I’ve drawn attention to Harry Parker‘s spellbinding Anatomy of a Soldier in an earlier post; here at the AAG in San Francisco I may even be speaking about it tomorow – we’ll see. (I’m supposed to be speaking about something else altogether but it’s in a session on’ Objects of security and war’, so I’m half-way through a new presentation, ‘Object lessons’).
Channel Four has posted an interview with the author at the Imperial War Museum on YouTube:
And there’s another interview with the BBC here.
As I work on the text of “Reach from the Sky”, I’ve been revisiting the role of Edward Steichen in the development (in fact, the industrialisation) of air photography on the Western Front. As I noted, all too briefly, in ‘Gabriel’s map’ (DOWNLOADS tab), Steichen commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces. He organised the 55 officers and 1,111 men under his command into what Paul Virilio described as ‘a factory-style output of war information’ that ‘fitted perfectly with the statistical tendencies of this first great military-industrial conflict’.
The classic source on Steichen’s assembly-line methods of reproduction (and much more) is Allen Sekula‘s essay, ‘The instrumental image: Steichen at war’, in Artforum 14 (1975) 26-35 [see also the image above]:
The establishment of this method of production grew out of demands for resolution, volume, and immediacy. No method of reproduction but direct printing from the original negative would hold the detail necessary for reconnaissance purposes. Large numbers of prints from a single negative had to be made for distribution throughout the hierarchy of command. In addition, the information in prints dated very rapidly. Under these circumstances, efficiency depended on a thorough-going division of labor and a virtually continuous speedup of the work process. Printers worked in unventilated, makeshift darkrooms; 20 workers might produce as many as 1,500 prints in an hour, working 16-hour shifts.
Analytically the essay has never been surpassed, but now there is a new book that fills in the biographical details of Steichen’s service during the First World War: Von Hardesty‘s Camera Aloft: Edward Steichen in the Great War (Cambridge, 2016):
Edward Steichen (1879–1973) played a key role in the development of photography in the twentieth century. He is well known for his varied career as an artist, a celebrated photographer, and museum curator. However, Steichen is less known for his pivotal role in shaping America’s first experiments in aerial photography as a tool for intelligence gathering in what may be called his “lost years.” In Camera Aloft, Von Hardesty tells how Steichen volunteered in 1917 to serve in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). He rose rapidly in the ranks of the Air Service, emerging as Chief of Air Photography during the dramatic final offensives of the war. His photo sections were responsible for the rapid processing of aerial images gained through the daily and hazardous sorties over the front and in the enemy rear areas. What emerged in the eighteen months of his active service was a new template for modern aerial reconnaissance. The aerial camera, as with new weapons such as the machine gun, the tank, and the airplane, profoundly transformed modern warfare.
Here is the table of contents:
Foreword: taking the camera aloft
1. War and exile
2. A new life in the military
3. Over there
4. The world of air observation
5. Taking charge
6. Over the front
7. War and photography
Appendix: life at the cutting edge: the photo sections.
The book includes stunning reproductions of photographs (from which I’ve borrowed the annotated image of the Photographic Section above): you can see a selection from the book here. Other Steichen aerial imagery from the period is here and here.
As you’ll be able to see when I’m finished, I’m no less interested in Steichen’s work during the Second World War, and in particular the various photographic projects he directed in the Pacific that captured – and celebrated – the masculinism and homosociality of modern war (here the work of Horace Bristol is especially revealing).
But right now it’s the industrialisation of aerial imagery that is capturing my attention. It’s a commonplace that the First World War was industrial warfare on the grand scale, of course, but often our attention is distracted by the killing machines and mechanisms themselves – the gas, the tanks, the aircraft – and we lose sight of the assembly-line logic that animated the slaughter not only during but also before and after.
