the U.S. uses force justly?

CARTER: Well, I think you’re right that the more important questions are the ethical ones, and one of the ethical questions is how big the battlefield is, because the administration claims the right to target leaders wherever they may show up in the world. A second moral problem that arises is the problem of civilian casualties. Even if we have the right to go after leaders of Al Qaeda, we have to do it, both as a matter of law and as a matter of ethics, in a way that minimizes civilian casualties. The administration doesn’t actually count civilian casualties, so we don’t know how many there have really been. Mr. Brennan says that there have been times that they haven’t actually taken the shot because civilians have been in the line of fire, and if so, I’m glad to hear that, but I still think that we’d be better off if we could have a conversation in which we could talk more about the civilians who are killed. And there’s another ethical problem that we don’t spend enough time thinking about, and that’s the way that the drone war goes away from the front pages. It’s not on the evening news. In Iraq, we’re on the evening news. In Afghanistan, it’s on the evening news. With the drone war, it’s done in secret, it’s clandestine, it’s hard to keep track, and we really should know what’s being done in our name.

LAWTON: What kind of moral oversight would you like to see taking place surrounding this?

CARTER: At minimum, we members of the public ought to demand as much disclosure as possible from both our government, and also that the media cover the drone wars as closely as we cover other wars. There’s no greater and more difficult moral decision a nation makes than killing other people, and it’s quite important, if we are going to do that, that it remain in the forefront of our consciousness, that we not be distracted by other issues.

ABERNETHY: How do we know how many civilian casualties there are? Isn’t that a big danger, that this—that the use of drones will spill over and there will be a lot of civilian casualties?

CARTER: Because the administration doesn’t tell us when there are civilian casualties, or how many, it’s very difficult to keep track. We tend to rely on sources on the ground, some of whom have their own agendas and want to exaggerate it for one reason or another. But if we don’t know how many civilians are dying, we really can’t give a good assessment of the ethical principles that are underlying these attacks.

ABERNETHY: Professor, just very quickly, why now? Why did the administration come out with this now?

CARTER: There have been a lot of voices, including my own, that have been urging an open discussion of this. Because the administration has not acknowledged in the past that this drone program even exists, it’s hard to have public conversation about it. Now we can have an ethical conversation about it, and it’s high time that we do so.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and to Stephen Carter of Yale University Law School.

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ABERNETHY: It’s been an emotional week since the dramatic US operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. On Thursday (May 5), President Obama laid a wreath at Ground Zero. He met with loved ones of some of those killed on 9/11 and told them he hoped bin Laden’s death brought them a small measure of comfort. The president repeatedly cited the 9/11 attacks when he announced the operation on Sunday (May 1).

Obama: Justice has been done.

ABERNETHY: When the news broke, spontaneous celebrations began in front of the White House and across the country. That prompted vigorous debate about whether jubilation was appropriate. In some parts of the Muslim world, there were anti-American protests and vows of retaliation. Obama made a distinction between Islam and Al Qaeda:

Obama: Our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader. He was a mass murderer of Muslims.”

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, as details of the raid emerged so did moral questions about the bin Laden mission. Joining me with more on all of this is our managing editor Kim Lawton and Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani diplomat, now the chair of Islamic studies at the American University in Washington. Akbar, welcome. Kim, welcome. Akbar, let’s start with the popular reaction in the Muslim world.

AKBAR AHMED (American University): Bob, the reaction to bin Laden’s death tells us a lot about what’s going on in the Muslim world. There have been threats, there have been some explosions, people were killed in Pakistan. There have been processions being taken out by the religious parties mainly, but what it’s telling us is that over this decade from 9/11 the leadership model of Bin Laden has become almost irrelevant. You’re seeing this revolution sweeping the Arab world. It’s being led by young people wearing jeans, and Facebook, Twitter. They want an inclusive society, a democratic society. They want to be part of the world order. They don’t want to blow up America or Israel or whatever.

