2004/03/01 by Michael O'hanlon, Michael O’Hanlon, P. W. Singer
Health Professions · #Health and Conflict Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/00396330412331343673
Although the threat of mass casualty terrorism has altered strategic priorities in the United States, the global community as a whole faces many of the same problems that it faced in the 1990s: civil wars; failed or failing states; and other humanitarian disasters around the world. The Iraq and Afghanistan interventions, and their difficult aftermaths, show the overlap between humanitarian and geostrategic interests. These interventions also demonstrate that demanding military stabilisation missions will be required as much for the ‘war on terrorism’ as for traditional peacekeeping. Civil conflicts still shape regional and global politics and development, and in many cases are still preventable or at least stoppable. Moreover, trends in demographics, economics, the global weapons market and international politics suggest that they are unlikely to diminish much further on their own. 1 Several hundred thousand people a year continue to lose their lives directly to war as well as to war-related famine and disease. Almost 90% of the dead are innocent non-combatants. A growing percentage of combatants are now child soldiers, in some wars as high as 60%. 2 But these wars have other costs as well. They provide terrorist groups with havens, as in Afghanistan, and with motivating causes, as in the Middle East and South Asia. Moreover, they not only help keep Africa and other parts of the developing world mired in misery, economic stagnation, and disease, but in a world of globalisation, have implications for public health across the planet. There is also a political cost. The continuation of these wars starkly undercuts the common Western argument that democracies protect and promote human rights. In a world essentially