Pakistan in Media

Daily Times, Pakistan
insight: Ejaz Haider
Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The state’s monopoly of violence does not mean a virtual carte blanche. Internally, as well as externally, states have to observe some norms and legalities in the exercise of violence

Writing is lonely business. It’s always a pleasure, therefore, to get a reader to sit up and take notice. Here I reproduce, with permission, what Cyril Almeida, a fine writer himself, wrote to me:

“I must confess, have been scratching my head a bit lately trying to figure out what you wanted to say in your article captioned ‘The act of killing’. Yes, warfare is serious business, but what about it? Were you trying to touch upon various theorists or make a point or ramble or what? I really couldn’t tell. Hope you believe that more than mere brash criticism, it is genuine confusion on the part of a longstanding reader.”

Let me revisit the article and my argument(s).

The background to the piece was the “confused” debate in this country over what needs to be done; who is the enemy; can “this” enemy be “othered”; should we use violence against those “presumed” to be our own; who uses “violence” or can legitimately use it, when and under what circumstances; or is violence unacceptable per se.

The first prerequisite of a response to any threat is a clear understanding of its nature, extent and severity. If there are multiple views on the very nature of the threat; worse, if there is a body of opinion within a collection that refuses to accept that there is a threat, that collection cannot be expected to mount a response.

Indeed, given the obvious physical manifestation of the threat this kind of response could even make one think that the state, as currently constituted, is perhaps unacceptable to the people and the violence generated by the other side, far from being a threat to the people, is a liberating struggle.

And yet, we have seen in recent weeks that the people, at least the majority, do not consider the Taliban a liberating force. What’s the problem with the debate then?

Much of the debate on tv channels and also in newspaper columns, if it can be called informed, structured debate, suffers from what in the army is referred to as situating the appreciation rather than appreciating the situation.

This was the rationale for my article. This is why I began by looking at the idea of use of force, i.e., generating violence, without taking a partisan position — “if one were to detach oneself from the conflict, it would be obvious that humans are getting killed on either side of the conflict.”

This can be the absolutist position of a pacifist, for instance. But is it tenable, short of presuming that the world and its affairs so far can be erased from the slate and we can begin with the Lockean tabula rasa? Further, assuming that that could actually happen, could the new writing on the slate actually help create a different world, one that is shorn of violence and all that is presently unjust? William Golding tried that experiment in Lord of the Flies. It failed, as it has throughout history.

What then?

One would then need to contextualise violence and create a baseline, some unit of analysis that can be used to justify the act of killing. This is akin to supposing the value of x — arbitrary, but essential.

I wrote: “What is...ignored is how difficult it is to make the decision to kill. What calculus must one use to do so?”

Fortunately, because the act of killing is always an extreme act, it must presuppose exceptional circumstances. In that sense, the calculus is provided by the nature of such exceptions. I can kill another man in self-defence. A situation where someone is attacked physically in a way that can lead to his death must be called exceptional. His retaliation is determined by a simple calculus: If I don’t resist I will get killed.

At the collective level, our unit of analysis is the state, the entity to which we relinquish our individual right to generate violence and by doing so give it the monopoly of violence.

Here too, however, the state’s monopoly of violence does not mean a virtual carte blanche. Internally, as well as externally, states have to observe some norms and legalities in the exercise of violence. These are codified. When they are broken, officials representing the state are punished. Even states are punished.

Yet, and this is the problem area in Just War theory, when and how can emergency ethics be used and justified? In World War II, German and Japanese cities were bombed with the specific objective of killing civilians — to break the enemy’s will to fight. Why? Presumably because it was thought that that was the only way to bring the war to a quicker end. The calculus: killing X number now will save Y number in the coming days, Y number presumed to be much greater than X.

The other crucial strand in that decision was to save one’s way of life. That is always the clincher. A state decides to wage war (kill) and the people back it up because the “other” wants to kill and, in extreme cases, destroy their way of life or impose its own.

In a way, the two pillars of Just War theory that have evolved in modern times, jus ad bellum (decision to wage war) and jus in bello (how to wage war) denote the same exception that Schmitt talked about as defining sovereignty. The decision of who must be killed, when and why, is the mother of all exceptions. Achille Mbembe was expressing the same thought when he noted that “to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes”.

The idea was to somehow save the debate from the uninformed platitudes mouthed by most on tv and some in the press. To try and figure out the nature of the threat; to see if violence is a justified response; to determine if a way of life is under threat; to argue if reference to the state is indeed the unit of analysis that we should use.

Cyril concluded his message with the following: “I must tip my hat to perhaps the best sentence I have read recently on Pak: ‘The calculus here is not only about saving much greater numbers but also about saving a way of life.’ Fabulous.”

Thanks my dear, but this sentence was the logical upshot of my entire argument in that article!