I’m sorry for the long silence – I’ve been in the UK, giving a new presentation on the Uruzgan air strike of February 2010, and learning much en route in Lancaster, Lincoln and Bristol. I’ll try to post extracts from the (developing) presentation in the next several weeks as I think about turning it into an essay, but I’ll still be on the road – or, more accurately, on vacation, so things will be irregular for some time to come. I expect regular postings to resume in early July, when I’ll be back in Vancouver.
I’ve also spent several days in Flanders, visiting some of the major sites associated with the First World War. We based ourselves in Poperinge, which was sufficiently far from the devastated and levelled town of Ypres to serve as a major staging post for munitions, supplies and men arriving at its station [see the image above], and for casualties being shipped back to the coast or to Britain (a slower and much more difficult journey). It was also the place (known to the British as “Pop”, supposedly the Paris of the Front, at least around Ypres) where soldiers on leave from the Ypres Salient went to have as good a time as possible, in the shops, bars, restaurants and brothels.
All of this has made me start to explore even more closely the military-civilian interactions behind the lines. There’s surprisingly little work on this, but waiting for me at home is a new book by Craig Gibson, Behind the Front: British soldiers and French civilians 1914-1918(Cambridge University Press, 2014), which despite the subtitle appears to include the war in Flanders too:
Until now scholars have looked for the source of the indomitable Tommy morale on the Western Front in innate British bloody-mindedness and irony, not to mention material concerns such as leave, food, rum, brothels, regimental pride, and male bonding. However, re-examining previously used sources alongside never-before consulted archives, Craig Gibson shifts the focus away from battle and the trenches to times behind the front, where the British intermingled with a vast population of allied civilians, whom Lord Kitchener had instructed the troops to ‘avoid’. Besides providing a comprehensive examination of soldiers’ encounters with local French and Belgian inhabitants which were not only unavoidable but also challenging, symbiotic and uplifting in equal measure, Gibson contends that such relationships were crucial to how the war was fought on the Western Front and, ultimately, to British victory in 1918. What emerges is a novel interpretation of the British and Dominion soldier at war.
The Contents List is topical and – to my regret – doesn’t seem to include anything on the overlapping and sometimes confounding geographies of military and civilian medical care, but it still looks like an excellent survey:
Part I. Mobile Warfare, 1914:
1. The first campaign Part II. Trench Warfare, 1914–1917:
2. Land
3. Administration
4. Billet
5. Communication
6. Friction
7. Farms
8. Damages
9. Money
10. Discipline
11. Sex Part III. Mobile Warfare, 1918:
12. The final campaign
And while I’m on the subject of medical-military machines, Britain’s Arts & Humanities Research Council has a new website, Beyond the Trenches, which is devoted to recent research on the First World War. One of its opening (short) essays is by Jessica Meyeron The long trip home: medical evacuations from the Front, which coincides with the first phase of my new research project. It’s a skeletal account of the casualty chain, or rather chains, and doesn’t flesh out these precarious journeys like Emily Mayhew‘s marvellous social history, Wounded: from battlefield to Blighty, 1914-1918 (see here). But it’s an interesting introduction to some of the logistical issues.
The essay has been prompted by a new BBC drama series, The Crimson Field, set in a British field hospital, which in its turn was apparently inspired by Ellen Newbold La Motte‘s first-hand account of a French field hospital, The backwash of war: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (1916). This is now sitting on my Kindle (and you can also download it free from Project Gutenberg here): its ‘warts-and-all’ portrayal was so vivid that it was banned by the American government when the United States entered the war in 1917. La Motte worked under Mary Borden, incidentally, who recorded her own experiences in The forbidden zone (more on the two women here, you can read the book here, and there is a helpful essay by Ariela Freedman, ‘Mary Borden’s Forbidden Zone: women’s writing from No Man’s Land’ in Modernism/modernity 9 (1) (2002) 109-124).
The book is organised in 14 vignettes, which were published regularly in the Atlantic Monthly, and at one point La Motte includes this observation:
“These Belgians!” said a French soldier. “How prosperous they will be after the war! How much money they will make from the Americans, and from the others who come to see the ruins!”
Having just returned from doing just that, I have to say that I saw remarkably few signs of crass commercialisation or opportunism: I was struck again and again by the dignified way in which the hideous events of those years have been recovered and commemorated. There was refreshingly little jingoism too: just a quiet sense of the enormity of it all. One of the most poignant exhibits I saw was a photograph of families visiting the war graves shortly after the Armistice, trying to find the site where a husband, a brother or a son was buried or, failing that, the place where he had been killed (since the graves of countless thousands were unknown). By then, the graves were being systematised and the cemeteries organised (see here), but the surroundings were still hauntingly raw: there had been no time for the ravaged landscape to recover, the blasted stumps to be torn out, and the trenches to be ploughed over. It was sobering to imagine families, already burdened with grief, seeing for themselves a landscape which must have revealed, at least in part, something of the horror of the war that had been for so long hidden from them.
Here is the abstract for my keynote at the Lancaster symposium on Security by remote control next month; it’s a development from my presentation at the AAG in Tampa, and I’ll provide more details as I develop the argument.
The God trick and the administration of military violence
Advocates have made much of the extraordinary ability of the full motion video feeds from Predators and Reapers to provide persistent surveillance (‘the all-seeing eye’), so that they become vectors of the phantasmatic desire to produce a fully transparent battlespace. Critics – myself included – have insisted that vision is more than a biological-instrumental capacity, however, and that it is transformed into a conditional and highly selective visuality through the activation of a distinctively political and cultural technology. Seen thus, these feeds interpellate their distant viewers to create an intimacy with ground troops while ensuring that the actions of others within the field of view remain obdurately Other.
But the possibility of what Donna Haraway famously criticised as ‘the God-trick’ – the ability to see everything from nowhere in particular – is also compromised by the networks within which these remote platforms are deployed. In this presentation I re-visit an air strike on three vehicles in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan, in February 2010, in which more than 20 civilians were killed in a helicopter attack prompted, in large measure, by video feeds from a Predator providing support to a Special Forces detachment in the vicinity. Most commentaries – including mine – have treated this in terms of a predisposition on the part of the Predator crew to (mis)read every action by the victims as a potential threat. But a close examination of the official investigations that followed, by the US Army and then the US Air Force, reveals a much more complicated situation. The Predator was not the only ‘eye in the sky’, its feeds entered into a de-centralized, distributed and dispersed geography of vision in which different actors at different locations inside and outside Afghanistan saw radically different things, and the breaks and gaps in communication were as significant as the connections. In short, much of later modern war may be ‘remote,’ but there’s considerably less ‘control’ than most people think.
As most readers will know, there has been a lively debate – at once profoundly philosophical and intensely practical – about what counts as a ‘grievable’ (and indeed survivable) life after military and paramilitary violence, and on the calculus of war-time casualties.
Two reports released yesterday conclude that recording and analysing data on the casualties of conflict and armed violence (both those killed and those who survive their wounds) can improve the protection of civilians and save lives. The first, by Action on Armed Violence, is called Counting the Cost and surveys ‘casualty recording practices and realities around the world’:
The AOAV report shows that transparent and comprehensive information on deaths and injuries can protect civilians and save lives. The numbers of casualties have always been a contentious issue, generally dominated by secretive counting criteria, and public numbers that have been dictated more by political agendas than evidence. In other cases, the arguments have been dictated simply by the use of different estimating techniques. An example in this sense has been the debate on the total number of people that were killed during the Iraq War between Iraq Body Count and a survey published in the Lancet medical journal. The Lancet estimated over 650,000 deaths due to the war, more than 10 times the number of deaths estimated by the Iraq Body Count for the same period. A series of articles arguing for one or the other have highlighted how different systems to estimate number of deaths can lead to very different end results.
