CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Nevertheless, it is generally the case that attacking the vulnerable is a tactic resorted to
by the weaker, irregular, side.
Whilst care must be taken to remember that asymmetric warfare is, at essence, warfare,
empirically there is evidence to suggest that it poses its own specific problems. At the
strategic level, the asymmetry of non-state-entities versus states, creates an immediate
problem of how a state is to respond – especially as international law deals with
relations and actions between states and says very little about non-state actors. When
one state poses a direct and immediate threat to another, the threatened state’s ‘inherent
right to individual or collective self defence’ 113 is clear and undeniable. When,
however, the threat is from a non-state actor, how the right to self defence is to be
exercised is far less clear-cut. Israel’s 1985 attack on the PLO headquarters in Tunisia,
the US attacks on targets around Tripoli in 1996 and on targets in Afghanistan and
Sudan in 1998, all used the justification of self defence, but with far from universal
acquiescence. Self defence was also the justification for the US-led invasion of
Afghanistan in 2002, but rested heavily on closely associating the Taliban leadership
with the actions of Al Queda. 114 More recently, in 2006, Israeli attacks on southern
Lebanon were justified by self defence but it was Hezbollah, not Lebanon, that was the
threat to Israel.
Whilst acknowledging that asymmetric warfare poses moral and legal difficulties at the
strategic level, the focus here will be on the specific characteristics of asymmetric
warfare that complicate the moral dimension at the individual level; the jus in bello of
those engaged at the tactical level. Here too, indeed more so, the empirical evidence is
plentiful that this form of warfare poses its own special problems.
That it is so is evidenced throughout history when we find that irregular warfare, both
symmetric (irregular versus irregular) and asymmetric (regular versus irregular), is far
more littered with examples of atrocity, barbarism and morally reprehensible conduct
than is regular warfare waged between professional, formally-constituted and organised,
disciplined armed forces. We can take our examples from the conduct of the ‘over the
mountain men’ and the irregular militias (both patriot and loyalist) in the American War
287