10 years of armed intervention, a necessary EGP assessment

Sending people to war or to “military interactions”, as you say, requires the utmost care in reflection and decision-making. War should never be anything else than an “ultima ratio” in a situation in which your own population or an ally is attacked, or in which there is an ongoing genocide somewhere else. The reason is that a war in itself usually causes too many casualties and human rights abuse to be justified without a most serious reason. If you don’t believe it, please watch Samuel Maoz’s film “Lebanon” (on the first Lebanon war). – There is also a more pragmatic way of looking at this: we have simply not the ecologic and economic resources on this planet to intervene in any non-democratic country and change their regime to one which is liked better – and by whom? shouldn’t it be liked better by the population of that country also?

Neither in the case of Irak nor in the case of Afghanistan the war served a legitimate goal, as mentioned above – in the case of Irak, this was so obvious that the UN refused to support it, despite the overwhelming political influence of the US on the UN’s decisions. In the case of Afghanistan, plans for building a pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean to bring oil from Kazakhstan to the world market had existed before September 11, 2001.
The so-called “war on terrorism” was just an ideological pretext. Though the regime of the Taliban was a particularly cruel one, causing large-scale violation of human rights, in particular those of women, children, lawyers, intellectuals, artists, journalists, etc., and though also the Saddam Hussein’s regime was a merciless dictatorship, using gas poising against (part of) his own people, there was no proof or even indication of ongoing genocide, when the decisions in favour of war against Afghanistan and Irak were taken.
The aims were economic and regime-change, because the existing regimes did not support the American economic interests to bring Asian oil to the world market, and as such, they were immoral.
The result of the two wars is known: many victims among the civil population as well as in the military forces of the countries involved in the “mission”, Afghanistan and Irak left in major political instability and poverty, to religious fanatics and to warlords involving in an ongoing civil war in which human rights’ violations are continuing, major ecological damage and the necessary development of our Western economies towards sustainability, thus not relying on exploitation of Asian gas, being hampered.

I also miss the aspect that any military intervention in a third country has to aim at giving back sovereignty to the people of that country, and that there has to be a clear perspective for development towards peace, respect of at least fundamental human rights and a reasonable internal stability and security after the war. Unfortunately, this clear perspective is still absent in both Afghanistan and Irak, though individual development projects may prosper, as long as they are secured by Western troops, like the Dutch troops in Uruzgan, at present.