ABERNETHY: But are you saying that Osama Bin Laden was kind of yesterday’s leader?

AHMED: Conceptually, yes. Bin Laden is suddenly, to me, as an analyst writing about the Muslim world for the last several decades, overnight he seems almost like a dinosaur. His methods failed. His vision still resonates. Muslims would still like to have justice and dignity and so on, but his method of achieving these means seems to be dated and irrelevant in today’s Muslim world.

ABERNETHY: But in this country he was very, very much an important figure.

AHMED: The dominant symbol of 9/11, because rightly he was linked to this terrible event and then the chain of events that followed which resulted in, over this decade, the deaths of literally millions of people, displacement of millions of people.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, in this country?

KIM LAWTON: Well, I was going to say that I’ve been hearing from a lot of American Muslims who were saying that for them he had so much highjacked Islam and highjacked the perception from non-Muslims about what Islam was that there this is a certain sense of relief that maybe that is now finished.

ABERNETHY: But what about on the street? The popular reaction here, the kids cheering.

LAWTON: The celebrations.

ABERNETHY: And everything like that. A lot of people were very upset about that.

LAWTON: There’s been a really lively debate within the religious community about whether or not those celebrations were appropriate, and both sides have been using Scripture passages to sort of bolster their arguments. Some people saying that Scripture says that one should never rejoice when one’s enemy falls. But then others saying Scripture says that you should rejoice when good wins over evil, and so there’s been a little bit of debate. The Vatican issued a statement saying while Osama Bin Laden certainly was responsible for sowing hatred and division, one should never rejoice over another human being’s death.

ABERNETHY: And is there any agreement about where justice ends and revenge begins?

LAWTON: Well, that’s been another big topic of discussion. Where are those lines? And a lot of people saying, as President Obama said, justice has been done. But then other people questioning, was this revenge? Or when you see the celebrations does it appear that it looks more like revenge than justice?

ABERNETHY: Akbar, there are a lot of other people watching this besides Pakistanis and Afghanis and Americans and all. What does this open up in the way of imitation? Do you hear anything about that?

AHMED: I do, Bob. In fact, a lot of people in Pakistan are commenting on this. They’re saying that if America just flies in, kills someone, takes the body out, then this is a precedent for other people in the neighborhood, and Pakistan and India have had a very tense relationship for the last half-century, three wars between them. India’s been wanting the people behind the attacks in Mumbai, former city of Bombay. They want them. They want to try them for terrorism. And a lot of Pakistanis saying, suppose India does the same thing, just flies in, kills these people, takes their bodies out. What is there to prevent people from doing this kind of copycat imitation of what the Americans did?

LAWTON: There, well, it has been a debate about the means that were used in this and whether they were ethical or legal. And that’s a hard thing to say, because for a lot of people this is obviously a very emotional thing.

ABERNETHY: It’s a war.

LAWTON: And that’s what people are saying. That he was an enemy combatant in a field. But the fact that it happened, this war on terrorism has very unclear lines. There are some questions about that. And, in fact, the United Nations has asked for more details about exactly what happened and was it legal, was it ethical. So that’s a conversation that’s going to continue, I think.

ABERNETHY: And it also opened up the question of whether torture is worth it, Akbar?

AHMED: I would say, Bob, go back to the founding fathers. Read George Washington on torture when he refused to torture British soldiers who had been torturing American soldiers because, he said, America must always take the high moral ground, and that is critical for this new country that we are founding, the United States of America.

LAWTON: It’s unclear exactly how much information that led to all of this was obtained through these enhanced interrogations.

AHMED: Kim, that whole thesis collapses if we discover, it’s all conjecture and debate right now, if we discover that Pakistani intelligence and American intelligence were in fact working together. Then this thesis…

ABERNETHY: But we didn’t know that.

AHMED: We don’t know. So therefore you can’t build up the argument that the information came through torture.

