Audience members at the 27th Great Debate Wednesday ultimately said the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, determining that there are alternative, less destructive ways to help the people of Afghanistan.
Though some panelists argued the Afghanistan war could be successful with specific political and military goals in place, the panelists against the war won the majority vote of the 130 attendees at the Tsai Performance Center Wednesday night.
The debate, hosted by the College of Communication, was modeled after the Cambridge and Oxford University Union Societies’ debates, including one affirmative and negative panel each made up of two professionals and one student.
Journalism professor Robert Zelnick, who moderated the debate, opened the floor to the lead speaker for the affirmative, Thomas Johnson, a national security affairs department professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.’
‘Nuanced Afghanistan is not black and white,’ Johnson said. ‘The war is worth fighting only if we have well-defined goals and realistic political and military strategies.’
Johnson said the U.S. should have a central policy in Afghanistan to empower and transfer security of the country to the Afghan people.
‘Democracy is not a source of legitimacy in Afghanistan,’ Johnson said, citing that President Hamid Karzai was seen as illegitimate before the election. ‘Elections don’t make democracies, democracies make elections.’
He said after eight years of ‘doing everything wrong,’ there are no easy solutions for Afghanistan, but one of the first steps should be isolating insurgents from the general population.
International relations professor Andrew Bacevich made the argument for the negative.
‘War is a great evil . . . a blight on human existence,’ Bacevich said. He outlined three conditions for any war to qualify as worth fighting: there must be no alternative, it must be purposeful and there ought to be some proportion between the stakes at hand and the cost the war will entail.
He said the counterterrorism approach of surveillance and employing U.S. precision strike capabilities to go after al-Qaida rather than innocent Afghans and the outsourcing approach are two comprehensive alternatives.’
‘It is their war,’ Bacevich said. ‘Let the Afghans take control of their war promptly.”
Abram Trosky, a political science doctoral candidate, provided the student voice for the affirmative.
‘ ‘This is a matter of a country violating international law,’ Trosky said.
Second year COM graduate student Kenice Mobley countered.
‘ ‘The real issue is whether or not a significant American presence in Afghanistan is essential for securing U.S. interest in the region for years to come,’ Mobley said.
Journalism professor Nick Mills presented the last counter argument. stating that the American people have never thought Afghanistan was worth fighting for, but its people were.
‘The more we fight for Afghans, the more we seem to fight against them,’ Mills said. ‘But we do believe they are worth fighting for.”
Zelnick invited the audience to make points in support of a team’s position. One man said he was speaking from his personal standpoint, rather than as a major in the Air Force.
‘When my troops went out with bottles of Gatorade and showed Afghans text messaging, that was when you saw the best effects,’ surveillance engineer Greg Grozdits said. ‘There would be a better way to fight this war altogether.”
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