What the AOAV new report confirms is that when transparency both in the numbers produced as well as the techniques used to record them are clear and public, the debates around these numbers can be overcome. For Serena Olgiati, report co-author, “transparency makes it clear that this data is not a political weapon used to accuse opponents, but rather a practical tool that allows states to recognise the rights of the victims of violence.”
I have a more reserved view about a ‘transparent’ space somehow empty of politics – and we all know what the first casualty of war is – but the report is more artful than the press release suggests: it begins by invoking Walter Benjamin on Klee’s Angel of History:
“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm1.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote these words in 1940 as he saw Europe engulf in flames. Within the year he had taken his own life on the French-Spanish border, the threat of deportation to a Jewish concentration camp seemingly too great for him to bear.
They are words that resonate as much today as they did then. Syria is engulfed in flames, Iraq descends back into the abyss and gun violence takes thousands of lives a week. The single catastrophe the Angelus Novus sees in the 21st century has to be the terrible harm caused by armed violence, a harm estimated to take over half a million lives a year.
Seeing this harm in its entirety is a gruelling task. Recording the true toll of armed violence reveals hard truths: it tells of underlying prejudices, of racism, of sexism: humanity’s ugliness. But only by turning behind us and calculating how many people have died and have been injured in a conflict, in a slum area, in a city in the grip of violence, can we ever begin to address the impact that armed violence has.
The report provided an analytical overview and a series of case studies (Colombia, Thailand and the Phillipines).
It concludes that when the UN systematically records the direct civilian casualties of violent conflict, and acts effectively on this information, this can help save civilian lives. However, casualty recording is not currently a widespread practice within the UN system.
The report recommends that the advancement of casualty-recording practice by the UN in conflict-affected countries should be pursued, as this would have clear benefits to the work of a range of UN entities, and so to the people that they serve.
This report looks at experiences of, and attitudes towards, casualty recording from the perspectives of UN staff based in New York and Geneva that we interviewed. It includes a case study of UN civilian casualty recording by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan’s Human Rights unit. Finally, the report discusses challenges to UN casualty recording, and how these might be met.
I’m just back from the AAG Conference in Tampa, and there’s a lot to catch up on.
First, an art installation in Pakistan called #NotABlugSplat that reverses the paramilitary gaze and ‘targets Predator drone operators sitting thousands of miles away who refer to kills as BugSplats.’ Now they’ll see on their screens the face of a child who lost her parents and two young siblings in a drone strike.
It’s a collaboration between Pakistani and American artists, working with Reprieve and the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, who also designed it ‘to be captured by satellites in order to make it a permanent part of the landscape on online mapping sites.’
It’s an arresting project – but if you scroll through the comments that followed gizmodo‘s report you’ll see that ‘hope’ and ’empathy’ remain dismally distant for many people.
Perhaps some of them would benefit from a new report for the Center of Naval Analyses (CNA) by Larry Lewis,Drone strikes in Pakistan: reasons to assess civilian casualties. I’ve noted his (largely classified) work on Drone strikes and civilian casualties in Afghanistanbefore, and in this – unclassified – report he leverages what we know about US military drone strikes in Afghanistan to address the cross-border attacks directed by the CIA. Lewis makes two key points.
First, he notes that the US government’s claims about civilian casualties for its supposedly covert operations in Pakistan are significantly lower than ‘nearly every other estimate available’. (En route, he draws attention to something that is usually overlooked in these calculations: under International Humanitarian Law, ‘the burden of proof is to determine whether a casualty is a combatant’, and where in doubt the casualty must be regarded and recorded as a civilian). Based on his previous work in Afghanistan, Lewis suggests three overlapping reasons – apart from a disinclination to tell the truth – that ‘complicate the estimation process’:
An irregular enemy – it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish combatants from civilians in irregular warfare, and this is exacerbated by combatants ‘co-locating with the local population’;
Misidentifications – ‘US forces mistakenly believe civilians to be enemy combatants’; I’m not sure how this is different from the first, but Lewis provides two examples that suggest he has in mind specific rather than general characteristics: mistaking men digging drainage ditches for militants burying an IED, for example, or assuming all those in close proximity to an engagement were involved (‘guilt by association’);
Battle Damage Assessments (BDA) based on aerial surveillance – determining the consequences of an air strike without ‘boots on the ground’ is likely to be defective
Of all of these, Lewis suggests that it is misidentification that is likely to be ‘the basis for the majority of civilian casualty incidents’ and cites the case that I discussed in detail in Tampa: the strike carried out by two attack helicopters following persistent surveillance from a Predator of a ‘convoy’ of three vehicles in Uruzgan province in Afghanistan in February 2010. I’ll post my version of events shortly, since I think it is a mistake to collapse this episode into a monotonic ‘Predator vision’; there were other eyes in the sky [see the image below], and – still more significantly – military vision is not a uniquely technical process (which is why the concept of visuality is so important) and in this case involved different interpretations of the Full Motion Video Feed from the drone by different people at different locations. In short, there was a de-centralized, distributed and dispersed geography of militarized vision that was never resolved into a plenary (still less totalizing) frame.
That said, Lewis’s second point is about process not platform. He has no truck with claims like Avery Plaw’s – ‘Where civilian casualties cannot be avoided they must be minimized. This is what drone strikes do’ – because they mistake ‘platform precision for a comprehensive process that minimizes civilian casualties’ and are in fact ‘contradicted by operational data’. He cites his earlier analysis of 2010-2011 data from Afghanistan, which ‘showed that several forms of attack, including engagements by manned air platforms, were less likely to cause civilian casualties than drone strikes’ (my emphasis; see my earlier discussion here). In his view, then, ‘minimizing civilian casualties is less a matter of platform or ordnance selection as it is using an approach that considers factors that lead to civilian casualties and then effectively takes them into account.’
The point is sharpened by Mark Gubrud in a response to a report from Charli Carpenter at the Duck of Minerva:
‘…drones use the same targeting pods and precision-guided weapons as the manned platforms they replace; in fact, the quality of imagery from the drones is degraded by the limited bandwidth and frequent interruptions of satellite links, as well as the transmission delay which can frustrate last-moment aborts. On top of the “soda straw” vision as compared with low-flying aircraft in close air support, these factors mean that, if anything, the drones are actually inherently less discriminate.’
Again, all of these factors were in play in the Uruzgan attack: degradations and interruptions of both video and audio transmissions were of critical importance – again, see the image from my Tampa presentation above – but even more significant was the way in which the military field of view expanded, contracted and even closed at different locations as the episode unfolded. More to come.
As CraigJones has discussed in detail, it’s been much easier to get information about the ways in which the United States has incorporated drones into its military and paramilitary operations than to prise open the door of UK operations (see also Chris Cole on ‘five basic facts we are simply not allowed to know here).
But the House of Commons Defence Committee has just published a two-volume report, Remote Control: remotely piloted air systems – current and future UK use.
Volume 1, the report and formal minutes (58 pp), can be downloaded as a pdf here, and Volume II, written evidence (130 pp), is available here. The second volume includes submissions from the Ministry of Defence, Northrop Grumman, and General Atomics together with critical submissions from Drone Wars UK, Reprieve, the Network for Social Change’s Remote Control project, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Over at the Bureau, Alice Rosshas a first response and summary here, while Chris Cole has a trenchant critique at Drone Wars UK here.
