The slaughter of patients and staff at a Doctors without Borders hospital is just another one of a long string of messages to America that it's time to come home once and for all
Here we go again. We cannot seem to avoid the opportunity to kill innocents and embarrass ourselves with the latest fiasco in Afghanistan. An American airstrike on the Medicins Sans Frontieres/Doctors without Borders medical facility has now been confirmed by top brass as being a direct mistake within the American chain of command. It would seem difficult, at this point, for the United States to wriggle out of responsibility at this point, in spite of their best efforts.
As the Guardian noted, the story has changed four times in the last four days. First it was collateral damage due to a strike on Taliban insurgents that were firing from the hospital, which turned out to be false. Then it turned out that no, it wasn't collateral damage; the medical facility was directly targeted. Then it turned to a "oops we're sorry but the Afghans called in the strike", which is only technically true in that the Afghans requested the strike, but it was guided by American special forces onto a medical facility where there were apparently no enemy troops. Now we finally get the "um, actually, we might have made a booboo" message.
This is not like the usual fog of war. This wasn't an Afghan wedding party in the boondocks targeted for loosing celebratory gunfire near a Hellfire-armed Predator drone, or a cruise missile strike on an underground bunker that happened to be full of cowering civilians instead of command and control elements of an enemy army, unbeknownst to the intelligence analysts. These events are horrific, but in warfare horrific things happen, which is why nations should try their best to avoid starting or prolonging them. I would prefer that the whole thing be avoided, as the concept of "surgical strikes" has always been a repugnant lie to justify excessive force in wartime. Any area-effect weapon is going to create "collateral damage", and in asymmetric warfare with disguised insurgents, innocent people are going to be killed. Modifiers thrown into the press briefings do not change that fact.
The MSF facility in Kunduz was not a poorly marked facility with dual-use characteristics. Our military knew it was a hospital operated by a Nobel Peace Prize-winning NGO. MSF had relayed the coordinates repeatedly to ISAF in the days prior to the firefight that precipitated the strike. The only way that this could have happened - if the chain of events remains as it is presently described - is that someone in the "kill chain" failed to note that the coordinates of the strike were the same as those of a medical facility, or that someone else in the chain knew it was a hospital and decided to pull the trigger anyway. Given the penchant of some of our troops for taking souvenir pics next to naked and shackled prisoners in dogpiles and filming themselves urinating on dead bodies after firefights, I can't rule out the latter.
It was either a case of criminal negligence or outright murder. I'm pretty sure I know which one the DOD is going to choose.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon tongue-twisters have doubled down on this disaster by using it as a case to increase our troop presence in Afghanistan. General John Campbell, the commander who revealed the targeting flub, has also said in the very same proceedings that we might want to delay the drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan given a resurgent Taliban and the arrival of - yes, you guessed it - ISIS (cue horrific, fearful screaming and dramatic musical sting), which prompted Johnny One-Note McCain to start ranting about "politically motivated withdrawals".
What cajones on these guys! Caught red-handed in the commission of a war crime, and they want to use it is a pretext to put keep US forces in Afghanistan to keep the Afghan army from having calling in air support, and let our more experienced American troops do it for them - the very same troops who targeted the hospital in the first place!
The Afghan government has been largely silent on this subject. Based on what I've been reading in American media, this is because they are afraid that we'll use this as a pretext to back up and leave them to their fates yet again. But this fits too neatly into the neocolonial "they are too ignorant and backward to fight a modern war so we need to help them" narrative that keeps getting pushed stateside. I suspect that they are just as shocked at our inability to avoid embarrassing ourselves as we are.
In any case, it should not change the fact that our presence there is more of the same begging for trouble that our leadership has been unwilling to stop. We've now been in Afghanistan for fourteen years, which is six years longer than the French spent providing military assistance to some Wild Colonial Boys in North America when they took on the might of the British Crown back in the Revolutionary War. The Afghan government is going to have to make some hard choices about maintaining the very basic prerequisites of sovereignty - a loyal standing military capable of enforcing its will - because we're not going to do it for them.
Or maybe we will. After all, with ISIS coming into the area, I'm sure that there we can find some other insurgent targets to miss while be bomb and strafe hospitals. Isn't that what having the most expensive military in the world is all about?
I really, really hope I'm wrong about this. I can't believe that I am, however, until my government stops hurling word salad at its citizens and starts demonstrating some accountability in this matter. Otherwise, it is just "the horror, the horror" all over again.