A human rights lecture Zoom event organized by members of the San Jose State Human Rights Institute on Wednesday featured two panelists for a discussion on U.S. militarism.
Panelists discussed the “War on Terror” which followed the attacks of 9/11, and how the U.S.’ approach to global peace and security should be rethought.
Halima Kazem-Stojanovic, SJSU Human Rights Institute journalism coordinator and journalism lecturer, moderated the discussion between Neta Crawford, professor and chair of the BrownUniversity department of political science, and Bilal Sarwary, independent scholar and journalist.
William Armaline, SJSU founding Director of the human rights program, introduced Kazem-Stojanovic, who hosted the event.
Kazem-Stojanovic is an Afghan American journalist who trained more than 300 journalists in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014, he said.
One of the panelists, Crawford, is the co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She explores the budgetary, human, environmental and social cost of the post-9/11 wars launched by the U.S.
According to the Cost of War project, the War on Terror between 2001 and 2022 cost the U.S. $8 trillion and a total of 929,000 lives, including more than 363,939 civilians.
Crawford started the discussion by defining militarism as “a collection of beliefs that can infuse decision making.”
“[Militarism] is an ideology,” she said.
She said militarism is seen as “the best option” confronting threats because of multiple beliefs.
“The first [belief] is that others are hostile, they hate you and what you stand for,” Crawford said.
She said the second belief regarding militarism is the idea that security is a scarce resource. If one side acts to increase its security, it would make the other more insecure, she said.
Then, she said militarism implies an overestimation of the military force utility and controllability and is seen as useful and safe.
Crawford said militarism exaggerates the advantages of the first strikes and preventive war, even if it’s against International Law.
“This is the belief that if you don’t act now, all will be lost,” Crawford said.
The U.S. used the idea of preventative war to justify the Iraq War in 2003, by identifying the threat of weapons of mass destruction, Crawford said.
She said Putin justifying Ukraine’s invasion as a reply to Ukrainian “nazis” also illustrates the use of militarism.
She said militarism values conquest as a high gain for their country.
“Militarism not only exaggerates the utility of military force . . . [it] devalues other ways of dealing with those threats.” Crawford said.
She added that non-military tools like diplomacy and sanctions are undervalued, seen as ineffective or too slow.
In military societies like the U.S., war and soldiers are glorified and seen as people with insight into foreign policy decision-making, Crawford said.
She explained how U.S. troops sent to Afghanistan were given a “heroic narrative,” later in the intervention, showing them as masculine warriors saving women from “horrific fates.”
Decision-makers tend to overemphasize others' potential regarding successful use of force, justifying the pursuit of more military resources. She called it “peacetime pessimism.”
“This is both conscious and unconscious threat-inflation,” Crawford said.
Economic benefits of military spending are exaggerated, and the economic cost of war tends to be minimized, Crawford said.
Finally, the human and environmental cost is forgotten from the official discourse before wars begin, she said.
Sarwary, the second panelist, worked in Afghanistan for 20 years after 9/11, and said he witnessed errors made by the U.S. military intervention there.
“We lost count of all of those tragic and sad incidents, and many of which amounted to war crimes from the American military,” Sarwary said, mentioning airstrikes and drones that he believes were wrongfully used by the U.S. military.
He referred to the U.S. warplane attack on a medical charity hospital in Afghanistan after its crew misidentified the hospital for a compound taken over by the Taliban. It killed at least 31 civilians and injured 28 others, according to a Nov. 25, 2015 NBC News article.
According to an August 16, 2021 Associated Press article, the Afghanistan War caused 47,245 Afghan civilians’ deaths.
Crawford said all military beliefs she described were on display in the post-9/11 wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine.
She said militarism is threatening democracy, as war and democracy are normative opposites.
“Democracy says that we must take force off the table and resolve our disputes nonviolently,” Crawford said. “In war, information and decision making power is concentrated, legislatures are sidelined in the name of secrecy and speed.”
Similar to Craward, Sarwary said the window for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban after 9/11 was closed deliberately because the Americans felt they’d been attacked and felt “a sense of revenge.”
Crawford said after 9/11, there were other ways to put political and economic pressure on the Taliban, but it was perceived as “too slow.”
“When a nation has been attacked, and people are fearful and angry, their prefrontal cortex is focused on threats and looks for ways to respond to those threats,” Crawford said. “The American public was not prepared, because it is so militarized, to think about other tools and to support those who were advocating other tools.”
Sarwary said the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was a “monumental failure on everyone's part over the last 20 years,” and thinks a 9/11 commission report should be created to find out how American and Afghanistan taxpayer money had been used.
He said many misunderstandings could have been avoided if more Americans spoke Pashto and Dari, which are both official Afghanistan languages.
“I think there's also this lack of understanding of who the people are, I agree completely,” Crawford said.
Ariana Shah, global studies sophomore and Human Rights Institute intern attended the Zoom lecture and said it was a chance to have Afghan journalists including Sarwary and Halima Kazem-Stojanovic in this discussion, because she felt that the Afghan perspective is missing in the U.S. perception of Afghanistan events.
“We just don't know about it in America, and it's really unfortunate . . . we don't know that much about these crimes,” Shah said. “I think students should really become more aware and not only are our lives being affected, but lives overseas, especially civilians.”
Both panelists during the lecture also spoke about the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“As an Afghan looking at the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and what's happening in Ukraine, I feel that the real bear trap is Ukraine for the Russians,” Sarwary said. “They will be stuck there.”
Crawford said the Russian nuclear threat should be taken seriously, because “we've got thousands of nuclear weapons remaining in the world and that . . . should be dismantled.”
She said negotiators ending this war should avoid mistakes made in Afghanistan, where the Afghan government was missing from the negotiating table with Taliban, the U.S. and other Western powers.
The U.S. foreign military policy also has consequences on its own territory, Crawford said.
She said the police in the U.S. have a disproportionate share of their force who are veterans or are still active in the reserves, bringing militarism back in the police officers’ mentality.
Police or military budget reduction creates the same “allergic reaction” saying without force, replies are not effective, she said.
Crawford and Sarwary said that U.S. militaristic interventions are “repeating the same pattern” of mistakes again and again.
“Unfortunately . . . there are some [people] of the United States who don't want to look critically at American history, military and otherwise . . . this is because it conflicts with their idea and their ideal of what it means to be a U.S. citizen or an American,” Crawford said. “And I'm sorry, you'll have to get over that and recognize that this is a complicated history, and we have good and we've got terrible . . . we'll be stronger if we face that.”