I’m still working my way through all this, but here are some key passages.
First, on the ‘double proximity’ of drone operations – as I’ve said before, even though these platforms can be controlled from thousands of miles away they are not weapons of global reach:
‘The MoD told us that in order to utilise unmanned air systems in the most efficient manner, they should be based as close as possible to the target area of interest to allow for the longest loiter time possible. In a “non-permissive” or hostile environment this would be “extremely difficult”.’
The other side of this is the invocation of a new (though, as I’ve also emphasised, thoroughly conditional and technologically mediated) quasi-intimacy:
‘It was very clear from the visit to XIII Squadron and discussions with Reaper aircrew that all were experienced professional personnel with a clear purpose and keen understanding of the Rules of Engagement which govern their operations. Despite being remote from the battle space they exhibited a strong sense of connection to the life and death decisions they are sometimes required to take. This was in stark contrast to the image portrayed by some commentators of “drone” pilots as video gaming “warrior geeks”.’
Again, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that ‘sense of connection’ is much more highly developed in relation to troops on the ground than to others who are in (or beyond) the field of view, and who are inevitably shut out from audio or online communications, which in part accounts for the risk to non-combatants whenever troops are ‘in contact’ with the Taliban and other fighters.
Second, the report seeks to draw a line between the US program of targeted killing and UK military operations in Afghanistan:
‘We acknowledge that over the last few years there has been a growing concern in relation to the sharing of intelligence with allies and the uses to which such data may contribute. While the issues raised by Reprieve stray beyond the terms of reference for our inquiry and indeed the remit of the Defence Committee, we do believe that there should be greater transparency in relation to safeguards and limitations the UK Government has in place for the sharing of intelligence…
‘We consider that it is of vital importance that a clear distinction be drawn between the actions of UK Armed Forces operating remotely piloted air systems in Afghanistan and those of other States elsewhere… In Afghanistan UAS provide intelligence in support of our ground commanders, enabling them to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Whether for targeting the Taliban or supporting troops on patrol, their ability to loiter over and survey areas for enemy activity and then feed back images and video in real time means they are an invaluable asset to our forces on the ground. Together, the UK’s fleet of UAS have carried out over 160,000 hours of ISR operations.
‘The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper operated by the RAF is the UK’s only armed remotely piloted air system. The RAF fleet rose to ten in early 2014 as an additional five aircraft were accepted into service. RAF Reapers provide persistent intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (ISTAR) for ISAF forces in Afghanistan, mostly in support of UK forces in Helmand province…. Since May 2008, UK Reaper aircraft have been armed with precision-guided weapons—Hellfire laser guided air-to-ground missiles and GBU-12 Paveway 500lb laser guided bombs… By 31 August 2013, UK operated Reaper aircraft had flown over 50,000 hours on operations in the ISR role with 418 weapons fired in the same period.’
Chris Cole is not convinced by the Committee’s (and, by extension, the Ministry’s) attempt to draw the line:
‘The report also argues that it is “of vital importance” that a clear distinction be draw between the use of drones by UK armed forces and what it discreetly calls “those of other States elsewhere.” It urges the MoD to continue its PR campaign – what the committee calls a “public awareness programme” – in order to “aid public understanding and acceptance.” PR it seems trumps transparency.’
Third, and closely connected to Chris’s misgivings, the report restates without examination the legal armature for UK military operations:
‘…the MoD told us that UK remotely piloted aircraft operate within the constraints of UK rules of engagement (ROE) and policy, even where operational control is assigned to a Coalition Commander, such as the Commander of ISAF. The MoD also stated that UK policy relating to targeting by remotely piloted aircraft is exactly the same as that for manned aircraft (and land and maritime weapons where applicable):
‘It is entirely compliant with International Humanitarian Law. Targets are always positively identified as legitimate military objectives and both pattern of life assessment and collateral damage estimate conducted. Strikes are carried out in accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict.
‘Personnel were keen for the public to know more and understand better what it is they do and to dispel some myths that have grown up about Reaper operations in particular. One pilot commented that the public needed to know that remotely piloted aircraft are “not robots, they’re not autonomous and we spend an awful lot of time training to fly them”. This training emphasised all aspects of the RAF rules of engagement such as whether a strike is necessary, whether any civilians are nearby, and what instructions have been received from the ground commander. Reaper aircrew were firmly of the view that the loiter time of remotely piloted aircraft allowed more informed decisions to be made and consequently the risk of civilian casualties was reduced should a missile strike be required….
Fourth, on civilian casualties and transparency:
‘The MoD told us that it was aware of only one incident involving an armed UK remotely piloted air system Reaper, which had resulted in the deaths of civilians:
‘On 25 March 2011 [three years ago to the day!] an attack on two pick-up trucks resulted in the destruction of a significant quantity of explosives and the death of two insurgents. Sadly, four Afghanistan civilians were also killed. In line with current ISAF procedures, an ISAF investigation was conducted to establish if any lessons could be learned or if any errors in operational procedures could be identified. In that case, the report concluded that the actions of the Reaper crew had been in accordance with extant procedures and rules of engagement.
…We note the conclusion of the UN Special Rapporteur [Ben Emmerson] that in any case in which civilians have been, or appear to have been, killed, there is an obligation on the State responsible to conduct a prompt, independent and impartial fact-finding inquiry and to provide a detailed public explanation. We recognise that this is not a simple and straightforward request as to do so could seriously jeopardise continuing operations. Nonetheless, we recommend that, to the extent that it is operationally secure to do so, following an event which has resulted in confirmed civilian casualties the MoD should seek to publish details about the incident and any lessons learned from the review process…’
For a good discussion of the UK’s definition of ‘civilian’ in such cases, see Dapo Akande at the European Journal of International Lawhere.
I previously noted the problems of providing medical care to those fleeing the war in Syria – and to those who’ve been left behind – and an article by Thanassis Cambanis in the Boston Globe (‘Medical care is now a tool of war’) reinforces the importance of the issue:
The medical students disappeared on a run to the Aleppo suburbs. It was 2011, the first year of the Syrian uprising, and they were taking bandages and medicine to communities that had rebelled against the brutal Assad regime. A few days later, the students’ bodies, bruised and broken, were dumped on their parents’ doorsteps.
Dr. Fouad M. Fouad, a surgeon and prominent figure in Syrian public health, knew some of the students who had been killed. And he knew what their deaths meant. The laws of war—in which medical personnel are allowed to treat everybody equally, combatants and civilians from any side—no longer applied in Syria.
“The message was clear: Even taking medicine to civilians in opposition areas was a crime,” he recalled.
As the war accelerated, Syria’s medical system was dragged further into the conflict. Government officials ordered Fouad and his colleagues to withhold treatment from people who supported the opposition, even if they weren’t combatants. The regime canceled polio vaccinations in opposition areas, allowing a preventable disease to take hold. And it wasn’t just the regime: Opposition fighters found doctors and their families a soft target for kidnapping; doctors always had some cash and tended not to have special protection like other wealthy Syrians.
Doctors began to flee Syria, Fouad among them. He left for Beirut in 2012. By last year, according to a United Nations working group, the number of doctors in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, had plummeted from more than 5,000 to just 36.
Since then, Fouad has joined a small but growing group of doctors trying to persuade global policy makers—starting with the world’s public health community—to pay more urgent attention to how profoundly new types of war are transforming medicine and public health.
It is grotesquely ironic that ‘global policy-makers’ should have to be persuaded of the new linkages between war, medicine and public health, given how often later modern war is described (and, by implication, legitimated) through medical metaphors: see in particular Colleen Bell, ‘War and the allegory of medical intervention: why metaphors matter’, International Political Sociology 6: 3 (2012) 325-28 and ‘Hybrid warfare and its metaphors’, Humanity 3 (2) (2012) 225-47.