ABERNETHY: But let me ask you quickly. What good can come of this in terms of better relations, not worse relations, but better relations between Pakistan and the United States? Do you see some kind of opening there?

AHMED: Not only these two countries. I would say the United States and the Muslim world. Because the war on terror, whether you like it or not, Bob, was driven by the symbolism of bin Laden, who towered over the horizon. He’s dead. It’s closure. Both the leaders of the Muslim world and the Untied States should really pause, reflect, take this moment and say it’s been a decade of death and destruction, so much pain and misery through out the world, let us now move towards a different direction. A world of peace and harmony and challenging the global problems that we face. There’s so many global problems facing us right now, and the United States can and must take the lead. This is the superpower, it has a moral vision, it must now lead us in that direction.

LAWTON: And I heard that a lot this week from the religious community. A lot of people whether they thought this was a good thing or they were celebrating or not, just the idea that indeed this is closure for one era and a lot of hope that we are being a new era.

ABERNETHY: Well let’s hope so. Kim Lawton, many thanks. Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, nice to see you again.

AHMED: Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Kim.

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Osama bin Laden is dead. Many Americans have greeted this news with celebration and, like the president, with homage to American patriotism and national unity.

Yet what is it exactly that so many Americans are celebrating and marking as a national achievement? That may seem to be a stupid question. Television anchors, commentators, and the crowds that gathered at the White House and elsewhere know what his death means: this is the man who orchestrated the killing of thousands of Americans on September 11, 2001, a day that spawned the “War on Terror” and brought still more deaths and wounds to Americans.

For President Obama and nearly every other public voice heard so far, this is a moment, as he put it, for Americans to “give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals” that made this happen and for Americans to “feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.” It is a moment to “think back on the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11” and understand “today’s achievement” as “a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people”—national qualities, Obama continued, that remind us “that America can do whatever we set our mind to,” which for Obama includes expanding prosperity, civil rights, and American influence abroad “to make the world a safer place.” But, Obama urged in closing, “Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Such expressions of satisfaction, exultation, and national unity at our “achievement” in killing Osama bin Laden are unnerving and chilling. I am not mourning the loss of bin Laden. I am not calling into question those Americans—especially families and friends bereft at the casualties of 9/11 and the ensuing wars—who may feel consolation at his death or use it as an occasion to reflect upon the harsh realities of American national security.

I am offended, however, at the suggestion that any American would take satisfaction in America’s proficient killing units. I am disturbed by references to the unity “that prevailed on 9/11,” a unity that accelerated a preemptive war in Iraq. I am dismayed that the killing of another human being—even Osama bin Laden—warrants songs of “God Bless America” and presidential reminders that “we can do these things” ultimately because of “who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

I prefer an America that experiences moments of unity without waving a bloody shirt. I prefer an America that does not invoke God so easily both out of respect for the millions in this country who do not identify with the Christian God and out of recognition of the dangers bred by self-righteous claims to God’s favor. The life and death of Osama bin Laden ought to have taught us that much.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College at Boise State University. His recent book, “Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), received the American Society of Church History’s Brewer Prize.

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According to news reports, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction in the failed Times Square bombing, has told investigators he carried out the attempted bombing to avenge US drone attacks in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.

Shahzad’s assertion adds more fuel to the simmering controversy over the ethics and effects of increasing reliance by both the CIA and the US military on unmanned drones to launch missile strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, asked (“US pressure helps militants overseas focus efforts,” May 7) : “Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan—notably the Predator drone strikes—actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent? It is a hard question.”

The Times Square drone connection also follows on last year’s deadly attack on the CIA, when a suicide bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al-Qaeda, detonated his explosives at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing US drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal regions.

CIA director Leon Panetta has called lethal drone technology “the only game in town” for going after al-Qaeda, and Obama administration officials have strenuously defended both the legality of the strikes in Pakistan as well as their effectiveness in killing suspected militants. They also deny the drones are responsible for an unacceptable level of civilian deaths.