You can see it in Steichen’s production line, but there are countless other examples. Last summer I was working in the Friends’ Library in London, recovering the role of the Quakers in providing medical care on the Western Front as part of my research on casualty evacuation, when I encountered this extraordinary passage that speaks directly to the relentless motion of the killing machine (see also my ‘Divisions of Life’ here). It’s a medical orderly’s account of loading an ambulance train, written some time in 1915:
Down in a hedged field at the end of the straggling mining village lies the casualty clearing station, some two-score large tents… Since midday the [casualty] clearing station has been full to overflowing, but still an endless line of motor ambulances moves down along the crowded road from the fighting line, through the village and into the muddy field. It is night now, starless and dark as pitch, and a lashing rain is driven hard in your face before a bitter and rising wind; but still the cars are discharging their pitiful loads in dreary succession when the train is brought into the siding which serves this desolate little camp.
From the train itself you can scarcely see anything of the clearing station tonight; only the headlights of the cars as they turn in through the gate, and a few hurricane lamps flickering here and there. Near one end of the train, at the wooden footbridge which crosses the stream separating the camp from the railway track, there stands a powerful acetylene flare, casting a circle of vivid light on the deep mud of the path. Save for three or four feeble oil-lamps on the ground beside the long darkened train, this is the only light at the loading place. A few moments of uncertain waiting, and the first stretcher comes down, its weary bearers slithering and stumbling in the watery mire. As you watch the flare you see them emerge suddenly from the utter blackness beyond into the fierce glare of the light; they halt for a moment, while a cloaked officer standing on the bridge raises the waterproof sheet which protects the wounded man’s face from the beating rain; a name is given and noted; the covering is dropped over the head, and the bearers move on again, seeing to vanish as if by magic as they pass with their burden out of the light into the enveloping blackness. A pause, another stretcher enters the circle of light; the same words pass, the same motions, and it too move son, blotted out as suddenly as it appeared. Watching this time after time, you feel as if a picture were being cast on a screen and flashed off, over and over again: for there is something cruelly mechanical about it all.
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY
I’ve just heard that John Urry died unexpectedly last Friday: I’m so desperately sad. We first met when we edited Social relations and spatial structures together as part of Macmillan’s Critical Human Geography series; an invitation to extend the conversation between sociology and human geography, it appeared in 1985, but we kept in touch ever since. He was a joy to work with. I remember rattling up to Lancaster on a succession of small trains from Cambridge and receiving the warmest of welcomes: good beer, creative conversation and lots of laughter. I last saw him two summers ago when I was in Lancaster for a conference on drones; one evening we sat in his gorgeous house sipping wine and having the loveliest and liveliest of times.
In between those book-ends (in fact before them and after them too) John produced some of the most imaginative work in the social sciences: books that were brimful of ideas – I never thought of it as Theory-with-a-capital-T and I doubt that he did either, though his grasp of classical and contemporary social theory was truly remarkable – that were drawn from an ever-expanding intellectual imagination fed by the widest of reading and reflection, but which never lost sight of the pressing substance of what he was thinking about. These were wonderfully accessible, provocative, insightful books – his work with Scott Lash on disorganized capitalism and his own studies of tourist culture and the tourist gaze, mobilities, climate change, and most recently on off-shoring. There was a tremendous clarity to John’s writing but also a humbling modesty; he was never strident, but it was impossible to put down one of his books – or reluctantly end a conversation with him – without thinking you had never seen it like that before and that you now had a lot more thinking of your own to do.
If you’ve never heard him, here he is in 2014:
John had an extraordinary gift for enlarging people’s political and intellectual horizons without lecturing or hectoring; his writing was splattered with references, but never in that showy, superficial ‘look how up-to-date I am’ way – instead they were generous acknowledgements of his debt to others and bibliographic gifts to his readers.
In (too) brief, he was a gorgeous man, the very model of a critical scholar and a generous human being. We still have his words but the realisation that there will be no more of them fills me with a sense of rootless desolation.