But there are, as Fouad emphasises, quite other, densely material biopolitics attached to contemporary military and paramilitary violence, including not only the targeting of medical staff, as he says, but also their patients.
“In Syria today, wounded patients and doctors are pursued and risk torture and arrest at the hands of the security services,” said Marie-Pierre Allié, president of [Médecins san Frontières’]. “Medicine is being used as a weapon of persecution.”
In October 2011 Amnesty International described the partisan abuse of the wounded in hospitals in Damascus and Homs, and the denial of medical care in detention facilities, in chilling detail.
At least then (and there) there were hospitals. Linking only too directly to my previous post on Aleppo, Cambanis concludes:
Today, Fouad’s former home of Aleppo is largely a ghost town, its population displaced to safer parts of Syria or across the border to Turkey and Lebanon. The city’s former residents carry the medical consequences of war to their new homes, Fouad said—not just injuries, but effects as varied as smoking rates, untreated cancer, and scabies. Wars like those in Syria and Iraq don’t follow the old rules, and their effects don’t stop at the border.
I first became aware of these issues at a conference on War and medicine in Paris in December 2012, which prompted my current interest in the casualties of war, combatant and civilian, and the formation of modern medical-military machines. Several friends from the Paris meeting (Omar Dewachi, Vinh-Kim Nguyen and Ghassan Abu Sitta) have since joined with other colleagues to produce a preliminary review published this month in The Lancet: ‘Changing therapeutic geographies of the Iraqi and Syrian wars’. They write:
War is a global health problem. The repercussions of war go beyond death, injury, and morbidity. The effects of war are long term, reshaping the everyday lives and survival of entire populations.
In this report,we assess the long-term and transnational dimensions of two conflicts: the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2003 and the ongoing armed conflict in Syria, which erupted in 2011. Our aim is to show that, although these conflicts differ in their geopolitical contexts and timelines, they share similarities in terms of the effects on health and health care. We analyse the implications of two intertwined processes—the militarisation and regionalisation of health care. In both Syria and Iraq,boundaries between civilian and combatant spaces have been blurred. Consequently,hospitals and clinics are no longer safe havens. The targeting and misappropriation of health-care facilities have become part of the tactics of warfare. Simultaneously, the conflicts in Iraq and Syria have caused large-scale internal and external displacement of populations. This displacement has created huge challenges for neighbouring countries that are struggling to absorb the health-care needs of millions of people.
They emphasise ‘the targeting and implication of medicine in warfare’ and note that ‘the militarisation of health care follows the larger trends of the war on terror, where the boundaries between civilian and combatant spaces are broadly disrespected.’ They have in mind ‘not only the problem of violence against health care, but also [the ways in which] health care itself has become an instrument of violence, with health professionals participating (or being forced to participate) in torture, the withholding of care, or preferential treatment of soldiers.’
And they describe a largely unplanned dispersal of medical care across the region that blurs other – national – boundaries, requiring careful analysis of the ‘therapeutic geographies‘ which trace the precarious and shifting journeys through which people obtain medical treatment in and beyond the war zone. They insist that ‘migrants seeking refuge from violence cannot be framed and presented as mere victims but as people using various strategies to acquire health care and remake their lives.’ The manuscript version of the report included the map below, which illustrates the scale of the problem:
My own work addresses similar issues through four case studies over a longer time-span, to try to capture the dynamics of these medical-military constellations: the Western Front in 1914-18, the Western Desert in the Second World War, Vietnam, and Afghanistan 2001-2014 (see ‘Medical-military machines’, DOWNLOADS tab).
Today Médecins sans Frontières published an important report, Between rhetoric and reality: the ongoing struggle to access healthcare in Afghanistan, that speaks directly to these concerns. Like the Lancet team, the report explores the ways in which war affects not only the provision of healthcare for those wounded by its violences but also access to healthcare for those in the war zone who suffer from other, often chronic and life-threatening illnesses: ‘The conflict creates dramatic barriers that people must overcome to reach basic or life- saving medical assistance. It also directly causes death, injury or suffering that increase medical needs.’ Releasing their findings, MSF explained:
After more than a decade of international aid and investment, access to basic and emergency medical care in Afghanistan remains severely limited and sorely ill-adapted to meet growing needs created by the ongoing conflict… While healthcare is often held up as an achievement of international state-building efforts in Afghanistan, the situation is far from being a simple success story. Although progress has been made in healthcare provision since 2002, the report … reveals the serious and often deadly risks that people are forced to take to seek both basic and emergency care.
The research – conducted over six months in 2013 with more than 800 patients in the hospitals where MSF works in Helmand, Kabul, Khost and Kunduz provinces – makes it clear that the upbeat rhetoric about the gains in healthcare risks overlooking the suffering of Afghans who struggle without access to adequate medical assistance.
“One in every five of the patients we interviewed had a family member or close friend who had died within the last year due to a lack of access to medical care,” said Christopher Stokes, MSF general director. “For those who reached our hospitals, 40 per cent of them told us they faced fighting, landmines, checkpoints or harassment on their journey.”
The patients’ testimonies expose a wide gap between what exists on paper in terms of healthcare and what actually functions. The majority said that they had to bypass their closest public health facility during a recent illness, pushing them to travel greater distances – at significant cost and risk – to seek care.
MSF provides a photoessay describing some of these precarious journeys (‘Long and dangerous roads’) here, from which I’ve taken the photograph below, showing an inured man being led by a relative into the Kunduz Trauma Centre.
Hard on the heels of its report into six US targeted killings in Yemen in 2009 and 2012-13, Human Rights Watch has published a detailed analysis by Letta Tayler of another drone strike carried out by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) against a wedding convoy on 12 December 2013. According to Greg Miller in the Washington Post,
The report represents the most detailed independent examination to date of a strike that has focused attention on the administration’s struggles to tighten the rules for targeted killing, provide more information about such operations to the public and gradually shift full control of the drone campaign from the CIA to the Pentagon.
There is considerable evidence of covert US-Pakistan co-operation in targeting in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (see here and here), but in the case of Yemen the collaboration is more overt and perhaps even more formalised: Yemen’s President described a ‘joint operations room’, including agents/officers from the US, the UK, NATO and Yemen that ‘identifies in advance’ prospective targets (who are usually described as members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula).
In this case, as in so many others, the United States has insisted that all those killed were terrorists, but HRW’s on-the-ground interviews (and videos) tell a different story. After a wedding feast at the home of the bride, many of the men and some of the women jumped into their vehicles to escort the bridal couple to a second celebration at in the groom’s village of al Jashem 35 km away.
At 4.30 that afternoon four Hellfire missiles struck the vehicles, killing at least 12 men and wounding at least 15 others – who are named and identified in the HRW report, and according to relatives all civilians.
‘We were in a wedding,’ cried the groom, ‘but all of a sudden it became a funeral. …We have nothing, not even tractors or other machinery. We work with our hands. Why did the United States do this to us?’
The US isn’t saying, and HRW notes that accounts from the government of Yemen have been inconsistent – though the local governor an military commander apologies for the killings, describing them as ‘a mistake’. Some reports agreed that some of those targeted were Al-Qaeda members – though if so, it seems they escaped: AQAP has not identified ‘martyrs’ lost in the attack, which is its invariable practice – and some claimed that the victims included ‘smugglers and arms dealers’.