“In this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning an attack,’’ Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, told an audience of international legal scholars on March 25, according to the Wall Street Journal (“US defends legality of killing with drones”).

Since President Obama took office, the CIA has used drones to kill some 400 to 500 suspected militants, according to intelligence officials, the Journal reported. The officials say only some 20 civilians have been killed—a figure critics sharply challenge. In 2009, Pakistani officials said the strikes had killed some 700 civilians and only 14 terrorist leaders, or 50 civilians for every militant. A New America Foundation analysis of reported US drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to 2010 says the strikes killed between 830 and 1210 individuals, of whom 550 to 850 were militants, or about two-thirds of the total on average.

More recently, an April 26 story in the Washington Post reported that the CIA has refined its techniques and made technological improvements that are reducing civilian deaths, and this week, in his joint news conference with President Karzai of Afghanistan, President Obama said, “I am ultimately accountable…for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed…and so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.”

Earlier this month, in a May 6 interview on National Public Radio, David Rohde, the New York Times reporter who was held captive for months by the Taliban in northern Pakistan, spoke about the US drone strikes and said, “I saw firsthand in north and south Waziristan that the drone strikes do have a major impact. They generally are accurate. The strikes that went on killed foreign militants or Afghan or Pakistani Taliban that went on around us. There were some civilians killed but generally the Taliban would greatly exaggerate the number of civilians killed. They inhibited their operations. Taliban leaders were very nervous about being tracked by drones. So they are effective in the short-term I would say…I don’t think the answer is, you know, endless drone strikes. The answer is definitely not sending American troops into Pakistan, into the tribal areas. That would just create a tremendous nationalist backlash. It has to be the Pakistanis doing it.”

Ethicists and religious leaders are beginning to challenge the morality of the drone program, arguing it violates international law as well as key precepts of just war theory. The Christian Century, for example, editorialized in mid-May (“Remote-control warfare,” May 18) that while the drone attacks have no doubt killed terrorists and leaders of al-Qaeda, “they raise troubling questions to those committed to the just war principle that civilians should never be targeted.”

Taking aim at one of the aspects of drone warfare that make it so popular with the military and with politicians—that it is a risk-free option for the US military because it avoids American casualties—the Century editors said: “According to the just war principles, it is better to risk the lives of one’s own combatants than the lives of enemy noncombatants.”

The “risk-free” idea is also being challenged. In a recent piece in the Jesuit magazine America (“A troubling disconnection,” March 15), Maryann Cusimano Love, an international relations professor at Catholic University, wrote that military (as opposed to CIA) drone operators suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at higher rates than soldiers in combat zones. “Operators see in detail the destruction and grisly human toll from their work,” she observed, and she quoted an air force commander who said, “There’s no detachment. Those employing the system are very involved at a personal level in combat. You hear the AK-47 going off, the intensity of the voice on the radio calling for help. You’re looking at him, 18 inches away from him, trying everything in your capability to get that person out of trouble.”

The Christian Century editors also noted that drone attacks on civilians have given militants a recruitment tool, citing an opinion piece by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and former army officer Andrew McDonald Exum published last year in the New York Times (May 17, 2009). “Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as the drone strikes have increased,” they wrote.

An even more emphatic critic of the use of drones is Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has been persuasive about its legal right to launch attacks in Pakistan,” she wrote in “Flying Blind,” an article also published in America magazine. “Even with the legal right to use military force, drone attacks must also conform to the traditional principles governing the rules of warfare, including those of distinction, necessity, proportion and humanity.’’

O’Connell argues that under the United Nations Charter, resort to military force on the territory of another state, in this case Pakistan, is permitted only when the attacking state is acting in self-defense, acting with U.N. Security Council authorization, or is invited to aid another state in the lawful use of force. “Pakistan did not attack the United States and is not responsible for those who did,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has no basis, therefore, for attacking in self-defense on Pakistani territory.’’