As a supplement to my previous post on mapping the bombing of Germany in the Second World War, I thought I should draw attention to Lauren Turner‘s report on the maps RAF Bomber Command had drawn to show the effects of its raids on individual cities. I described the construction of target maps in ‘Doors into nowhere’ (DOWNLOADS tab); these maps were compiled for the Blue Books kept by Arthur Harris as chief of Bomber Command (above). In the summer of 1943 Harris ordered the preparation of a large book (which eventually extended to several volumes) which would show the “spectacular” results of the bomber offensive. “After each attack on a German city,” he explained, “the area of devastation was progressively marked with blue paint over a mosaic of air photographs of the city as a whole”. Harris was immensely proud of this “inventory of destruction,” as Tami Biddle calls it, and showed it to all his prominent visitors (see also here for a short discussion of how blind Harris was to the strategic significance of his campaign).
Here, for example, is Cologne in November 1944:
The dark blue shows the area destroyed or badly damaged: you can also find more information about the damaged city in my post on the geometry of destruction here (which includes an early target map).
Lauren’s report for the BBC includes similar maps for Berlin and Dresden.
As part of the Chronicle‘s Scholars Talk Writing series, there’s a lovely interview with Deirdre McCloskey here and much to think about. For example:
Given the many differences you point out in Crossing about how Donald and Deirdre think, felt, and interacted in the world, surely there were changes in your prose style when you transitioned. Can you say something about gender and writing, and how your crossing affected your prose?
I do not want to be accused of essentialism. But as a first- and third-wave feminist (not second wave — e.g., the startlingly transphobe Germaine Greer), I note differences. It’s hard for me to judge, true, because when I read my earlier stuff I’m reading it philosophically for the argument, not rhetorically for the style. The big item I reckon is the style of argument. I still write always with an argument, which might sound male — unless you met my mother, from whom I learned how to argue! But the arguing is less relentless now, more diffident, as arguments should be if you are interested in the actual truth and want to establish it together with your reader.
As a young man I was proud of crushing an opponent in my writing — as though on my high-school football team (of which, by the way, I was co-captain). Now I am trying to make common cause with the reader, and trying also to be truthfully gentle with the “opponents.” It came naturally — not as Rule No. 15 in How to Be a Woman. My joke, though, is that I can’t tell whether any improvement is because I became a woman (within the limits, alas, of biology and life history) … or because I finally grew up.
Matt Farish‘s perceptive view of David Vine‘s BaseNation – ‘a distressing and tremendously helpful resource for grappling with the global geography of the American armed forces’ (see also here, the map here [also shown above] and the interactive map here) – is up at the LA Review of Books here.
The Baseworld that was pieced together during and after World War II undoubtedly represented “a qualitative and quantitative shift,” but it is noteworthy that a place like Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, once dubbed the “western edge of civilization,” is today both a heritage landscape and an active Army facility, including, of course, the military’s most prominent prison. As historians have noted, the movement of men and motifs from the “Indian Wars” to overseas conflicts like the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) was direct. “Now that the continent is subdued,” the California-based Overland Monthly announced in 1898, “we are looking for fresh worlds to conquer.”
In the 21st century, the perverse demand for “total defense” has produced an increasingly diverse roster of base types, from Germany’s Kaiserslautern Military Community (including the massive Ramstein Air Base), home to an 840,000-square-foot mall, to the small, often secretive “lily pads” that typify the Pentagon’s role “in at least forty-nine of the fifty-four African countries. It may be operating in every single one.” By limiting the number of troops in place — sometimes replacing them with “pre-positioned” weapons and matériel — and encouraging closer ties with other national militaries, lily pads present a different sort of challenge for opponents of military presence.
But Matt – I think properly refuses the distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘extraterritorial’:
Vine’s decision to focus almost exclusively on “extraterritorial” sites is practical, but it is also political, even as the division implied by this word is unsustainable. The benefits of its retention seem meager: it allows Vine to advocate for a return of “troops and base spending back to the United States,” “stemming the leakage of money out of the U.S. economy and ensuring that economic spillover effects remain at home.” Despite the stupendous number of dollars at stake — tens if not hundreds of billions, annually — I still wonder if Vine’s heart is really in this argument, or if he would prefer to emphasize the “twenty-first century form of colonialism” he documents in places like Guam, and the restitutions that might result from demilitarization. But even on this charge, he follows the same path, claiming that the condition of Guam or Puerto Rico hinders “our country’s ability to be a model for democracy.” For followers of popular political speech, this is familiar prose. But it is still a fictional aspiration, all the more frustrating because it seems to be the result of authorial or editorial pragmatism. It falls apart as soon as we consider varieties of ongoing military colonialism and environmental injustice in the American Southwest, for instance.