But they also all made it clear that this was a wedding convoy that was targeted, and the government of Yemen has made compensation payments to the families.
HRW discusses the implications of the killings under the different legal regimes of international humanitarian law (the ‘laws of war’) and international human rights law, but also notes that the attack seems to have violated the protocols set out by the Obama administration in May 2013. These included the ‘near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured…’
NBC – which also has video of the aftermath of the strike – reported in January that the Obama administration was carrying out an ‘internal investigation’, but nothing has been forthcoming and questions from HRW were rebuffed. All we have so far is this extraordinary statement, reported by Rooj Alwazirfor al Jazeera:
“Obviously, broadly speaking, we take every effort to minimise civilian casualties in counterterrorism operations – broadly speaking, without speaking to this one specifically,” State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said when asked about the strike.
‘Broadly speaking’, what is it about weddings that those carrying out air strikes don’t understand?
It’s not difficult to imagine what those who attended the wedding will remember of that day. But in case it is,Reprieve (which carried out its own investigation into the strike) has published photographs of some of the victims and their families – and of a funeral of nine people.
UPDATE: AP is now carrying sketchy information about the official investigation into the strike:
Three U.S. officials said the U.S. government did investigate the strike against al-Badani — twice — and concluded that only members of al-Qaida were killed in the three vehicles that were hit…
Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered an independent investigation by an Air Force general and the White House requested another by the National Counterterrorism Center. Both concluded no civilians were killed. Votel’s staff also showed lawmakers video of the operation. Two U.S. officials who watched the video and were briefed on the investigations said it showed three trucks in the convoy were hit, all carrying armed men.
The report provides no basis for the identification of the victims as non-civilians. Human Rights Watch had already questioned the presence of armed men as indicative:
‘Nearly everyone in the procession was an adult male, and one Yemeni government source said many of the men carried military assault rifles. But these details do not necessarily point to involvement in violent militancy. Yemeni weddings are segregated, including the traditional journey to bring the bride to her new home. And Yemeni men commonly travel with assault rifles in tribal areas, including in wedding processions, when celebratory gunshots are common.’
But here is the final Catch-22:
The officials said the Pentagon can’t release details [of the strike or the investigation] because both the U.S. military and the CIA fly drones over Yemen. By statute, the military strikes can be acknowledged, but the CIA operations cannot. The officials said that if they explain one strike but not another, they are revealing by default which ones are being carried out by the CIA.
The extent to which combat casualties influence the public’s support for war is one of the most frequently and fiercely debated subjects in current American life and has cast an enormous shadow over both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The common assumption, based largely on U.S. experience in past wars, is that the public is in some way casualty averse or casualty shy, and that as losses increase its support for a war will inexorably decline. Yet this assumption has been adopted as conventional wisdom without any awareness of one of the most important dimensions of the issue: how has the public become aware of the casualties sustained during particular wars? To what extent has the government tried to manipulate or massage the figures? When and why have these official figures been challenged by opportunistic political opponents or aggressive scoop-seeking reporters?
As Steven Casey demonstrates, at key moments in most wars what the public actually receives is not straightforward and accurate casualty totals, but an enormous amount of noise based on a mixture of suppression, suspicion, and speculation. This book aims to correct this gap in information by showing precise what casualty figures the government announced during its various wars, the timing of these announcements, and any spin officials may have placed upon these, using a range of hitherto untapped primary documents. Among the nuggets he has uncovered is that during World War I the media depended on Axis figures and that the Army and Navy did not announce casualty figures for an entire year during World War II. Organized chronologically, the book addresses the two world wars, the limited wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the recent conflicts that are part of the War on Terror. Using sources such as the private military command papers of Generals Patton, MacArthur, and Westmoreland, and previously unopened New York Times archives, it offers the first analysis of how the U.S. government has publicized combat casualties during these wars, and how these official announcements have been debated and disputed by other voices in the polity. Casey discusses factors such as changes of presidential administration, the improvement of technology, the sending of war correspondents to cover multiple conflicts, and the increasing ability to identify bodies. Casey recreates the complicated controversies that have surrounded key battles, and in doing so challenges the simplicity of the oft-repeated conventional wisdom that “as casualties mount, support decreases.” By integrating military and political history, he presents a totally new interpretation of U.S. domestic propaganda since 1917, filling a major gap left by a spate of recent books. Finally, it provides a fresh and engaging new perspective on some of the biggest battles in recent American history, including the Meuse-Argonne, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, China’s intervention in the Korean War, the Tet Offensive, and the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Amazon has temporarily withdrawn its Kindle edition because there are technical issues that it is working with OUP to resolve: I hope this is sorted out soon… But for now you can read an extract over at Salon, ‘How Richard Nixon reinvented American warfare (…and paved the way for Iraq and Afghanistan)’:
Determined to prop up South Vietnam in an election year, Nixon’s casualty sensitivity had not extended beyond American lives to enemy noncombatants. “Now, we won’t deliberately aim for civilians,” he told his senior advisers at one point in 1972, “but if a few bombs slop over, that’s just too bad.” In Nixon cold calculation the American electorate was principally concerned with U.S. losses; it cared far less about what happened to civilians….
In the wake of defeat, the U.S. government tried to learn the appropriate lessons. As well as reconsidering military-media relations, officials thought long and hard about the conditions under which the public would support the use of force—and the prospect of casualties—in the future. Sometimes, they looked back beyond Vietnam to an earlier era when the media had appeared more manageable and the public less skeptical. Of course, even during the two world wars and Korea, the government had always faced searching questions about the veracity of its casualty information. But Vietnam had clearly changed the rules of the game. Trust in government was much lower. The media was even keener to probe for the story behind the official narrative. And the whole debate was now even more sensitive to the human cost of war. These were all legacies that the two Bushes would have to grapple with in the post–Cold War era, as they took the United States into war against a new set of enemies.
I’m just back from Beirut, and trying to catch up. Every day I went for a walk along the Corniche, and on the second morning a young Syrian boy asked if he could clean my shoes. I was wearing trainers, but told him that I’d pay him anyway and he could clean my shoes next time I came out; he refused to take the money until I had agreed where and when I would present myself for the service. Heart-warming and hear-breaking, and I can’t get him out of my mind. So here is a quick up-date on the situation (see also my previous posts here and here).
First, this week Foreign Policy published this sobering animated map of casualties from the civil war in Syria based on data from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group:
It visualizes the approximately 74,000 people who died from March 2011 to November 2013. Every flare represents the death of one or more people, the most common causes being shooting, shelling, and field execution. The brighter a flare is, the more people died in that specific time and place. The data used are drawn from the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), the documentation arm of the Local Coordination Committees in Syria which has been one of the eight sources on which HRDAG has based its count. In a June 2013 report, HRDAG cited VDC as the most thorough accounting of casualties in Syria, though the dataset has been found to contain some inconsistencies…
What the map demonstrates is the escalation of the conflict — with data from March 2011 through the VDC’s Nov. 21, 2013 report — and its quick descent from being a smattering of violence to a multi-front war with militias challenging the military (and other militias) almost everywhere at once. What it can’t show, of course, is the horror and destruction of this war.
My image is just a screen grab, of course, so you need to visit the original to see the overall, devastating effect.
For more detail, I recommend Syria Deeply, a new digital platform that attempts to combine citizen journalism with professional analysis; there’s a profile of the project at start-up over at Fast Companyhere and a more recent commentary from its founder Lara Setrakianhere. I think there are lessons to be learned here about the way publics can be created and brought to engage with conflicts, and that goes for academics as well as journalists.
