Of ‘Just War’

US President Barack Obama could not have made it more subtle as he delivered his acceptance speech after receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo last week. A huge joke that the choice was, Obama knew it only too well that he had an onerous task to justify it all as best as he could. Hence the ‘‘just war’’ theory. He evoked the notion of a ‘‘just war’’ and robustly defended the use of military force ‘‘on humanitarian grounds’’ and to preserve peace. Urging his listeners to ‘‘think in new ways about the notions of a just war and the imperatives of a just peace’’, he said that the ‘‘instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving peace’’. Does he not sound like Lord Krishna expounding the notion of a just war against evil forces in the battlefield of Kurukshetra as Arjuna refused to fight against his cousins? However, the irony of the Barack Obama situation is that the so-called just war in the case of Afghanistan is against the very Frankenstein that the US itself had meticulously nourished and groomed to win the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union? The Taliban terrorist of the day was an expedient CIA-ISI creation of the Cold War era who would, by 1996, control vast swathes of Afghanistan and eventually keep Osama bin Laden as an honoured guest, which Obama is aware of. And yes, the initiator of a just war cannot be the chief cause of it. Be that as it may, would Obama back us if we too were to wage a just war against the LeT inside Pakistan? THE SENTINEL