David has promised to donate all proceeds from Base Nation ‘to nonprofit organizations serving military veterans, their families, and other victims of war and violence.’
Britain’s Imperial War Museum has produced a striking animation of the ‘strategic bombing campaign’ in Europe during the Second World War:
If the YouTube link (above) doesn’t work in your region, try this. I can’t find any version on the IWM website – this version originates with the Daily Mail here – but an interactive version will be available to visitors at the reopened American Air Museum in Britain (at IWM Duxford) from the weekend. The first bombing mission by the USAAF took place on 29 June 1942 against the Hazebrouk marshalling yards.
I’ve noticed Brian Castner‘s astonishing work before – see my post here – and I’m now deep into his latest book (published on my birthday). I’ll write a detailed response when I’m finished, but it is so very good that I wanted to give readers advance notice of it. It’s called All the ways we kill and die (Arcade, 2016):
The EOD—explosive ordnance disposal—community is tight-knit, and when one of their own is hurt, an alarm goes out. When Brian Castner, an Iraq War vet, learns that his friend and EOD brother Matt has been killed by an IED in Afghanistan, he goes to console Matt’s widow, but he also begins a personal investigation. Is the bomb maker who killed Matt the same man American forces have been hunting since Iraq, known as the Engineer?
In this nonfiction thriller Castner takes us inside the manhunt for this elusive figure, meeting maimed survivors, interviewing the forensics teams who gather post-blast evidence, the wonks who collect intelligence, the drone pilots and contractors tasked to kill. His investigation reveals how warfare has changed since Iraq, becoming individualized even as it has become hi-tech, with our drones, bomb disposal robots, and CSI-like techniques. As we use technology to identify, locate, and take out the planners and bomb makers, the chilling lesson is that the hunters are also being hunted, and the other side—from Al-Qaeda to ISIS— has been selecting its own high-value targets.
This is how Brian himself describes the book:
In January of 2012, a good friend of mine–Matt Schwartz from Traverse City, Michigan–was killed in Afghanistan. Matt was an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician. We had the same job, but while I had done my two tours in Iraq and went home, Matt deployed again and again and again. He was shot on his second tour, and died on his sixth.
I realize now that I was bound to do an investigation into his death; my training demanded it. But instead of asking “what” killed him–we knew immediately it was a roadside bomb–I asked “who” killed him. It’s a question that would not have made any sense in past wars, not even at the start of this one. But we have individualized the war, we target specific people in specific insurgent organizations, and in the course of my research, I discovered the leaders on the other side do the same in reverse to us.
This is the story of an American family at war, and the men and women who fight this new technology-heavy and intelligence-based conflict. I interviewed intel analysts, biometrics engineers, drone pilots, special operations aircrew, amputees who lost their legs, and the contractors hired to finish the job. They are all hunting a man known as al-Muhandis, The Engineer, the brains behind the devices that have killed so many soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You can read an excerpt at VICE (‘The problem with biometrics at war‘) and another at Foreign Policy (‘You will know the Bomber by his designs‘).
Reading this in counterpoint to Harry Parker‘s Anatomy of a soldier (see my post here) – both deal with the aftermath of an IED in Afghanistan – is proving to be a rich and truly illuminating experience.
Yet more on violations of medical neutrality in contemporary conflicts (see my posts here, here, here and here). Over at Afghan Analysts Network Kate Clark provides a grim review of (un)developments in Afghanistan, Clinics under fire? Health workers caught up in the Afghan conflict.