Second, it’s much harder to find information about those who have been wounded in the conflict – one of my present preoccupations: see here and here – but while I was in Beirut Lebanon’s Daily Star published an interesting report on NGOs working in the borderlands to treat casualties from the war zone. In the Bekaa Valley the International Committee of the Red Cross has treated over 700 people since 2012, while a 20-bed clinic run by Lebanon’s Ighatheyya has treated 135 people since it opened five months ago in Kamed al-Loz. The casualties include pro- and anti-Assad fighters (according to the ICRC, ‘When we know the patients are from opposing sides we separate them by placing them on different floors … We make sure they don’t know the other is there’) and civilians alike. Many of them are suffering from infected wounds because they were initially treated in makeshift facilities in tents or private houses, which is why the perilous journey across the border is so vitally important. Neither the ICRC nor Ighatheyya make cross-border runs. The Star‘s reporters explain:
Many patients are lawfully retrieved from the border by the Lebanese Red Cross, who then take them to a number of cooperating hospitals across the Bekaa Valley for treatment. According to a well-informed source, the ICRC has contracted four hospitals, in Chtaura, Jib Jenin, Baalbek and Hermel, to care for war wounded Syrians.
After surgery patients are often referred to clinics run by other non-governmental organizations, such as Ighatheyya, who oversee the patients’ convalescence…. Ighatheyya is [also] in the process of building a fully equipped 30-bed hospital in the border town of Arsal, where many refugees and combatants cross into Lebanon.
Another major locus of emergency medical treatment is Tripoli, just 30 km from the border and the primary treatment centre for Syrians seeking emergency medical assistance in northern Lebanon. Médecins Sans Frontières, which also operates from four locations in the Bekaa Valley, has been supporting local clinics and hospitals here since February 2012 (and it’s been working inside Syria since March 2011).
NGOs are not the only organisations on the field. Last summer NBC described the operation of a new clinic set up by the Syrian National Opposition to treat opposition fighters. It too is in the Bekaa Valley, which is for the most part controlled by Hezbollah – which is of course militantly pro-Asad. Four days after the clinic opened a local militia aligned with Hezbollah broke into the compound and forced a rapid evacuation, and early last summer armed men attacked an ambulance transporting a patient to surgery and kidnapped him: ‘Since then, the Lebanese Red Cross has refused to transport the clinic’s patients in ambulances through certain Hezbollah-dominated areas without an army escort. And private cars carrying patients through those areas have been shot at.’
For more on the transnational ‘therapeutic geographies’ involved in the wars in Iraq and Syria, see Omar Dewachi, Mac Skelton, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Fouad Fouad, Ghassan Abu Sitta, Zeina Maasriand Rita Giacaman, ‘The Changing Therapeutic Geographies of the Iraqi and Syrian Wars’, forthcoming in The Lancet. And for a discussion of the regional geopolitics of all this, including a corrective to the claim that the war in Syria is simply ‘spilling over’ into Lebanon, see Bélen Fernández over at warscapeshere.
As MSF emphasises, refugees from the conflict in Syria need more than emergency treatment for war wounds: ‘The epidemiological profile of populations does not change when they cross borders; those who needed medications for chronic conditions in Syria still need them in Lebanon.’ And, clearly, they have other pressing needs too:
‘[T]the gaps in service that existed [in June 2012] have not been sufficiently addressed but have in fact widened as more people have streamed across the border. Living conditions among the majority of refugees and Lebanese returnees remain extremely precarious, particularly with winter arriving. More than 50% of those interviewed, whether they were officially registered or not, are housed in substandard structures — inadequate collective shelters, farms, garages, unfinished buildings and old schools — that provide paltry, if any, protection against the elements. The rest are renting houses, but many of those people, now separated from their lives and livelihoods, are struggling to pay the rent. The medical picture has deteriorated as well. More than half of all interviewees (52%) cannot afford treatment for chronic disease care, and nearly one-third of them have had to suspend treatment already underway because it was too expensive to continue. For those who are and are not registered alike, the costs attached to essential primary health care, ante-natal care and institutional deliveries are prohibitive. Among non-registered returnees and internally displaced Lebanese, 63% received no assistance whatsoever from any NGO.’
Here’s a recent map of Syrian refugee flows:
For more detail, UNHCR’s tabulations of Syrian refugees in Lebanon can be found here, and there’s a remarkable interactive map here (again, the image below is just a screen grab).
The number of registered refugees in Lebanon – and, as that MSF report indicates, registration is itself a deeply problematic process and the numbers understate the gravity of the situation – is now around one million; Lebanon’s population is four million, so one person in five is a refugee. But wary of its experience with the Palestinian refugee camps – on which Adam Ramadan‘s work is indispensable: his book is due out later this year, but in the meantime see ‘In the ruins of Nahr al-Barid: Understanding the meaning of the camp‘, Journal of Palestine Studies 40 (1) (2010) and ‘Spatialising the refugee camp‘, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (1) (2013) 65-77 – Lebanon has refused to sanction camps for Syrian refugees: hence those ‘tented settlements’ on the map above (and see the image below).
This strategy, or lack of it, is in marked contrast to Jordan, where Al- Za’atari, which opened in July 2012, will soon become the largest refugee camp in the world (below): you can find a sequence of satellite images showing its explosive growth here.
But Lebanon is adamant that it will not sanction any intimations of permanence. Norimitsu Onishireported recently in the New York Times that
Those fears have forced the refugees to try to squeeze into pre-existing buildings and blend into the landscape. Those with means rent apartments. But hundreds of thousands are living in garages and occupying the nooks and crannies of buildings under construction. Abandoned buildings, including universities and shopping malls, have been taken over in their entirety by refugees.
Here, as usual, there are pickings to be had. Last year Tracy McVeighreported in the Guardian that
‘While there are widespread reports of extraordinary acts of generosity and kindness by Lebanese towards Syrian refugees, many people here are making money from Syria’s war. Landlords are getting rents for barely habitable properties, stables and outhouses. There are hefty profits to be made in the gun-running business, and refugees are easily exploited as cheap labour. The government is getting military resources from America and Europe, which are keen to see it able to protect its borders. But many others are losing out – those who are trying to house and feed large families along with their own.’
And that includes young boys looking for shoes to clean on the waterfront in Beirut. If you want to donate more than the cost of a shoe-clean, you can reach Oxfam here, the International Rescue Committee here and UNHCR here.
I’ll be talking about ‘Seeing like a military‘ at the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting in Tampa (home of Joint Special Operations Command!) 8-12 April 2014, and here’s the abstract:
Modern war has long placed a premium on visuality, but later modern war deploys new political technologies of vision and incorporates them into distinctive modes of the mediatization and juridification of military violence. This paper sketches those general contours and then examines two episodes in more detail. Both were carried out by the US military. The first is a combat helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in New Baghdad in July 2007, the subject of a military investigation, a Wikileaks release (‘Collateral Murder’), and two documentary films (‘Permission to Engage’ and ‘Incident in New Baghdad’). The second is another combat helicopter attack, but this time facilitated by the crew of a MQ-1 Predator, on three civilian vehicles in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan in February 2010, which was the subject of a military investigation that has been documented in detail. I use these incidents to extend the debate about militarized vision beyond dominant discussions of ‘seeing like a drone’, and to raise a series of questions about witnessing and military violence under the sign of later modern war.
The title is obviously a riff on James C. Scott‘s Seeing like a state – not least his opening claim that ‘certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision’ – and the abstract is really just a summary of previous posts on Militarized Vision (see also ‘Unmanning’ here), but I’ll provide updates as the work progresses.
