Reading some articles about the attack on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, I am struck not just by the vehement emotion involved but also the bafflingly unhelpful responses to what is very clearly a tragedy. Their first impulse is to savagely attack the US and try to inflame public sentiment, rather than maintain any kind of objectivity or think about what they are really trying to accomplish.
I saw an article in the paper this morning (No Combatants in Hospital Hit by US, Gregg Zoroya, USA Today, 6 NOV) in which MSF Director Christopher Stokes claims: “The view from inside the hospital is that this attack was conducted with a purpose to kill and destroy.” Well, no shit, dumbfuck. The purpose of an “attack” is, by definition, to kill and destroy. This statement is basically a tautology. What does he hope to accomplish by saying something like this?
Joanne Liu, another MSF official, explains, “Hospitals have protected status under the rules of war.” OH! So THAT’s what all those JAGs were talking about when they said the exact same thing using the exact same words. Yet, the hospital “came under relentless and brutal aerial attack by US forces.” Again, what do you think the point of an attack is? The goal is to place as many weapons systems on the target as possible. If it is relentless and brutal, that means they are doing it right.
This kind of verbiage is designed to arouse anger and hatred, but it doesn’t add anything constructive to the discussion. If anything, it hurts their own goals by arousing anger at the legitimacy of the US and fueling support for the Taliban.
I’m also a little bit confused by MSF’s position, here. I am looking at a photo of a protest rally over the US allegedly targeting doctors. Yet, this is Afghanistan… A country where women get acid thrown in their faces and pederasty is a cultural institution. Every review of civilian casualties indicates the Taliban kills three times as many civilians as the US, yet I don’t see them protesting this fact. More importantly, what the US does by accident or as isolated criminal incidents, the Taliban does as a matter of deliberate policy. Again, the US is evil and the Taliban apparently gets a pass.
Going deeper into the issue, I can’t comprehend the chain of logic required to deliberately attack a hospital. Every single soldier gets taught the laws of war repeatedly. I just got my most recent JAG re-training this week. There are JAGs whose whole job is to do nothing but vet whether airstrikes are permissible or not. But that’s not the point, either. Deliberately attacking a hospital runs contrary to the strategy that the US has been practicing for the last ten years. Our entire “COIN” strategy is built on the premise of building legitimacy in the eyes of the population.
Do they seriously believe a bunch of Generals just sat around one day and said, “Hey, you know that strategy we’ve been pursuing for the last ten years? The one that serves as the foundation for our entire war effort and the core focus of all our training? What if we decided to just go and do the exact opposite?” The very notion makes no sense at any level.
It reminds me of the 2011 attack on a Pakistani border outpost. The Pakistanis did the same thing: Instead of taking a rational response to the situation, they immediately attacked the US and accused it of willfully and deliberately attacking them. This makes no sense at any level. Pakistan controls the critical US supply lines from sea ports into Afghanistan. After the attack, Pakistan shut off the route as punishment and it became more difficult and expensive to import supplies by air.
Again, the logic is baffling. Imagine a group of Generals sitting around a table thinking, “Hey, you know that country that controls our most strategic supply line? The one that could cut us off at any moment? Let’s go blow up some of their soldiers just to fuck with them. Not enough to make a difference, really, just like ten or twenty.” It makes no sense.
Partly, I think this is a monster of our own making. The US has always been keen to placate critics. Ever since Desert Storm we’ve paraded our ability to use “smart” precision weapons to minimize civilian casualties. I don’t believe there is any army in the world that places as much emphasis and effort into avoid collateral damage as the US. And, in a way, I suspect that this is what makes the entire thing unbelievable. We have spent so many years pandering to and placating our critics by emphasizing our ability to discriminate that it becomes implausible when things inevitably go wrong. It reminds me a little of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia… There is no conceivable reason why anyone would deliberately attack an embassy, yet the senior military leadership had just spent months telling everyone how careful we were and suggesting that a mistake would be impossible. I, for one, believe the military should move away from this kind of rhetoric. I would love to see the President get up in front of a crowd and say, “Hey, we’re going to war. Shit is going to get fucked up, a lot of people are going to die, and some of them aren’t going to deserve it. But that’s what war is.” Then, having heard an honest assessment of the reality of the situation, the public could make a more informed choice about whether a war is really what they want.
On a related note, I think the western world has a profound misunderstanding of what war is. Recall the 2010 “Collateral Murder” video, a heavily doctored and misleading version of an air attack. I recall hearing Americans that were just aghast that such a thing could happen. The soldiers I worked with, on the other hand, were just baffled. Attacking the enemy is the point of war. Destroying an armed enemy squad is a victory. Identifying the two reporters in the middle of an enemy squad would (A) require superhuman psychic powers, but more importantly it is (B) irrelevant because the presence of two reporters in the middle of an enemy squad does not render that squad immune to attack. I recall us scratching our heads over this. What did people expect was going to happen in a war? Why were we being sent to fight a war and then called “criminals” for doing the thing you pay us to do?
And, partly, it angers me because part of my work is ensuring compliance with the law and I put a lot of effort into it. For the record, I train military interrogators. I give them comprehensive briefings on the Abu Ghraib atrocities, and I make every interrogator watch the videos produced from the Stanford Prison Experiment. I think I do the best I possibly can to make sure things are done right… But it doesn’t matter, because our enemies (to include human rights groups) have already decided that we are evil and no amount of evidence will change that.