The question isn’t whether we bombed the hospital. It’s whether we think it matters.
Really, there isn’t a whole lot of doubt about “whether.” We did it. And it’s looking as though we meant to do it.
Writing about the Kunduz bombing in the New Yorker, Amy Davidson walks us through the whether-or-not questions and leaves us with these interesting observations:
“We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings,” a nurse named Lajos Zoltan Jecs said, in a statement distributed by M.S.F [Médecins Sans Frontières].
“In the Intensive Care Unit, six patients were burning in their beds.”
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… On Saturday, General John Campbell, the American commander of American forces in Afghanistan, said with even greater specificity that the strike was “against insurgents who were directly firing upon U.S. service members advising and assisting Afghan Security Forces,” who were “in the vicinity” of the hospital. Then, on Monday morning, General Campbell said that this was not so after all.
[Oops.]
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Their [Afghan military’s] defense of the strike suggests that the intention was, indeed, to hit the hospital—never mind that it was a hospital run by a reputable aid group that had given the facility’s exact G.P.S. coördinates to all parties involved.
In the end, our government has committed us to work with the Afghan forces and can, with a hair’s-breadth of justification, say something like “They told us to do it.” How does that work morally, quite apart from strategically?
Davidson writes:
Some American soldiers said that they found standing by while that abuse took place impossible to bear. But this was not so much a matter of the U.S., constrained by the need to fight terrorism, being powerless to change a foreign culture: Afghans themselves resented and hated what these men did to their children. The question, then, might be whether places like Kunduz fall despite what we tell ourselves are tough, pragmatic bargains, or because of them.
There is only so much distance we can claim. On Monday, in response to Campbell’s revised statement, Christopher Stokes, M.S.F.’s general director, cautioned against simply “attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghan government.” Stokes added, “The reality is the U.S. dropped those bombs.”
Yes. We did. We do it over and over and over again. One news report mentioned parallels with Fallujah.
…Or we could go back at least as far as Vietnam.