I’m deep into the detailed investigation of the Uruzgan incident. Previously I’d worked from a transcript of communications between the Predator crew, the ground forces commander and others – hence ‘From a view to a kill’ (DOWNLOADS tab) – but the detailed investigation files are eye-opening and are beginning to suggest a different narrative.
I’ve also widened the scope of the project (which, as the abstract suggests, was already about much more than the full motion video from Predators and Reapers). Although I won’t be talking about this in Tampa, I’m also examining another incident, an air strike on two tankers hijacked by the Taliban near Omar Kheil in Kunduz, Afghanistan in September 2009. The strike was carried out by USAF jets on the orders of the German Army (the Bundeswehr) from its Forward Operating Base at Camp Kunduz. It’s a complicated story that needs some background about (1) the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan and (2) air strikes and civilian casualties.
Bad Kunduz: the Bundeswehr and Afghanistan
After 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Germany provided the third largest contingent of troops to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), but Bonn saw its primary role as stabilisation and reconstruction – in fact, the government refused to describe its military operations in Afghanistan as a war at all – and following this mandate Camp Kunduz [below] served as the base for a Provincial Reconstruction Team which was instructed to maintain a ‘light footprint’: so much so that troops jokingly referred to the base as ‘Bad Kunduz‘ (‘Spa Kunduz’) because it was so removed from the fighting.
But the security situation deteriorated, and Taliban attacks on German patrols and bases intensified. By 2007 the Bundeswehr had formed Task Force 47, made up of regular soldiers and elite troops from the Kommando Spezialkräfte or Special Forces, to adopt a more offensive posture and, in particular, to identify Taliban commanders who would be placed on ISAF’s Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) for kill/capture missions. A detachment from Task Force 47 was also stationed at Camp Kunduz.
Still, in August 2009 Der Spiegel ran a story on ‘How the Taliban are taking control in Kunduz‘, and interviewed the base commander, Colonel Georg Klein, who described what the newspaper called the new ‘logic of the war’:
‘Kunduz has changed… I really don’t want to shoot at other people. They’re people too, after all. But if I don’t shoot, they’ll kill my soldiers.’
This ‘new logic’ would be demonstrated with hideous clarity a fortnight later. Yet – in principle, at least – it was constrained by a new Tactical Directive issued by General Stanley McChrystal in response to civilian casualties caused by coalition air strikes.
Air strikes and civilian casualties
Bombing had played a major role in the invasion of Afghanistan, and air strikes continued to be of decisive importance as the war with the Taliban continued (for more information, see here and here). They were also the main source of civilian casualties caused by coalition military operations; as the air war was stepped up and the body count soared so public hostility increased.
On 4 May 2009, just four months before the Kunduz air strike, there was yet another serious incident in which, according to a field investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, at least 89 civilians were killed in a series of air strikes near the village of Garani (sometimes spelled Gerani or even Granai) in the district of Bala Baluk in Farah province. Afghan forces had moved to engage the Taliban, supported by ISAF advisers, and as the fighting intensified they were reinforced by a detachment of US Marines. Close Air Support (CAS) was requested, and the first air strikes were carried out by F/A-18F jets (shown as #F1-4 in the graphic below). In the early evening their fuel reserves became too low to continue, and they were replaced by a B-1 bomber which made three further strikes (#B1-3). In the first strike, three 500 lb GPS-guided bombs were dropped; in the second, two 500 lb and two 2,000 lb bombs were dropped; and in the third a single 2,000 lb bomb was dropped. You can find images of the aftermath at Guy Smallman‘s gallery here.
The ICRC report on the incident has never been published, in accordance with its usual practice, but Wikileaks released a cable from the US Ambassador in Kabul describing his meeting with the ICRC’s Head of Mission on 13 June to discuss the results. The ambassador praised the Head of Mission as ‘one of the most credible sources for unbiased and objective information in Afghanistan’ and accepted that the investigation was ‘certainly exhaustive’. But the casualty estimates were considerably higher than those made by ISAF’s own military investigation, from which I’ve taken the map above.
According to the Executive Summary prepared for US Central Command, ‘we will never be able to determine precisely how many civilian casualties resulted from this operation’. The military investigation concluded that 26 civilians had been killed but did ‘not discount the possibility’ that there were many more, and its authors also noted the ‘balanced, thorough investigation’ carried out by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that cited ‘as many as 86 civilian casualties’. Other reports claim as many as 147 civilians were killed.
The details of the military’s own investigation remain classified; General David Petraeuspromised to show the strike video from the B-1 bomber in a press briefing (see also here), but it has never been released, though Wikileaks reportedly had an encrypted version in its possession (the issue formed part of the US government’s case against Bradley/Chelsea Manning). Although the CENTCOM report of 18 June ‘validated the lawful military nature of the strike’, it also expressed grave concern at ‘the inability to discern the presence of civilians and assess the potential collateral damage of those strikes’, and its recommendations included an immediate review of guidance ‘for employment of kinetic weapons, to include CAS, in situations involving the potential for civilian casualties.’
On 2 July McChrystal updated the existing Tactical Directive of October 2008 with a revised Tactical Directive – parts of it remained classified, but the ‘releasable’ version is here – which insisted that
‘We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories – but suffering strategic defeats – by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people.’
Among other provisions, the directive specifically instructed commanders to ‘weigh the gain of using CAS against the cost of civilian casualties’. This is, of course, a requirement under international humanitarian law, but McChrystal went further and tightened the Rules of Engagement to such a degree that David Wood could write of the US Air Force ‘holding fire over Afghanistan’. Lessons from the incident were also incorporated into US Marine pre-deployment briefings (here; scroll down) and it was also used as the basis for a ‘tactical decision-making’ module in the US Army’s Afghanistan Civilian Casualty Prevention Handbook (June 2012) (pp. 58-67). But these lessons hadn’t been learned in time to prevent the tragedy that took place near Kunduz on the night of 3/4 September 2009.
The Kunduz air strike
At 8 p.m. on 3 September Colonel Klein received a report that two tanker trucks had been hijacked by the Taliban as they drove south through Kunduz province (‘Entführung der Tanklastwagen’ on the map above). Thomas Ruttig provides an excellent overview of how what the Bundeswehr called ‘the Incident at Coordinate 42S VF 8934 5219’ unfolded here:
‘ The trucks were owned by an Afghan private company and contracted to deliver airplane fuel to ISAF forces. When the two hijacked lorries got stuck crossing a shallow riverbed at the border between Aliabad and Chahrdara districts, away from the main road, in the middle of a night in Ramadan, the Taliban mobilised the inhabitants of nearby villages more or less under their control to pump the fuel out and get the lorries going again. A large number took the offer up. Meanwhile, with the help of ISAF air reconnaissance, the immobilised trucks were located. This was done by a B-1 bomber which had cameras on board so strong they could even identify the weapons carried by the hijackers.’
The B-1 had to withdraw in the early hours of the morning because it was running low on fuel, and according to some reports the US Air Force was unwilling to provide replacement aircraft unless there were ‘Troops in Contact’ (TIC) with the Taliban. Klein decided to confirm a TIC – even though his troops were not at the scene – and two F-15E fighter jets flew right over his Forward Operating Base and then took up their station near the tankers at 0108. These aircraft (the two shown below were photographed over eastern Afghanistan) are operated by two crew members, a pilot and a weapons systems officer, and are equipped with Forward-Looking Infrared Sensors that, as Rutting notes, ‘portrayed people on the ground only as black spots.’ The two jets eventually carried out an airstrike at 0150.
