Contextualising principles and choices

It was September 2011. I was headed to Dulles for the flight back to Pakistan. Sharing the cab ride with me was a Syrian-American couple in their early 60s. They were going to Damascus to settle some business issues and meet with relatives before returning to the US.

We started chatting and, inevitably, the conversation, after the initial pleasantries, shifted to the situation in Syria. The Syrian gentleman said that he was greatly worried by the developments and thought that if the opposition groups did not accept the political and constitutional openings Bashar Assad was offering, meagre though they were, the situation could get out of control.

I argued that the only way out was for Assad to step down. My Syrian interlocutor disagreed for two reasons: one, Assad was unlikely to step down; two, if he were to step down at that point, the country would be plunged into chaos. He thought that after decades of authoritarian rule, taking the lid off suddenly would do more harm than good. I recall arguing with him on the basis of the principle of democracy, peoples’ will, their rights, yada yada, yada.

He listened to me somewhat patiently and then said that if a solution could not be found, Syria would come apart because the protests would beget a response, the response would beget more protests, violence would follow and the situation would get out of hand. He particularly feared the entry into the fray of external actors and the space it would create for radical Islamist groups.

As later events have shown, he was absolutely right. I, on the other hand, failed to appreciate the consequences of an abrupt push for glasnost, at least in Syria. I should have known better, not least because I myself have often cited Nazih Ayubi’s nuanced distinction between fierce and hard states as opposed to strong states.

In his 1995 book, Over‑stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, Ayubi argued that the authoritarian Arab states had little ability to control populations, trends and changes because they used the state machinery —bureaucratic administration, surveillance, the military and police forces – to keep the people in line; The hard state, Ayubi stressed, coerces and, therefore, is brittle; the strong state achieves its goals through democratic processes, persuasion and aggregating interests. The people, for the most part, do not consider the state an alien entity.

This is why it should have been clear to me while discussing Syria that two things would likely happen: Assad would resort to oppression and the opposition would respond with violence. In the process the state would fragment and into that chaos would march external actors — as they did. Result: the civil war continues.

But why these thoughts? Well, because my last article generated some discussion and a particularly trenchant commentator asked me what could be considered an unlawful command and would it not be deemed correct if the subordinates disobeyed it? For instance, what if the Army Chief directed the commander of 111 brigade to arrest the prime minister and report to GHQ for further orders from the CMLA/COAS? Should the commander read back the Constitution to the COAS and tell him that he could not follow such an order?

Or, at a more extreme end, an officer were asked to take out a bunch of terrorists by indiscriminately bombing, if required, a village, resulting in collateral damage? Should the officer directing the operation read back the various Geneva Conventions and the use of proportionate force?

As should be obvious, the two situations are very different. I would not place the first — which is closer to the unfortunate historical facts in this country — as subject to the “superior orders” defence. The breach of the Constitution is a serious offence and the Constitution in fact has an article that deals with it. But before I go further, let me say that one makes these choices in the real world; they unfold in real-life situations and, therefore, cannot be debated purely conceptually, intellectually or constitutionally. One can problematise these choices, of course, like trolley experiments do, but in the end, in the real world, one has to make a choice.

In which case, and of course I am aware that there’s much space for the critics to disagree with my position, a COAS ordering a coup is constitutionally wrong (and I would oppose it in principle) but when a coup gets underway — and it would because much else in the system is likely to have gone awry already — for a subordinate officer to create a situation which could lead to the breakdown of military discipline, is a situation with much graver consequences than the original breach of the constitution. The reason is simple: the breach of the constitution, bad as it is, is still bloodless. The breakdown of discipline is never bloodless and will lead to further chaos and casualties.

Nor is this a hypothetical possibility. In 2016, Turkey was on a knife’s edge because of such factionalisation. West African states have witnessed such scenarios to the detriment of order. While at a conceptual/theoretical level no one can have an issue with rejecting an unconstitutional order, in the real world making choices in sub-optimal situations is a task more complex than simply mounting a Kantian argument about the good that inheres in the principle and which must be defended for that reason.

In the second example, if a field commander or a pilot or drone operator, gets eyes on civilians and is convinced that there is no way to avoid collateral damage, it would be advisable to abort the operation. This happens often. There were officers who refused to shoot protestors during the 1977 PNA movement. Mistakes do happen, because of human error or bad intel. But if the commander gets information about the presence of civilian non-combatants and is reasonably certain that putting steel on target would endanger their lives, as a soldier he would be perfectly within his rights to abort the operation or the strike. By doing so, he would not be disobeying an order but acting in line with the rules of engagement.

I mentioned superior orders above. The Nuremberg trials which followed WW-II determined that the presence of superior orders was no longer enough to escape punishment, but merely enough, in certain cases, to lessen punishment.

The point is that real-life situations invariably present us with difficult choices. Making those choices often depend on our predispositions. In the end, the fact remains that real life is messy. In a given situation, one has to contextualise, not decontextualise the application of certain principles because nothing operates in a vacuum.

The writer is a journalist interested in foreign and security policies