An End in Themselves

We are now a full year past the U.S. withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan, and it seems that the Afghan people are once again to be made to suffer for the actions of their rulers. And, just as on all the previous occasions, this will be an injustice piled atop an injustice, since ordinary Afghan civilians are already the primary victims of Taliban rule, then as now; and, just as before—they are to be punished for the deeds of the very people who are victimizing them. 

Because of the Taliban's actions, the Afghan people were punished with twenty years of war, occupation, innumerable counts of collateral damage and U.S. war crimes, the full extent of which may never be known. Because of the Taliban's actions, the Afghan people had the assets of their central bank—which, because of the unique structure of the institution in Afghanistan, includes the savings of innumerable ordinary Afghans—frozen, destroying much of the economy. 

And now, because the Taliban has again been discovered to be harboring leaders of Al Qaeda, the prospect of this money being returned to the Afghan people is declared to be more remote than ever. U.S. leadership, as we have discussed before, has already unilaterally expropriated $3.5 billion-worth of Afghanistan's central bank reserves. And the remaining half—which was supposed to be set aside for "humanitarian" purposes—is reportedly not going to be transferred back to Afghans anytime soon. 

Needless to say, this is catastrophic for the people of Afghanistan. The hunger, economic collapse, and rampant unemployment that have beset the country since the U.S. withdrawal may have multiple causes, but looming large among them is a lack of liquidity, due to the freezing of the country's central bank assets. In order for the country's economy ever to function again, these assets must be restored. But doing so has become politically far more difficult, in the wake of al-Zawahri's killing. 

The gruesome remote butchering of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri—committed by a knife-wielding U.S. drone—revealed at least two things: first, that U.S. leadership continues to embrace the doctrine of a global "war on terror" to justify targeted assassinations in countries where it no longer maintains an official military presence; and second, that the Taliban continues to harbor leaders of the international terrorist network responsible for 9/11. Plus ça change... 

The U.S. government is officially saying that these events complicate the planned disbursement of the $3.5 billion, because it raises the risk that the money will end up in terrorists' hands. Advocates and humanitarian leaders who have followed the issue closely, however, have long argued that monetary transfers back into the Afghan central bank—which remains an autonomous institution—could be tracked in such a way as to minimize or altogether eliminate this risk. 

It therefore seems that other motives are at play: most likely the simple politics of the matter. It would look bad to transfer funds directly back to Afghanistan, right after discovering that the Taliban is still harboring Al Qaeda leaders. But, as we saw above, the people who suffer most from the withholding of the central bank funds are not the Taliban, nor Al Qaeda, but the people they are terrorizing most: the ordinary citizens of Afghanistan. 

In which case, the Afghan people are once again being punished for the crimes of others. They are, therefore, being used as a means to serve a purpose external to themselves. In order to punish the Taliban, innocents are being sacrificed. In order to spare U.S. leadership any appearance of rewarding the country's repressive rulers, the people who suffer most from their abuses are being placed on the altar. It is, as I've said before, the ultimate violation of the Kantian categorical imperative. 

Of course, the Biden administration would deny this as their motive. They tried to portray their earlier theft of the $3.5 billion as a way of "saving" some of these assets for the use of Afghanistan's people. After all, they say, it is possible that legal proceedings in the United States could have resulted in the seizure of the full $7 billion, due to lawsuits brought by some (manifestly not all) families of 9/11 victims. By dividing the pot in half, the administration claims, they are sparing some of it at least for Afghans. 

The fact that the administration was able to legally "protect" up to half of the total amount, however, gives the game away. There was no outstanding or enforceable legal claim on the money. They therefore could have saved all of it and begun transferring it back to the Afghan people, as humanitarian experts have been urging them to do all year. Plainly, they intended to keep some for potential disbursement to U.S. plaintiffs. And what rationale could there be for granting ordinary Afghans' savings to 9/11 victims, unless one embraces a theory of collective punishment? 