Those providing health care in contested areas in Afghanistan say they are feeling under increasing pressure from all sides in the war. There have been two egregious attacks on medical facilities in the last six months: the summary execution of two patients and a carer taken from a clinic in Wardak by Afghan special forces in mid-February – a clear war crime – and the United States bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz in October 2015, which left dozens dead and injured – an alleged war crime. Health professionals have told AAN of other violations, by both pro and anti-government forces. Perhaps most worryingly, reports AAN Country Director Kate Clark, have been comments by government officials, backing or defending the attacks on the MSF hospital and Wardak clinic [see image below].
So, for example:
Afghan government reactions to the news of the Wardak killings [at Tangi Sedan during the night of 17/18 February 2016; see also here] came largely at the provincial level, from officials who saw no problem in those they believed were Taleban – wounded or otherwise – being taken from a clinic and summarily executed. Head of the provincial council, Akhtar Muhammad Tahiri, was widely quoted, saying: “The Afghan security forces raided the hospital as the members of the Taliban group were being treated there.” Spokesperson for the provincial governor, Toryalay Hemat, said, “They were not patients, but Taliban,” and “The main target of the special forces was the Taliban fighters, not the hospital.” Spokesman for Wardak’s police chief, Abdul Wali Noorzai, said “Those killed in the hospital were all terrorists,” adding he was “happy that they were killed.”
Yet, the killings were a clear war crime. The Laws of Armed Conflict, also known as International Humanitarian Law, give special protection to medical facilities, staff and patients during war time – indeed, this is the oldest part of the Geneva Conventions. The Afghan special forces’ actions in Wardak involved numerous breaches: forcibly entering a medical clinic, harming and detaining staff and killing patients. The two boys and the man who were summarily executed were, in any case, protected either as civilians (the caretaker clearly, the two patients possibly – they had claimed to have been injured in a motorbike accident) or as fighters who were hors d’combat (literally ‘out of the fight’) because they were wounded and also then detained. Anyone who is hors d’combat is a protected person under International Humanitarian Law and cannot be harmed, the rationale being that they can no longer defend themselves. It is worth noting that, for the staff at the clinic to have refused to treat wounded Taleban would also have been a breach of medical neutrality: International Humanitarian Law demands that medical staff treat everyone according to medical need only.
That the Wardak provincial officials endorsed a war crime is worrying enough, but their words echoed reactions from more senior government officials to the US military’s airstrikes on a hospital belonging to the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières on 3 October 2015. Then, ministers and other officials appeared to defend the attack by saying it had targeted Taleban whom they said were in the hospital (conveniently forgetting that, until the fall of Kunduz city became imminent when the government evacuated all of its wounded from the hospital except the critically ill, the hospital had largely treated government soldiers). The Ministry of Interior spokesman, for example, said, “10 to 15 terrorists were hiding in the hospital last night and it came under attack. Well, they are all killed. All of the terrorists were killed. But we also lost doctors. We will do everything we can to ensure doctors are safe and they can do their jobs.”
MSF denied there were any armed men in the hospital. However, even if there had been, International Humanitarian Law would still have protected patients and medical staff: they would still have had to have been evacuated and warnings given before the hospital could have been legally attacked.
Not surprisingly heads of various humanitarian agencies all reported that the situation was worsening:
“General abuses against medical staff and facilities are on the rise from all parties to the conflict,” said one head of agency, while another said, “We have a good reputation with all sides, but we have still had threats from police, army and insurgents.” The head of a medical NGO described the situation as “messy, really difficult”:
All health facilities are under pressure. We have had some unpleasant experiences, The ALP [Afghan Local Police] are not professional, not disciplined. If the ALP or Taleban take over a clinic, we rely on local elders [to try to sort out the situation]. We are between the two parties.
He described the behaviour of overstretched Afghan special forces as “quite desperate,” adding, “They are struggling, trying to be everywhere and get very excited when there’s fighting.” Most of them, he said, were northerners speaking little or no Pashto, which can make things “difficult for our clinics in the south.”