In addition, she contends that while al-Qaeda is a violent terrorist group, “it should be treated as a criminal organization to which law enforcement rules apply. To do otherwise is violate fundamental human rights principles. Outside of war, the full body of human rights applies, including the prohibition on killing without warning.”

The only basis for the United States to lawfully use force in Pakistan would be if it had the consent of the country’s political leaders. It is not clear whether the US has such a valid invitation, according to O’Connell.

“Pakistan’s president has told US leaders not to attack certain groups that have cooperated with Islamabad,” O’Connell wrote. “The United States has done so anyway, insisting that Pakistan use more military force and threatening to carry out attacks itself if the government refuses. None of this can be squared with international law.”

As recently as May 12, the head of an influential religious party which is a junior partner in Pakistan’s ruling coalition denounced the most recent drone attacks as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. “The recurring attacks on targets in tribal areas are blatant aggression against Pakistan and the military should shoot down intruding drones,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party told reporters, as reported in the Gulf News.

The case of western Pakistan presents particular challenges, according to O’Connell: “There suspected militant leaders wear civilian clothes, and even the sophisticated cameras of a drone cannot reveal with certainty that a suspect is a militant. In such a situation international humanitarian law gives a presumption to civilian status.”

In an interview, O’Connell suggests that there is confusion about international law versus domestic national security law and that the scarcity of developed ethical analysis and discussion of drone warfare might have to do with the fact that the drone itself is “just a delivery vehicle.” The real ethical issue, she said, is “the greater propensity to kill” made possible by the “video game-like” quality of drone combat.

Gary Simpson, a theology professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and the author of “War, Peace, and God: Rethinking the Just War Tradition” (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2007), acknowledges that although he hasn’t yet thought about ethics and drone warfare, “the ongoing evolution of weaponry always poses new questions. It changes the questions about proportionality”—referring to the just war principle that the benefits of war must be proportionate to the expected harm— “and the protection of one’s own forces over against the vulnerability of civilian populations.”

The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held hearings in March and April on the rise of the drones, the legality of unmanned targeting systems, and the future of war, and US Naval Academy ethics professor Edward Barrett testified that while unmanned weapons systems “are consistent with a society’s duty to avoid unnecessary risks to its combatants,” and they can “enhance restraint” on the part of the soldiers engaged in virtual warfare, they also “could encourage unjust wars” and “could facilitate the circumvention of legitimate authority and pursuit of unjust causes.”

It will be interesting to see whether Congress and the White House continue to involve ethicists and religious thinkers in future deliberations on these issues. Last December, just before President Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on themes of just war, the White House gathered religious leaders at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for what was described as a briefing and discussion of the morality of war, according to the Washington Post. White House staff members took notes for the president.

For now, the Obama administration insists the use of drones in Pakistan is imperative in the fight against terrorism, and Amitai Etzioni, an international relations professor at George Washington University, writing recently in the Joint Force Quarterly (“Unmanned Aircraft Systems: The Moral and Legal Case”), has enumerated many of the reasons and offered multiple lines of supporting argument: “The United States and its allies can make a strong case that the main source of the problem is those who abuse their civilian status to attack truly innocent civilians and to prevent our military and other security forces from discharging their duties,” he says, and “we must make it much clearer that those who abuse their civilian status are a main reason for the use of UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and targeted killing against them.”

But others, such as Kilcullen and Exum, argue drone combat exacerbates the problem of terrorism and contributes to the instability of Pakistan. “Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing,” write Kilcullen and Exum. “Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live.”

Missile strikes launched from the comfort of Langley, Virginia, a half a world away from Waziristan, are unlikely to do that and thus, to critics, remain morally problematic.

David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Afghanistan (“The Right War Gone Wrong”) and nuclear disarmament (“Trimming the Nuclear Arsenals”).

