Ending War (A RESPONSE TO RICHARD W. Miller) (Essay‪)‬

In "The Ethics of America's Afghan War," Richard W. Miller argues that reflecting on whether and how to end the war in Afghanistan exposes serious deficiencies in just war theory. (1) I agree, though for different reasons than those canvassed by Professor Miller. Miller argues that by focusing on the traditional categories of just cause, proportionality, and necessity (or last resort), just war theory obscures the importance of broader geostrategic considerations that he believes are the most plausible--though ultimately for Miller insufficient--rationale for continuing with the strategy of large-scale counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. I doubt that geostrategic considerations can play the role in moral assessment that Miller believes they do. But the phenomena he is pointing to do illuminate important defects in traditional just war theory. As is well known, just war theory has been dominated by discussion of jus ad bellum (considerations for determining the justice of a war) and jus in bello (considerations for determining just conduct within a war). More recently, such authors as Gary Bass and Brian Orend have drawn our attention to a comparatively neglected aspect of just war thinking, the jus post bellum (considerations for determining just conduct after war has ended). (2) But these three existing areas fail to provide a complete ethics of war in as much as they omit an account of normative principles to govern the termination of war. This omission has been noted independently by Darrell Mollendorf (also a respondent to this symposium) and myself and explored in papers published around the same time in 2008. (3) I refer to this fourth component of the ethics of war as jus terminatio and Mollendorf refers to it as jus ex bello.