The head of another agency listed the problems his staff are facing:
“We have seen the presence of armed men in medical facilities, turning them into targets. We have seen violations by the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces], damage done to health facilities that were taken over as bases to conceal themselves and fight [the insurgents] from. We have seen checkpoints located close to health centres. Why? So that in case of hostilities, forces can take shelter in the concrete building. We have seen looting. We have seen ANSF at checkpoints deliberately causing delays, especially in the south, including blocking patients desperately needing to get to a health facility. We can never be certain that [such a delay] was the cause of death, but we believe it has been.”
He said his medical staff had been threatened by “ANSF intervening in medical facilities at the triage stage, forcing doctors to stop the care of other patients and treat their own soldiers, in disregard of medical priorities.” Less commonly, but more dangerously for the doctors themselves, he said, was the threat of Taleban abduction. He described a gathering of surgeons in which all reported having been abducted from their homes at least once and brought to the field to attend wounded fighters “with all the dangers you can imagine along the road.” He said the surgeons were “forced to operate without proper equipment and forced to abandon their own patients in clinics because the abduction would last days.”
Locally, medical staff often try to mitigate threats from both government forces and insurgents by seeking protection first from the local community. One head of agency described their strategy:
“When we open a clinic, our first interlocutors are the elders. Everyone wants a clinic in their area, but we decide the location and make the elders responsible for the clinic… They have to give us a building – three to four rooms. All those who work in the clinic – the ambulance driver, the owner of the vehicle, everyone – come from the area. We also need the elders to deal with the parties… If the ALP or Taleban take over clinic, we always start with the elders [who negotiate with whoever has taken over the clinic].”
However, this tactic puts a burden on community elders who may not be able to negotiate if the ANSF, ALP or insurgents are also threatening them.
***
I’ve delayed following up my previous commentaries on the US airstrike on the MSF Trauma Center in Kunduz (here and here) because I had hoped the full report of the internal investigation carried out by the US military would be released: apparently it runs to 3,000-odd pages. I don’t for a minute believe that it would settle matters, but in any event nothing has emerged so far – though I’m sure it’s subject to multiple FOIA requests and, if and when it is released, will surely have been redacted.
All we have is an official statement by General John Campbell on 25 November 2015 (above), which described the airstrike as ‘a tragic, but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error’, and a brief Executive Summary of the findings of the Combined Civilian Casualty Assessment Team (made up of representatives from NATO and the Afghan government) which emphasised that those errors were ‘compounded by failures of process and procedure, and malfunctions of technical equipment.’
The parallel investigations identified a series of cumulative, cascading errors and malfunctions:
(1) The crew of the AC-130 gunship that carried out the attack set out without a proper mission brief or a list of ‘no-strike’ targets; the aircraft had been diverted from its original mission, to provide close air support to ‘troops in contact’, and was unprepared for this one (which was also represented as ‘troops in contact’, a standard designation meaning that troops are under hostile fire).
(2) Communications systems on the aircraft failed, including – crucially – the provision of video feeds to ground force commanders and the transmission of electronic messages (the AC-130 has a sophisticated sensor and communications suite – or ‘battle management center’ –on board, staffed by two sensor operators, a navigator, a fire control officer, and an electronic warfare officer, and many messages are sent via classified chat rooms).
The problem was apparently a jerry-rigged antenna that was supposed to link the AC-130 to the ground. Here is how General Bradley Heithold explained it to Defense One:
“Today, we pump full-motion video into the airplane and out of the airplane. So we have a Ku-band antenna on the airplane … the U-model…. On our current legacy airplanes, the solution we used was rather scabbed on: take the overhead escape hatch out, put an antenna on, stick it back up there, move the beams around. We’ve had some issues, but we’re working with our industry partners to resolve that issue.”
He added, “99.9 percent of the time we’ve had success with it. These things aren’t perfect; they’re machines.”
Heithold said that dedicated Ku-band data transfer is now standard on later models of the AC-130, which should make data transfer much more reliable.
