In the hope of spoiling your meal or trip home, or of making still less pleasant your absorption of the evening news, here are two thoughts on war which some of us on the Mail & Guardian have recently been discussing. One is about war as Nato tries to wage it; the other is about war as some in Africa conduct it. First Nato.
The alliance’s behaviour over Kosovo suggests Nato hopes it can successfully prosecute a war in a foreign country at no cost to itself beyond the price of the armaments it uses and the salaries of the military technicians it employs to despatch them. This means no Nato blood being spilt; no broken Nato bodies being returned to devastated families.
Who knows? Nato may even succeed. That is to say the alliance’s current long-range bombardment alone may convince Belgrade to withdraw its forces from Kosovo. It may also be sufficient to ensure Belgrade allows displaced ethnic Albanians to return and grants Kosovo the autonomy it had within Yugoslavia’s largest republic, Serbia, until this was arbitrarily removed in 1989 by Slobodan Milosevic, then Serbia’s president.
If success does come, however, Kosovars are unlikely to fall over each other in the rush to thank Nato. For, as we on this newspaper and others have pointed out, Nato’s refusal to commit human bodies on the ground to defend the Kosovars immediately after its bombardment began hastened precisely the outcome we are told Nato’s battle plan was intended to avoid. That is, displacement of hundreds of thousands of Kosovars.
Be that as it may, the intriguing notion about the Kosovo conflict remains the one that says you may possibly wage a war successfully at no human cost to your own forces.
There is nothing new about wishing for this capability. The quest for it has probably been around for as long as we human beings have been. Whether war has involved hurling bones, rocks, spears or bullets at one another, it has usually involved us in trying to keep ourselves out of our enemy’s range or sights while putting him clearly within ours. The principle is: maximum harm to the enemy; minimum harm to ourselves.
What has changed over the past half-century, however, is that some of us now apparently can – theoretically at least – successfully prosecute a war at no human cost to ourselves. We can now wage war at such a remove that warfare’s actual processes and consequences do not physically impinge on us.
In this sense, we have entered an era of vicarious warfare. We can now plan, model, direct, enact and assess actual wars on computers. We make real wars in virtual, not actual, reality. We have no need to set foot in the actual theatre of battle.
It’s not difficult to imagine any military leader from Shaka to Alexander the Great to Napoleon getting excited at this prospect. It’s easy to imagine any one of them sitting around a campfire with his closest generals over a pot of beer or a few wineskins, letting their imaginations go wild, slapping their thighs and exclaiming, “Jislaaik! Just imagine it, hey,” at the thought of pouring satellite-guided missiles down on the Boers, the Persians or the English more than 400km away.
The nuclear bomb, delivered by long-range missile, is perhaps the dark apotheosis of our flirtation with omnipotence. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” said J Robert Oppenheimer, the United States physicist who oversaw the first successful explosion of an atomic bomb in the the New Mexico desert in 1945. He was quoting the words of Vishnu, the second god of the Hindu triad, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Hinduism’s Song of the Lord.
Some of us – for example, US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair – can now destroy another country while promising our own citizens little more inconvenience than they would endure in the course of an afternoon in front of their personal computers playing Starcraft. Moreover – witness the latest bombing of Iraq and now Yugoslavia – the Nato countries are evidently willing to set about matters in this way.
I find the implications rather frightening. A few years down the line, who in Nato member countries, whose only experience of war will be as virtual reality, will understand the cost of actual war for those on whom the alliance chooses to visit it? Which of those Nato citizens will know enough about actual war to care whether or not their governments’ resort to it can be justified?
The costs of war are more readily evident to those of us who live in Africa. We see it in the faces of the continent’s millions of refugees and amputees. And for the hesitancy about war this must produce in some of us I suppose we can be grateful.
What is not as apparent, however, is just how much of a way of life war has become in Africa. It is naturally a money-making opportunity for foreign arms dealers who supply insurgent movements across the continent, from Angola to Somalia, from Sudan to Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, from surplus stocks in Eastern Europe. War is also the path to power for many an African malcontent and aspirant “big man”.
But war is far more than just that in large parts of Africa. War has become the main motor of production and exchange. In some African societies, war has created a set of economic relationships among both governments and rebels – relations more powerful and deeply entrenched than any others – whose survival and prosperity depends upon the continuation of war. In short, war has become an economic necessity for the dominant groups across large parts of our continent.
This promises the continuation of those wars in near perpetuity. In the deregulated environment created by war, the Jonas Savimbis, Jos Eduardo dos Santoses and Charles Taylors make opportunities not only for themselves, with their access to diamonds, oil and other state resources. They also create opportunities for a million other bootleggers, petty smugglers and 16-year-olds with guns. Trade thrives in hardwoods, hides, ivory – shaming the export performance of neighbours at peace. Currencies, like everything else, trade at real values. Who, when they can have the certain values of war, would hanker for the organised deceptions of peacetime?
Peace, in recent weeks, has looked a far less certain prospect than it did 10 years ago when the Berlin Wall came down. And our understanding as people of the price we may have to pay to maintain it looks flimsy at best.