Good wars, bad wars, necessary wars

War is . . . an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.

Carl von Clausewitz's succinct definition of war still holds true. What has been unleashed on and against Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again a reiteration of that sad principle. The weak state, in comparison to the Russian Federation, that Ukraine is stands as a simple reminder of all those times in history when small or not so powerful states have succumbed to the might of stronger nations. Call it aggression or invasion or, as Putin has put it, denazification, but war remains an ugly spectacle which has been and will forever be integral to human nature.

Hobbes was right. He hit the nail on the head --- that men were nasty, brutish and short. Human nature, much as we would like to sing of its nobility, has for centuries been a long tale of the powerful brutalising the weak, of good men bearing the brunt of assaults by men not so good. Of course, there have been all those defining moments in history when good men have in the end prevailed against those determined to raze their countries to primitivism. That has taken sacrifices, sometimes in the figure of millions, as the erstwhile Soviet Union learned through the deaths of twenty million of its citizens in the long battle to beat back Hitler's Nazis. And sacrifices were the reality in 1971 when Bengalis engaged the Pakistan army in a desperate struggle to free themselves of the genocide they had been subjected to.

Wars sometimes accomplish the goals which nations set for themselves. And all too often those goals are nefarious in intent. Recall the sordid manner in which Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler together accomplished their dark mission of obliterating Poland in 1939, before the Fuhrer turned on the Soviet leader. The aftermath of war pushed Czechoslovakia up against a wall, to a point where its foreign minister Jan Masaryk lost his life, probably when he was pushed to his death. War saw the capitulation of France before an unstoppable German army in 1940 and the quick rise of a collaborationist regime in Vichy. That again is one other sinister aspect of war, when conquering armies sometimes leave local collaborators in seemingly powerful positions, the better to have their goals realised.

War is premeditated violence, as an aggressive imperial Japan was to demonstrate unabashedly in China, Korea and elsewhere in Asia during the Second World War and prior to that. When war leaves a nation vanquished, the victors often resort to unspeakable brutalities, which the Japanese did with intense ugly pleasure during that war. Their attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 revealed a different aspect of armed conflict, which was that war often leads to overreach on the part of the arrogant. It is then that morality decrees that such overreach be checked with equal and devastating force. America under Franklin Roosevelt thus laid Hirohito and Tojo low. One cannot be quite sure that Volodymyr Zelensky will be able to accomplish a similar feat in his resistance to Vladimir Putin.

War is, again, sometimes a solution to a crisis, as Bangladesh and India demonstrated against Pakistani jingoism in 1971. But more often than not, war leaves simmering discontent all around, the best instance here being the Middle East. For weeks in 1967 the war drums sounded in Cairo, Amman and Damascus; and then Israel's forces went surgically into action, leaving Egypt, Jordan and Syria beaten hollow. But war, at critical moments in history, become necessary to force the pace in diplomacy. The Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in 1973 did precisely that. Anwar Sadat's late-night trip to Jerusalem in 1977 remains an example to be cited. Pakistani and Indian leaders, once the battlefield skirmishes were over, went to Tashkent in 1966 and Simla in 1972.

There are no beautiful wars, only necessary wars and bad wars. Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap fought a long, necessary war against, first, the French and then the Americans. It was a war of national liberation, from which the cue was taken by guerrilla armies in Africa through the 1970s and later. A bad war, in clear illustration of the Hobbesian attitude to human nature, was launched in the 1990s in former Yugoslavia by the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. It was war which mutated into genocide. Indonesia waged a bad war against East Timor; Afghanistan has endured a long series of terrible wars that have reduced its people to penury. Iraq is a wreck. Biafra fought a war, in all its secessionist enthusiasm, against Nigeria, only to lose it in heart-breaking manner. Tens of thousands were killed and millions were displaced.

Wars have friends suddenly becoming foes. The Chinese attack on India in 1962 broke the heart in Jawaharlal Nehru, for the attack came from his good friend Zhou En-lai. Mutual suspicion between Beijing and Delhi has lingered since that cold October. Long wars have led to longer anguish before drawing to an end. The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea illustrates the story.

In the end, every war is the death of men by the tens of thousands. Every war leaves lands and history scarred by long queues of widows, by children who lose their fathers, by soldiers who lose limbs and therefore life's meaning.

In Ukraine, where David has little chance against Goliath, war is but the death of a country which has wanted so much to live and thrive.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is a senior journalist and political analyst.

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