Leaking the truth
THE EXTRAORDINARY volume of confidential US military information released via the Wikileaks website reveals a melancholy story of death, damage, unpreparedness and incompetence.
The thousands of documents appear to confirm that the war in Afghanistan was badly run from the beginning. Wishful thinking in high places and poor control on the ground have resulted in under-equipped and ill-informed US and Coalition soldiers causing hundreds if not thousands of civilian deaths.
But have these revelations shifted the moral debate over the legitimacy of the war onto a different level?
The short answer is, no. Anyone who has bothered to keep themselves informed about the progress of the campaign will have realised long ago that something like this was the true story.
This is not a series of set-piece battles between equally-matched professional soldiers. It is a struggle for an uncertain end between a merciless Taliban army, and Coalition forces whose conscience is tested every day by the limitations of its capabilities. Of course there are terrible mistakes, and of course there are crimes. That is what war does.
As a result of these leaks, many more people will be inclined to say, 'Therefore we should not be fighting this war.' Perhaps; but it's also possible to argue that they should force not just our US allies, but all of us, to address once more the question of right and wrong in warfare.
War is always evil. But it should be possible to limit the evil. If not, it becomes harder and harder to justify the means by ends which seem further off today than when this melancholy war began.
No God in the morning?
RADIO 4's cherished Thought for the Day slot has accommodated over the years, with some grumbles from die-hard conservatives, contributions from representatives of other faiths. But there has been a long-running battle over whether it should give air-time to those of no faith at all.
Now the Ekklesia theological think-tank has poured oil on troubled flames by commissioning research which shows that this religious slot isn't actually all that religious at all.
Academic Lizzie Clifford has analysed the scripts and found that many speakers don't mention God anyway.
More than this, 'Explicit theological content is often absent, attenuated or consciously pragmatic' and 'The concluding "message" is invariably couched in terms that can be put into practice by the listener regardless of their creed, or lack of one.'
She concludes that it's 'puzzling' that non-religious voices are excluded, and that there's no particular reason why secular humanists shouldn't have a voice.
No doubt readers will have their own views. But if we are inclined to assume that this is another step down the slippery slope of secularisation, and man the barricades to preserve the status quo (bearing in mind that most contributors are apparently male, Christian and Oxbridge-educated) we might like to wonder exactly what we have to be afraid of.
The Baptist historian T R Glover said that the church flourished in its early centuries because Christians 'out-lived, out-died and out-thought' pagans.
We should choose our battles carefully. Surely this should not be one of them.
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