A Mistake Was Made — in Blowing Up Doctors without Borders — General John Campbell Reportedly Said — Evidently Implying that Mistaken Collateral Damage Cannot Be a War Crime — and Inadvertently Demonstrating the Near Impossibility of Exercising Effective Accountability in War

© 2015 Peter Free

 

07 October 2015

 

 

This is an essay about (at least) one evil of waging perpetual war

 

From the New York Times:

 

 

The American commander in Afghanistan now believes that United States troops did not follow their own rules [of engagement] in calling in the airstrike that decimated a Doctors Without Borders hospital [see here] when no American and Afghan troops were in extreme danger, according to officials with direct knowledge of the general’s thinking.

 

Regardless of what mistake may have been made, General Campbell told a Senate committee on Tuesday that the strike was ultimately the result of “a U.S. decision made within the U.S. chain of command.” He took responsibility for the sustained bombardment of the medical facility, which he said took place in response to an Afghan call for help.

 

[H]e told senators [on the Armed Services Committee] that “to prevent any future incidences of this nature, I’ve directed the entire force to undergo in-depth training in order to review all of our operational authorities and rules of engagement.”

 

© 2015 Eric Schmitt and Matthew Rosenberg, General Is Said to Think Afghan Hospital Airstrike Violated Rules, New York Times (06 October 2015)

 

 

Two significant supervisory issues arise

 

Can fair-minded accountability be effectively exercised?

 

If accountability can be exercised, will it last?

 

 

The answer to both questions is “no”

 

Fair-minded responsibility cannot be assessed because the highest ranking among America’s civilian political leaders have militarized US policy throughout the world in a way that diminishes the value of non-combatant lives.

 

The last two presidential administrations have set a moral tone that permits wide-spread collateral damage, during their exaggerated and unrealistic efforts to suppress Islamic-tainted terrorism:

 

 

President Bush invaded Iraq under circumstances in which it was clear that Iraq had done nothing to threaten the United States. The war was unquestionably illegal and, more arguably than not, immoral. Hundreds of thousands died.

 

Presidents Bush and Obama then aggravated this illegality by drone-murdering hundreds more innocents. In the process, these two administrations indefensibly expanded the definition of terrorist to include anyone male and of military age and, essentially, anyone unfortunate enough to be in the proximity of such a person.

 

Last, almost unbelievably — from a legal perspective — in 2015, the Obama Administration further expanded the definition of unlawful enemy combatant to the more expansively worded one, unprivileged belligerent. The change apparently aimed at authorizing the execution of some journalists.

 

One cannot soundly now argue that this top-down example of disrespect for the value of innocent and reasonably innocent lives would not affect American troops and their allies.

 

General Campbell is probably correct that someone violated rules of engagement in the Doctors without Borders massacre. But one cannot persuasively argue that such a “mistake” was both unforeseeable and avoidable, given the nature of perpetual war and the example that two presidents have set.

 

General Campbell has arguably been wedged into an ethically and administratively impossible place by his Commander in Chief’s own poorly reasoned policies.

 

 

War always means atrocity — hence the legal and moral caveat that war should be avoided

 

Though the Doctors without Borders bombing probably constitutes a war crime — meaning that the hospital, as a hospital, was knowingly bombed — I can empathize with whichever troops felt themselves threatened by a hospital that was — according to Afghani authorities — either a base for the “enemy” or a place where they could get patched up, along with anyone else who needed medical assistance.

 

No one constantly under fire wants enemies being sent back into the fray because some “do gooder” saw fit to heal them.

 

This feeling is predictable. But it clashes with (legitimate) rules of war that explicitly protect medical people in war zones.

 

The point is that a Commander in Chief cannot, on the one hand, set an example that lessens the value of innocent lives under wartime conditions and then create and sustain those conditions indefinitely — without expecting and implicitly condoning the reprehensible things that always go with them.

 

This is why international law attempts to confine lawful war to those circumstances in which a nation is invaded. By minimizing the instances in which war can erupt, law and morality both seek to reduce the number of instances in which armed conflict takes place. By restricting violent conflict, the number of predictable atrocities that take place are reduced.

 

In their exaggerated and hubristic over-emphasis on security, American presidential administrations have apparently lost international law’s train of persuasive logic.

 

 

As a result of America’s now seemingly perpetual war against evil

 

We have:

 

slackened traditionally accepted American morality,

 

expressed (by policy) a casual disregard for innocent lives lost,

 

and systematically —

 

fed these diminished moral standards back into perpetuating the cycle of slaughter.

 

 

The moral? — “We the good guys” are now too frequently functionally almost inseparable from the bad ones

 

I suspect that General Campbell will be influenced (from higher command levels) to find low-ranking scapegoats, so as to ritually exorcise the Doctors without Borders massacre from our national soul.

 

However, the true source of our national soul-pollution is the civilian pinnacle of the chain of command. Meaning the President and the United States Congress. Both of which have too casually implemented a policy of waging unceasing and unwinnable wars. By doing this, they have implicitly invited the inevitable atrocities that accompany war and, especially, incessant war.

 

Symbolically, on the one hand:

 

(a) we have the high-ranking civilian group of morally and legally blind American political leaders —

 

and, in moral contrast, on the other

 

(b) the dead and maimed Heroes against Suffering (meaning Doctors without Borders) and their patients

 

with — trapped in between —

 

(c) the American military that has been tasked with doing the morally, legally, and practically impossible.

 

As nurse Lajos Zoltan Jecs concluded after his hospital was bombed, “It is unspeakable.”

 

There are few instances in life in which the prongs of pole-opposite ethics are so clearly highlighted.

 

To say that the situation is tragic is to too easily dismiss the completely avoidable policy insanity that contributed to it.