Causes of war —Sikander Amani

The decision to go to war, which one would think to be the most carefully weighed action a political leader could ever make, is more often than not made on either irrational, false or parochial grounds

Given the massive damage and casualties of war, how could anyone rational even consider engaging in one? For the naïve civilian, war simply seems such a dumb idea that it is mind-numbing to understand how and why it has been, and still is, repeatedly used as a tool of political advancement. The 20th century has witnessed deep changes in the nature and in the scale of war; it is estimated that of all those who have died in wars since the year 1000, 75 percent died in the 20th century, which holds the dubious merit of having been named the age of “total war”. Conflicts also tend to be increasingly intra-state, rather than interstate. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, since the end of the Cold War, 95 percent of all armed conflicts have been internal rather than between states. It goes without saying that this has entailed a much higher impact on civilians: from being mere “collateral damage”, civilian deaths have actually become a target of war, if not often its primary aim.

It is interesting however, to dwell on the causes of interstate conflicts, as it seems to reveal a deeper, underlying structure of the human psyche itself. In a very thorough study, two social scientists, Greg Cashman and Leonard Robinson, have identified patterns of factors leading to war. They emphasise the multiplicity of wars’ origins, which work in concentric circles, and hence the need for multilayered and multilevel analyses: the individual level (personalities of the leaders, their psychological makeup, their perceptions of the world), the sub-state level (power play and interactions among groups within government institutions, who often defend their turf rather than the national interest), the nation-state level (including the oft-seen case of diversionary wars in the case of internal political turmoil), the dyadic level (i.e. the relationship between a pair of states and their historical, dynamic interactions, especially in the case of enduring rivals), and the international system level (the existence of alliances, the multipolarity of the world, etc). The more negative factors you find at each level, the more likely it is that war will erupt.

A very disturbing pattern emerges: the decision to go to war, which one would think to be the most carefully weighed action a political leader could ever make, is more often than not made on either irrational, false or parochial grounds. The idea that this most momentous decision would be made on the basis of rational choice theory (whereby rational actors identify an objective, gather information, engage in an objective, well-informed cost-benefit analysis of their policy options, and choose the policy most likely to maximise their objectives at the lowest possible cost), is strikingly off-mark: it is as we managed to be rational in small-scale and insignificant decisions, but gave way to knee-jerk stupidity, emotionalism and puffed-up egotism in the gravest and most important of them. No doubt war is the result of a long chain of events, from long-term historical legacies to the immediate, proximate circumstances that trigger the conflagration. But it is also depressingly clear that many of these factors are based on inaccurate, biased or prejudiced premises, which are nowhere along the chain counterbalanced or compensated by a fair and objective assessment of the situation. (Of course, a major objection to this is that we do not know how many wars were avoided by exactly such a rational compensation along the chain. Nonetheless, the sheer number of occurrences of wars means that even if it has occurred, it is far from a systematic or infallible correction.)

In particular, a key element that surfaces at each level of analysis is the strength of misperceptions, biased evaluations and prejudiced beliefs as a major factor in the onset of war. More often than not, leaders are driven by a related set of false assumptions: (1) that the intentions of one’s opponent are more hostile than they are in reality; (2) that the power of one’s own state is greater than it really is; (3) that the oncoming war will be quick and not very costly; (4) that offensive strategies are more likely to succeed than defensive ones. This in turn leads to a double misjudgement: a false sense of optimism about the potential outcome and benefits of the war, and a growing fear about the opponent’s intentions; one is increasingly sure that the other is threatening, and that victory is certain. Given that this process happens on both sides of the border, reciprocal enmity only heightens, and the conflict spiral churns in: each action by the opponent is perceived as necessarily hostile, which in turns leads to a need to buttress one’s defences, which leads the first state to feel less secure and engage in its own arms build-up, and so on. Very Hegelian, one might say. As each action of the other is interpreted according to a predefined framework of hostility and on the basis of assuming the worst about the other and the best about oneself, the possibility of peaceful resolution is reduced at every step. War becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as events that reinforce old stereotypes are given great prominence, while those that do not are simply ignored.

The two scholars give the example (surprise, surprise) of India and Pakistan prior to the 1971 war: “Each side harboured stereotypical assumptions that greatly hindered any attempt to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Pakistani leaders tended to assume that India had never accepted the partition of colonial India into two states and thus was behind every instance of political instability in Pakistan. The Indian leadership believed that the Pakistanis were intellectually inferior and Pakistan was a second-rate power…The mirror-imaging that the leaders of both parties projected on each other — the tendency to define themselves as rational and peace loving, while seeing the other as being irrational and warmongering — drove both parties to take a dark view of the intentions of the other throughout the second half of the 1960s.” (This remains depressingly true even today.) As far as Pakistan’s side is concerned, the authors emphasise the misperceptions that guided the leadership at every step: misjudgement on the ambit of American support, on the extent of China’s commitment, misperception that there existed a unique window of opportunity to confront India just then as its threat was perceived to be getting greater, deep-rooted prejudices about the Bengalis’ ability to lead or fight, stereotypical views on the “martial races” and the Hindus, overreliance by Yahya and the Pakistan Army on its military readiness and prowess, an inability to gather, assimilate and interpret unexpected and dissident information…(They add that the situation in India was “not completely dissimilar”). There were many other factors in this war, no doubt — but the question remains: had these false and unrealistic perceptions not held sway at every step, would the war have occurred? In the same vein, it is equally remarkable that reputation or a vain desire for glory are often more important considerations for national leaders to enter war than claims on territory, resources or material capabilities. Cashman and Robinson’s study on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1942 is enlightening in this respect, where, though territorial and energy issues played their part, the main arguments that swayed both decision-makers as well as the public opinion were considerations of national prestige and “loss of face” — and this, in spite of a well-acknowledged massive asymmetry in military capacities in favour of the US. How can one not be reminded of the Kashmir issue here? If prestige and face-saving strategies did not figure as prominently in the national policies of both India and Pakistan, is it not reasonable to think that greater steps towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict would have been taken by now?

Back in 1651 already, the great Hobbes emphatically showed how skewed representations, false assessments, a “vain concept of one’s own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree than the vulgar”, and the desire for glory, which lead to deep-seated mistrust and suspicion, become the seeds of war. And hence, “persons of sovereign authority are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another…And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation, that is, by force, or wiles, to master all men he can”. The only good news, he says, is that such antagonistic stance eventually gives way to the rational calculation of peace and the social contract. The question now is: how soon is “eventually”?

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at sikander.amani@gmail.com