(3) Afghan Special Forces in Kunduz had requested close air support for a clearing operation in the vicinity of the former National Directorate of Security compound, which they believed was now a Taliban ‘command and control node’. The commander of US Special Forces on the ground agreed and provided the AC-130 crew with the co-ordinates for the NDS building. He could see neither the target nor the MSF Trauma Center from his location but this is not a requirement for authorising a strike; he was also working from a map that apparently did not mark the MSF compound as a medical facility. According to AP, he had been given the coordinates of the hospital two days before but said he didn’t recall seeing them. The targeting system onboard the AC-130 was degraded and directed the aircraft to an empty field and so the crew relied on a visual identification of the target using a description provided by Afghan Special Forces – and they continued to rely on their visual fix even when the targeting system had been re-aligned (‘the crew remained fixated on the physical description of the facility’) and, as David Cloud points out, even though there was no visible sign of ‘troops in contact’ in the vicinity of the Trauma Center (‘An AC-130 is normally equipped with infrared surveillance cameras capable of detecting gunfire on the ground’):
Sundarsan Raghaven adds that ‘Not long before the attack on the hospital, a U.S. airstrike pummeled an empty warehouse across the street from the Afghan intelligence headquarters. How U.S. personnel could have confused its location only a few hours later is not clear…’ More disturbingly, two US Special Forces troops have claimed that their Afghan counterparts told their commander that it was the Trauma Center that was being used as the ‘command and control node’, and that the Taliban ‘had already removed and ransomed the foreign doctors, and they had fired on partnered personnel from there.’
(4) The aircrew cleared the strike with senior commanders at the Joint Operations Center at Bagram and provided them with the co-ordinates of the intended target. Those commanders failed to recognise that these were the co-ordinates of the MSF hospital which was indeed on the ‘no-strike’ list; ‘this confusion was exacerbated by the lack of video and electronic communications between the headquarters and the aircraft, caused by the earlier malfunction, and a belief at the headquarters that the force on the ground required air support as a matter of immediate force protection’;
(5) The strike continued even after MSF notified all the appropriate authorities that their clinic was under attack; no explanation was offered, though the US military claims the duration was shorter (29 minutes) than the 60-minutes reported by those on the ground.
Campbell announced that those ‘most closely associated’ with the incident had been suspended from duty for violations of the Rules of Engagement – those ‘who requested the strike and those who executed it from the air did not undertake the appropriate measures to verify that the facility was a legitimate military target’ – though he gave no indication how far up the chain of command responsibility would be extended; in January it was reported that US Central Command was weighing disciplinary action against unspecified individuals. In the meantime, solatia payments had been made to the families of the killed ($6,000) and injured ($3,000).
Not surprisingly, MSF reacted angrily to Campbell’s summary: according to Christopher Stokes,
‘The U.S. version of events presented today leaves MSF with more questions than answers. The frightening catalog of errors outlined today illustrates gross negligence on the part of U.S. forces and violations of the rules of war.’
Joanne Liu, MSF’s President, subsequently offered a wider reflection on war in today’s ‘barbarian times’, prompted by further attacks on other hospitals and clinics in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere:
“The unspoken thing, the elephant in the room, is the war against terrorism, it’s tainting everything,” she said. “People have real difficulty, saying: ‘Oh, you were treating Taliban in your hospital in Kunduz?’ I said we have been treating everyone who is injured, and it will have been Afghan special forces, it will have been the Taliban, yes we are treating everybody.”
She added: “People have difficulty coming around to it. It’s the core, stripped-down-medical-ethics duty as a physician. If I’m at the frontline and refuse to treat a patient, it’s considered a crime. As a physician this is my oath, I’m going to treat everyone regardless.”
Kate Clark‘s forensic response to the US investigation of the Kunduz attack is here; she insists, I think convincingly, that
‘… rather than a simple string of human errors, this seems to have been a string of reckless decisions, within a larger system that failed to provide the legally proscribed safeguards when using such firepower. There were also equipment failures that compounded the problem but, again, if the forces on the ground and in the air had followed their own rules of engagement, the attack would have been averted.’
