Monthly Archives: June 2016

Sacrifice and Accountability

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As we approach the second great American summer holiday weekend, I am reminded of a moving piece that I read over Memorial Day. In a New York Times op-ed titled “The Graves of the Marines I Lost,” J. Kael Weston reflects on late 2004 when he was the State Department’s representative in Falluja and participated in the decision to send American troops to secure polling places in western Iraq during elections in early January. One of the Marine helicopters transporting troops for that mission crashed on January 26, 2005, killing all 31 on board. The accident remains the single largest-casualty incident for either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.

Weston’s article details his quest to visit the graves of all the soldiers killed in this accident—an accident for which he feels he bears some responsibility for having pushed to send the soldiers to the polling stations on that day. Weston pays moving tribute to the sacrifices made by American soldiers in its current, seemingly never-ending wars and in the wars of America’s past.  He also considers the lives of the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians that have been lost over the years that the United States has been at war.

What is perhaps most moving about this piece is that the author feels responsible for what was a terrible accident at a time when the people who made the decisions to send our forces there and to keep sending them there do not seem similarly burdened by accountability. Foreign policy officials from the George W. Bush administration who orchestrated the Iraq invasion routinely appear in the media as “experts” commenting on current policy; academics who supported the war and the surge(s) find ready homes in think tanks and policy schools; former senators who voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 can secure the presidential nomination of a major political party. Meanwhile the military is stretched so thin and its personnel have been so beaten up by years and years and years of deployments that it is currently struggling to fill positions in Iraq and Afghanistan—positions where these individuals will be risking their lives to (at best) prolong the inevitable. Paying tribute to those who lost their lives in America’s current wars is admirable, but these tributes ring hollow when elected policy makers and expert thought leaders do not take responsibility for both the choice to start these wars and the choice to let them drag on with no end in sight, despite several promises to end combat operations.

I was seventeen years old when the United States invaded Afghanistan.  My ten-year college reunion was a few weeks ago, and we still have troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.  My generation has been at war for the entirety of its adulthood and has supplied the manpower to keep these foolish conflicts going. We have the right to demand accountability from the generation of policy makers that chose these wars and that asks that we continue to fight them without any workable strategy for or possibility of winning sustainable political outcomes there. As we celebrate our independence this weekend, let us remember both the sacrifices made by Americans in service of this independence and the recent policy decisions that generated these sacrifices.

Accountability in Kunduz

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I’m back! I can’t promise that I will be posting regularly just yet but I am planning to ease back into the blog over the next couple of months. Now that my two major projects for 2016 (my book and my newborn daughter) have come to fruition, I’m also planning to focus on my new manuscript about British decision-making in the spring of 1940. Over the past twelve weeks I have, however, managed to sneak in some reading and some time to think about the current state of American foreign policy. One theme to which I have found myself drawn over the past couple of months is accountability. I will be exploring this idea over the next few weeks, and today’s post concerns accountability and responsibility in relation to the war in Afghanistan.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published a great piece written by Matthieu Aikins and illustrated with haunting and sometimes gruesome photographs by Victor J. Blue about an American air strike in October 2015 that destroyed a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials MSF) in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The article does an excellent job of teasing out responsibility for the strike, which killed 42: was this a simple case of negligence on the part of American forces or was it something else? The article suggests—convincingly I think, although I am simplifying a bit here—that the Afghan security forces manipulated their American allies into destroying the hospital.[1]

Why would local forces want the United States to destroy a hospital? MSF touts itself as an impartial actor in local conflicts, and consequently its mission is to provide medical care to individuals regardless of affiliation. As a result, the hospital in Kunduz and its staff treated many Taliban fighters alongside civilians and those loyal to the Afghan government. Aikins’s reporting suggests that the local population and Afghan security forces had long suspected (probably erroneously) that the hospital was serving as a headquarters of sorts for the Taliban. On October 3, 2015, the Afghan security forces seized an opportunity during an American mission to dupe the Americans into firing on the hospital, incinerating the building and those unable to escape in time.

The destruction of the hospital and the confusion surrounding American actions in October 2015 illustrate some uncomfortable truths about America’s involvement in Afghanistan: after fifteen years on the ground, we still don’t have a clear idea of what we are trying to accomplish there, we don’t understand the currents of local resentment and loyalties among the population, and we cannot be confident in the goals and capabilities of the Afghan forces. The American combat mission formally ended in 2014, and since then American forces on the ground have been restricted to two roles: training and advising the Afghan security forces, and attacking al Qaeda and IS. We saw in Kunduz in October 2015, however, that it is very difficult in practice for American forces to operate within these restrictive mandates and that a mission that is supposed to be purely defensive in nature may in fact be sliding down a slippery slope to offensive engagement with the Taliban.

Who bears responsibility for killing the Afghan civilians who died when American forces attacked that hospital in Kunduz? Is it the Afghan security forces, for tricking the Americans into firing on the wrong target? The Taliban, for making Kunduz a war zone? The United States, for sending its forces there in the first place? The Americans who made the decision to fire in the midst of shaky intelligence? Osama bin Laden, for launching 9/11 and drawing the United States into war there in the first place? I wish I had a good answer to this question. It seems that the New York Times can’t make up its mind, either. The print version of this story was titled “Reading the Wreckage: Did Afghan Forces Mislead the United States into Destroying the Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz?” As you will see if you click through, the title for the online version of the same article is, “Doctors with Enemies: Did Afghan Forces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?” In other words, the online version omits the United States entirely from the title and places all the blame on our Afghan allies.

 

[1] This does not mean that the United States bears no responsibility for the attack. The Pentagon recently disciplined sixteen soldiers for their conduct during the strike. The Afghan forces may have prodded the Americans to strike the hospital, but the accident raises important questions about our intelligence on the ground in Afghanistan and the rules for conducting such strikes. As Aikins’s article details, these “rules” are often unclear because of the nature of the American mission in Afghanistan.