CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

The military defeat of the Taliban regime was therefore the liberation of the
Afghan people. But there is now the imperative on the international community
of a second liberation: liberating the Afghan people from the other scourges
which have beset them for decades: fear, hunger, poverty and war. 139
In other words a simple military intervention was not enough; for the intervention to be
justified the intention had to be right, too: a long term commitment to improving the lot
of ordinary Afghans. Most importantly, Straw emphasized the requirement that the
coalition that had intervened in Afghanistan be prepared to commit the necessary
resources, including, crucially, political will. 140 It is for this reason that ‘right intent’ and
‘reasonable chance of success’ have been grouped together for discussion in this
section: right intent is undermined if the resources are not available, or not committed,
that will ensure reasonable chance of success.
Yet, despite the rapid success in removing the Taliban regime and establishing a
relatively stable government in Kabul, insufficient effort and resources were committed
to rebuilding the remainder of the country. With the US and her close allies diverted by
their much larger-scale intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan became what Anthony
Cordesman has called the ‘not quite forgotten’ war:
Nation building is having its own crisis in Afghanistan … … ‘Victory’ ... has
proved as relative as in Iraq. The Taliban has mutated and is fighting again, Al
Qa’ida has lost many of its leaders but as mutated and relocated some of its
operations in Pakistan, the internal tensions in Afghanistan threaten to make its
central government the government of ‘Kabulistan’, and the spillover of Islamic
extremism into Central and South Asia continues. 141
Critics of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 have frequently pointed to the apparent
failure to plan for the post-conflict situation, as undermining the coalition’s moral case.
Colonel Tim Collins, who commanded a British infantry battalion during the invasion
has argued explicitly that this failure undermined the legitimacy of the causus belli as
understood by must soldiers on the ground: the liberation of the Iraqi people from a
tyrannical regime. 142 Whilst less prepared to make such statements publicly, several
senior officers closely involved with the planning and execution of the war have made
the same point privately to the author: they felt that the evidence they saw of the
regime’s oppression of the Iraqi people justified the invasion, but that the complete
failure of any significant plan for post-conflict seriously dented the morality of the
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