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When it began eight years ago, the war in Afghanistan was the right war, the good war, the moral war.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the effort to capture Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders and to drive from power their Taliban protectors had the moral and ethical support of most Americans, as well as much of the international community. President George W. Bush laid out the rationale to Congress: “The leadership of al-Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al-Qaeda’s vision for the world.”

It was a widely shared view. Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and one of the foremost experts on just and unjust wars, called Afghanistan a “classic” case of the just war. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral statement arguing for “the right and duty of a nation and the international community to use force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.”

“Afghanistan has been the West’s ‘good war’ until now,’’ wrote Michael Daxner, president emeritus of the University of Oldenburg in Germany, this summer in the World Policy Journal.  “In recent history, there has rarely been another intervention with so much institutional legitimacy and so little questioning of strategy and perspective as there has been with Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF].” Daxner also served as special counselor to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

The initial military campaign in Afghanistan appeared to be a resounding success. A small band of American forces overthrew the Taliban in less than three months, drove them out of Kabul, and apparently had both the Afghan Taliban force and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda on the run.

Photo: US Air Force

But somewhere along the way Afghanistan got lost, its moral rationale muddied as the Bush administration quickly turned its focus to the unnecessary war, the morally unjustifiable war, the war against Iraq. The Afghanistan effort went astray, starved of resources and attention. It became, first, America’s forgotten war, and then a conflict beset with its own strategic and policy complexities as well as moral ambiguities.

Over the years, “as the mission has changed and become larger and more complex, these initial judgments have been subject to further consideration,” David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, told an audience there on Sept. 1.  As RAND Corporation political scientist Seth Jones has written in his recent book on the American experience in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires (Norton, 2009), “Despite the idealism of the initial campaign and the success of military operations, the United States squandered this extraordinary moment. … And by 2006, tensions in Afghanistan had “escalated dramatically and Afghanistan was leveled by a perfect storm of political upheaval in which several crises came together.”

Jones argues, and most experts seem to agree, that as US policy in Afghanistan drifted, Pakistan emerged as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, allowing them to regroup and mount renewed and more widespread attacks. Afghan governance became “unhinged” with corruption, and “the international presence, hamstrung by the US focus on Iraq, was too small to deal with the escalating violence.”

Now US and coalition casualties continue to mount. The United States had lost more than 900 troops, and October was the deadliest month so far, with 59 American soldiers killed. British combat losses have crossed the 200 mark, and the battlefield situation is worsening as the Taliban and its insurgent allies are not only waging fierce resistance to the ISAF but also extending their control over increasingly large swaths of Afghanistan territory. The top US military officer, Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Boston Globe in late August that the Taliban and its alliance with the al-Qaeda terrorist network are stronger than ever, and in other interviews he has characterized the military situation in Afghanistan as “deteriorating.”

Public opinion has also been turning against Obama’s “war we must win,” According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent of respondents see the war in Afghanistan as not worth its costs, although 55 percent say they have confidence the president will choose a strategy that will work. In a Quinnipiac University poll released on November 18, American voters say 48 – 41 percent that fighting the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do, down from 52 – 37 percent last month.

British public opinion is more skeptical. A poll published in the Aug. 29 Daily Telegraph found that 62 percent oppose British troops staying in Afghanistan. Only 26 percent favor remaining, and this month the Catholic bishop who heads the military diocese of Great Britain, speaking in a homily at a requiem mass for the fallen, urged resolution in Afghanistan “as speedily as possible.”

While conservatives and Republicans generally continue to support the war and call for more US troops for the effort—the Quinnipiac poll found 68 percent of Republicans think the United States is doing the right thing fighting in Afghanistan—some conservative pundits are beginning to turn against the effort. The columnist George Will, in a widely circulated Sept. 1 column, called on the US to begin “rapidly reversing the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan” and fight the war in such a way as to end US combat fatalities, suggesting US lives have been “squandered.” Will faulted both the goals and the strategy being pursued.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the antiwar movement that mounted a large but ultimately futile effort against the US invasion of Iraq is regrouping to challenge Obama, somewhat reluctantly, on Afghanistan. A wide variety of groups, including veterans’ organizations and coalitions of grass roots groups, such as Win without War and United for Peace and Justice, plan teach-ins, demonstrations, and lobbying at aimed raising questions about the cost of the war.