As we've seen previously, one of the lawyers pushing the case to try to appropriate Afghan assets for the families of 9/11 victims was even willing to make this argument explicitly.  "The reality is," he said, "the Afghan people did not stand up to the Taliban when they had the opportunity [....] As a country, as a people, they bear some responsibility for allowing the Taliban back in." And so, apparently, every adult and child in Afghanistan is to be held collectively liable for actions they did not personally commit. 

Well, okay, that lawyer may say: so, why is it wrong to do so? What's the problem with sacrificing individuals in order to punish the collective? (The question could also be asked with regard to the Russian, Venezuelan, and Iranian civilians who are suffering the results of U.S. sanctions for the actions of their leaders).  The Kantian notion that we shouldn't treat people as a means, as opposed to an end in themselves, is often stated as a commandment, as if it were self-evident. But why is it evident at all? 

Couldn't it be worth sacrificing individuals to serve a larger collective purpose—such as deterring the Taliban from continuing to play host to international terrorists? Don't, as Spock puts it, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"? We can say that each individual person is of infinite value: but how do we know this is anything more than a sentimental fiction? And if the value of one person is in some sense quantifiable after all, then is not an aggregate of individuals more important and more valuable than one? 

We saw, in a recent post on a different subject, one account of why the Kantian theory is valid: the individual really is of infinite value, because each contains all of existence and the world in themselves. The quote I used to illustrate the concept came from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in which the novelist describes how his heroine could only justly be treated as an end in herself, because her life was the only one she would ever have: it was her one chance at existence, and the only vehicle through which the world, the universe, other people, and existence itself became knowable to her. 

Reading this past weekend Hardy's youthful "novel of sensation," the gripping and at times outrageous Desperate Remedies (the first effort that Hardy managed to get published, though the second one he wrote), I discover that even at this early point in his career, he was already possessed of the same insight. And in some ways, I'd say, he says it even better and more clearly in the earlier book (much as I admire the formulation of the idea in Tess as well). 

His heroine in that first novel, Cytherea, is debating whether she should sacrifice her individual happiness—through a marriage to a man she does not love—in order to serve the needs of others (including her brother's medical bills). And in the course of doing so, she realizes the same thing of herself that Hardy's narrator would realize of Tess, in the author's later and more mature book. 

It is no small thing to sacrifice oneself for the greater good, Cytherea observes, because one can only be aware of that greater good through oneself. "Though it may be right," she declares, "to care more for the benefit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty to them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said?" 

When the U.S. contemplates using innocent Afghan civilians to serve some external purpose (political optics, for instance, or—more legitimately, perhaps—sending a deterrent message to Taliban leadership), it may be inclined to see them as a quantifiable aggregate. Policymakers are wont to think in such terms. 

But we must remember that each individual among them is, to themselves, the whole of existence, in just the way Cytherea describes. Any knowledge of others, of the aggregate mass, and of their rival needs and claims, only comes to them through themselves. So each of us is, and must be, the whole world to ourselves, as Hardy relates. 

It is only with this sense of the infinity living inside each individual that a just policymaker can go about their work. And it should be immediately clear that a true appreciation of this insight forbids sacrificing any individual to something external to themselves, holding them collectively guilty for something they did not as an individual commit, or otherwise treating them as a means to an end, rather than an end in themselves. 

A policymaker may be tempted to say of any one individual (other than themselves) whom they have sacrificed, oh well, it was a necessary evil. But, as Cytheria goes on to say, they do not realize that "what to them is but a thought," encapsulated within the phrase necessary evil, is—speaking from the point of view of the one sacrificed—"a whole life to me, as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs; that it was my world, what is to them their world[.]"

Such is the state of affairs for every person in Afghanistan, as for every human being in every other country on Earth. And this truth, once grasped, should make it impossible for any policymaker ever again to contemplate "collateral damage," collective punishment, or any other scheme for harming one person in order to serve a purpose outside of themselves. A human consciousness cannot be counted and weighed and traded against another: for it is a whole existence, a whole universe, unto itself.