This is what just-in-time war looks like, but it’s not enough to blame all this on what General Campbell called a ‘high operational tempo’. As a minimum, we need to be able to read the transcripts of the ground/air communications – which are recorded as a matter of course, no matter what the tempo, and which are almost always crucial in any civilian casualty incident resulting from ‘troops in contact’ (see, for another vivid example, my discussion here) – to make sense of the insensible.
This image released by Bleecker Street shows Phoebe Fox, left, and Aaron Paul in a scene from “Eye In the Sky.” (Keith Bernstein/Bleecker Street via AP)
The New York Review of Books has a characteristically thoughtful response by David Cole to Gavin Hood‘s newly released Eye in the Sky: ‘Killing from the Conference Room‘.
The film traces the arc of a joint US/UK drone strike in Nairobi, told from the viewpoints of those charged with authorising and executing the kill. The nominal target is a safehouse, and the two al-Shabab leaders inside (conveniently one American citizen and one British citizen); less conveniently, after the strike has been authorised a young girl sets up a bread stand in front of the house.
It’s a more complicated scenario than the serial drone strikes dramatized in Andrew Niccol‘s Good Kill – because here the politicians are brought into the frame too – and David sees it as a twenty-first century version of the ‘trolley-problem’:
In the classic version of the problem, a runaway train is hurtling down a track on which five people are tied; they will die if the train is not diverted. By pulling a lever, you can switch the train to an alternate track, but doing so will kill one person on that track. Should you pull the switch and be responsible for taking a human life, or do nothing and let five people die?
In Eye in the Sky, the question is whether to [use a drone to] strike the compound, thereby preventing an apparent terrorist attack and potentially saving many lives, though the strike itself might kill the young girl as well as the suspected terrorists. If the operation is delayed to try to avoid endangering the girl, the terrorists may leave the compound, and it may become impossible to prevent the suicide mission. But it’s also possible that the girl will finish selling her bread and leave the danger zone before the suspects depart. If the terrorists leave the compound, an opportunity to capture or kill them without harming others may arise. And of course, the suicide mission itself might fail. As a Danish proverb holds, predictions are hazardous, especially about the future. But a decision must nonetheless be made, and the clock is ticking.
As he points out, there’s no right, neat answer:
There are only competing intuitions, based on utilitarian calculations, the difference, or lack thereof, between act and omission, and the like. In Eye in the Sky, and all the more so in the real world, the choices are never as clearly delineated as in the “trolley problem”; decisions must be made in the face of multiple unknowns. The girl may die and the terrorists may get away and kill many more. But what the film makes clear is that, notwithstanding today’s most sophisticated technology, which allows us to see inside a compound in Africa from half a world away, to confirm positive identifications with facial imaging technology, to make joint real-time decision about life and death across several continents, and then to pinpoint a strike to reduce significantly the danger to innocent bystanders, the dilemmas remain. Technology cannot solve the moral and ethical issues; it only casts them into sharper relief.
Consider, for example, the implications of the purported accuracy of armed drones. The fact that it is possible to conduct “surgical” strikes and to maintain distance surveillance for extended periods of time increases the moral and legal obligation to avoid killing innocents. When the only way to counter an imminent threat was with more blunt explosives or by sending in ground forces, attacks entailing substantial harm to civilians were nonetheless sometimes warranted. As technology makes it increasingly feasible to strike with precision, risks to civilian lives that were once inescapable can now be avoided. And if they can be avoided, mustn’t they be? Thus, when President Barack Obama in May 2013 announced a standard for targeted killings away from traditional battlefields, he said he would authorize such strikes only when there was a “near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” Precisely because they are so discriminating, drones may demand such a standard. Yet as the film shows, that standard can be very difficult to uphold, even under the best of circumstances.
Given my own interest in the film, I’ll share my thoughts as soon as I’ve seen it.
Note: In the most recent US strike against al-Shabab on 5 March, in which drones and conventional strike aircraft were used to kill perhaps 150 people (or perhaps not) at a training camp 120 miles north of Mogadishu, it seems clear that few doubts were entertained (but see Glenn Greenwald here).
geographical imaginations 