Photo: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith

Religious voices and ethical questions are also being raised. This month, a group of 77 United Methodist bishops signed a letter to the president calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of all forces and saying there is no path to military victory in Afghanistan. An open letter from a range of progressive religious leaders led by evangelical Christian activist and Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis called for a “humanitarian and development surge” in Afghanistan and exhorted the president to “let the nonmilitary strategies lead the way.” Last month, the US Catholic bishops sent a letter to the president’s national security advisor, General James. L. Jones, urging the administration to review its use of military force “to insure that it is proportionate and discriminate” and to “develop criteria for when it is appropriate to end military action in Afghanistan.”

In a recent issue of Commonweal, the independent and lay-edited Catholic review of religion, politics, and culture, Boston University history and international relations professor Andrew Bacevich wrote in a piece entitled “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan and the Limits of American Power” that “fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible.” As for what the US should do, Bacevich suggests that “a sense of realism and a sense of proportion should oblige us to take a minimalist approach,” adding that “we can’t eliminate every last armed militant harboring a grudge against the West. Nor do we need to.”

The mainline Protestant journal Christian Century editorialized in its Sept. 8 issue that “it is time to ask: What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and how does it serve peace in the region and the American interests?” America, the national Catholic weekly magazine published by the Jesuits, asked earlier this month about Afghanistan, “What are we achieving there? Do we have the ruthlessness and patience to stay in this fight? With our nation printing money to pay its bills, can we really afford to maintain this long war?” “Nothing about the mission in Afghanistan is clear,” concluded a Sept. 25 Commonweal editorial, “least of all its connection to American security. All wars, including necessary wars, involve difficult choices. If President Obama chooses to keep us in Afghanistan, he must do a better job of explaining his reasons and expectations to the American people—especially to the families of soldiers serving there. He can no longer ask Americans to assume that saving Afghanistan from the Taliban is the same thing as saving American from Al Qaeda.”

The Rev. John Langan, SJ, a professor of philosophy and Catholic social thought at Georgetown University, first posed the question of “whether we’re making real progress toward morally important goals” eight years ago in a 2001 interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, just one month after the US bombing of Afghanistan had begun. Today he says the answer to that question is no. Even when explicit consideration of just war ethics seems absent from current strategic debate, says Langan, “a lot of ethical issues are present in policy planning,” especially questions about whether our goals are attainable and worth pursuing. “I wish,” says Langan, “I was seeing a debate about what is worthwhile versus are we meeting the demands of the generals.” On this point, he says, he sees parallels with Vietnam and what he calls “a deeply ingrained tendency in the military that if a problem resists us, bring more resources to bear and we will prevail.” In Afghanistan, he observes, “we are forced to fight in cautious and disagreeable ways,” and “we never get very far from the possibility of tragedy.”

Howard Rhodes, a religious studies professor at the University of Iowa, teaches a course every fall on war and peace in Western religious thought. The lack of informed public debate about Afghanistan in just war terms, he suggests, is because “Christian churches and their representatives are largely incapable of articulating how those debates might look,” and “ordinary people in churches are not well prepared to be engaged” in them. Our weakened just war discourse, he adds, “reflects the pressure of pacifism” and an “erosion in ordinary citizens’ ability to engage in any discourse other than protest.”

Yet moral issues remain inextricably bound up with our broad strategic and political debates, says Rhodes. For him, the most disturbing characteristic of the current moment is that the US is “profoundly unclear” about the kind of world it is using its power to bring about and “extremely unclear about what war is for.”

DoD photo by Sgt. 1st Class Leonardo Torres, U.S. Army

Duke University ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, a Christian pacifist, has spoken about Afghanistan in similar terms. In an interview earlier this month, he told Religion News Service that “it’s still not clear what we’re fighting for. It’s so deeply ambiguous that it’s hard to fit into just war criteria. The very idea that you begin to assess the justness of a war after the war is already going to happen, I’m sorry, it’s already too late.”

Rhodes says he expects President Obama to go some distance to meet his military advisors’ requests. “All the options are bad,” says Rhodes, “and for the next year the least bad option” is to give General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of US troops in Afghanistan, “as much of what he’s asking for as is tolerable.” McChrystal has made clear again and again that the United States and its allies, facing a serious and deteriorating military situation on the ground, must essentially start over. This will involve not only a new strategy but also a new effort to make the moral and political case for what President Obama has called “the necessary war’’ to the American people, the people of the allied nations in the NATO coalition and, not least, the Afghan civilian population.

“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,’’ McChrystal said in an Aug. 31 statement as he sent up the chain of command a confidential assessment of the nearly eight-year-old war asked for by Obama when he put McChrystal in charge of the faltering effort in Afghanistan. Three weeks later, the assessment was leaked to the Washington Post, including its warning that without more forces the conflict “will likely result in failure.” Throughout much of the fall, Obama has convened his national security and military advisors for a series of strategy sessions about means and ends and whether to add more US combat forces to the battle. At the end of this year there will be some 68,000 US forces in Afghanistan and another 40,000 NATO troops from US allies such as Great Britain, Germany, and Canada.

At the September event at Notre Dame (and again in the October 19 issue of America in an article reassessing US engagement in Afghanistan), David Cortright argued that as presently constituted the Afghanistan effort, even if originally a just cause, fails under the just war criteria of last resort and probability of success, and he made a two-point challenge to current policy, even as refined and redefined by Obama and McChrystal.

“I would argue, and many did even at the beginning of the US military mission, that war is an inappropriate means of countering al-Qaeda so that the fundamental strategic assumption [of U.S. policy] … is subject to debate,” he said. “War is not an instrument that can be used to counter non-state terrorist networks,” he suggested. “It also has many detrimental, unintended harmful consequences.” He cited as an example that war treats “mass murderers as if they were soldiers, thus inadvertently raising the credibility and moral stature of these criminals.”

In his second challenge, Cortright asked why we are at war with the Taliban and argued, as do others, that the strategic assumption lumping together the Taliban and al-Qaeda as inseparable and indistinguishable is wrong. Furthermore, al-Qaeda’s influence in Afghanistan is waning while the Taliban’s is gaining. He suggested, following the argument of Fotini Christia and Michael Semple in their article “Flipping the Taliban” in the July/August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, that US policy must have a “political ‘surge,’ a committed effort to persuade large groups of Taliban fighters to put down their arms and give up the fight.”

Christia and Semple say Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, as announced in his March 27 speech and a six-page White House white paper,  acknowledged that integrating reconcilable insurgents will be a key component of US policy. “Yet US policy makers have not adequately developed a vision of how to achieve reconciliation,” they write. “Admitting their lack of knowledge about the precise character of the insurgency, they equate reconciliation with merely cajoling Taliban foot soldiers into crossing over to the US side.”

It is an argument that has won the support of the Christian Century, whose editors have concluded that “working to reconcile the Taliban with the broader interests of the Afghan nation calls for respecting the interests of local Taliban leaders. They are not a monolithic group.”

As the Obama administration seeks to devise a means to implement the McChrystal recommendations—or not, it comes under close scrutiny from politicians and other observers. Noting the failed efforts of past powers, from Alexander the Great to Great Britain and, most recently, the Soviet Union, to subdue Afghanistan, the Christian Century editorial put it bluntly: “To avoid another catastrophe, the president must be held to a clear strategy and a short timeline.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service. He wrote last year for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “God and Empire.”

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