What is particularly interesting about all this is that – in the wake of McChrystal’s revised Tactical Directive and tightened Rules of Engagement – the American pilots of the two F15-Es were markedly reluctant to strike. They were eventually persuaded to do so by Klein, yet he had no direct ‘eyes’ on the events as they unfolded. He was relying on a visual feed from the strike aircraft to a Remote Operated Video Enhanced Receiver [ROVER] terminal and on ground reporting from a single Afghan informant – classified as C-3, the lowest grade for ‘actionable intelligence’ – who was communicating by telephone with other ‘sub-contacts’ at the scene; there were apparently five intermediaries between the local source and Klein. At least one of them was a Special Forces intelligence officer from Task Force 47 who was with Klein in the Tactical Operations Center; some reports suggest that he believed that four Taliban leaders on the JPEL were at the scene.
The 15-page (redacted) cockpit transcript is here; all times shown there are Zulu (i.e. GMT), but here I revert to local time to reconstruct what happened. Klein is with his Forward Air Controller codenamed ‘Red Baron’ – what the USAF calls a Joint Terminal Attack Controller or JTAC, which is how he appears in the transcript – in the Tactical Operations Centre at Camp Kunduz (marked as Lager der Bundeswehr on the map above and referred to as PRT KDZ in the SIGACT report below).
The JTAC first asks the pilots to ‘stay as high as possible’ so that they can transmit a wide-shot video of the scene to his ROVER-3 screen – although this isn’t the latest model the JTAC wants ‘the best picture possible to give the commander [Klein] the possibility to make a decision’ – and they paint the target with infrared. They are confident this won’t alert the people on the ground: ‘We got no friendlies in the vicinity of the target and I don’t believe the insurgents got N[ight] V[ision] G[oggles] to see the IR.’
The picture is poor and so the pilots fly lower; they offer to provide ‘a show of force’, which is a standard tactic in Afghanistan accounting for 10 per cent of all Close Air Support sorties (though, as this map shows, it was less common in Kunduz compared to the south; I’ve borrowed the map from the remarkable work of Jason Lyall that I noted in a previous post on air strikes in Afghanistan).
The JTAC declines, saying ‘I want you to hide’, so that the people on the ground will have no warning of an impending attack, which leaves the pilots wondering ‘how we’d be able to drop anything on that as far as current ROE [Rules of Engagement] and stuff like that…’ They’re not sure that this meets the criteria for a TIC, which would allow them to engage, because they can’t see any German troops (‘friendlies’) on the ground: ‘We’ve got 50 to 100 people down there all claiming to be insurgents but I’m not seeing any imminent threat…’
One pilot accepts that the JTAC might have better information, but wants to ‘dig a little more’:
‘I’m really looking to find out status of the people inside [a nearby building 200 metres away] and then what’s inside the trucks. And then we can “show of force”, scatter the people, and then blow up the trucks.’
Again he offers to make a show of force but tells the JTAC they are ‘showing no CDE [collateral damage estimate] concerns within about 200 metres of that target.’ The pilots agree that Camp Kunduz is ‘pretty far away’ from the scene so that it is not visibly in imminent danger, and they wonder if ‘there is anyone else we can talk to’ before committing to a strike. They even contemplate contacting US Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar for clearance.
The pilots ask for confirmation that there would be ‘no civilians in the vicinity of the fragmentations’ from their two 500 lb GBU-38 bombs dropped on the tankers – ‘is that possible with no C[ollateral] D[amage] E[stimate]?’ the lead pilot queries – and again they ask the JTAC to confirm that everyone on the scene is ‘hostile’:
‘That’s affirmative. We got the intel information that everyone down there is hostile.’
More vehicles are arriving on the scene and the JTAC insists that this is now a ‘time-sensitive target’. He then passes the pilots the standard 9-line briefing for a strike (see left). The first three lines are ‘not applicable’ because the aircraft are already on the scene, but the JTAC specifies the altitude, the target (‘insurgents on sandbank with 2 stolen trucks’), target location and mark, repeats ‘no friendly forces in area’, and asks them to remain on station for a Battle Damage Assessment.
As the target is designated by the pilots, they ask the JTAC whether he is ‘trying to take out the vehicles or are you trying to take out the pax [people]?’
‘We’re trying to take out the pax.’
They again ask the JTAC to confirm that there are no friendlies in the vicinity, and he reports that they are all ‘safe’ at Camp Kunduz ‘roughly fifteen click to the east.’ (In fact, the base is about 8 km to the north east, but the tankers are facing in the opposite direction and Ruttig estimates it would have taken them an hour or so to reach the base on the rough, unpaved roads of the region).
The pilots still have misgivings: ‘something doesn’t feel right but I can’t put my thumb on it.’ They debate between themselves whether ‘in accordance with our ROE right now’ they should obtain higher-level clearance. If troops are not in imminent danger clearance is required from ISAF Headquarters in Kabul, and if there is a risk of civilian casualties clearance would need to be obtained from NATO’s Joint Force Command. Before they can reach a decision the JTAC jumps back in:
‘Clearance approved by commander he is right next to me.’
They’re not convinced. ‘The ground commander is clearing us hot but I don’t know if it meets the [hostile] intent or not.’
Still reluctant to strike – one pilot asks the other if ‘you’re saying it’s no imminent threat even though the JTAC said it was’ – the lead pilot tells the JTAC that they would prefer ‘to get down low, scatter the pax and blow up the vehicles’.
It then emerges that ‘ISR’ is en route, which presumably means a Predator with higher definition sensors, but before the remote platform can arrive the JTAC responds to the pilot’s repeated suggestion to scatter the people and then hit the trucks:
‘Negative, I want you to strike directly.’
Still no contact with the remote platform, and the lead pilot asks ‘one last [time]’ for confirmation that this is an imminent threat.
‘Yeah, those pax are an imminent threat, so those insurgents are trying to get all the gasoline off the tanks and after that they will regroup and we’ve got intel information about current ops so probably attacking Camp Kunduz.’
At 1.51 a.m. local time Klein gives the order: ‘Weapons release!’ The F-15Es are again ‘cleared hot’. Two 500lb GBU-38 bombs are released.
Here’s the strike video:
And here are the first military reports of the action (SIGACT or Significant Act) via Wikileaks:
From the ground
In contrast to these distanced observations, this is how the attack was described to Der Spiegel by one of the tanker drivers:
‘I can’t say how many airplanes there were or what type there were. But, starting at around 10 p.m., you could hear the sound of aircraft, though it was very faint. The plane must have been flying very high. But, yes, in Afghanistan, we recognize the sound of fighter jets. Some of the people around the trucks must have certainly heard the sound as well, but the majority of them were just jockeying to get fuel more quickly.
The armed men were getting nervous. They started making lots of phone calls again. I thought they were calling their leaders and asking for advice, asking what they were supposed to do now. At a certain point, some of them started shouting and waving their weapons around. They were screaming at the people to get away from the trucks because bombs were about to start falling. But no one wanted to miss an opportunity to get some free fuel. Then, some of the armed men even started running away…. I was sitting with some of the armed men along the river quite a way away from the trucks, maybe 50 meters (164 feet). The men were arguing over whether they should kill me right away or use me as a hostage to try to extort money from my company. I was very afraid — also of a possible bombardment….
At first, there was a loud droning, like what you hear when a generator short-circuits. Then there was a bright flash. I just let myself fall forward and went down underwater. Even from there, I could feel the shock wave. For a few seconds, it was as bright as day. Even the water was heating up. When I came out of the water, the whole area around the tanker trucks was on fire. It looked like the ground was spitting up fire, though it was just the fuel from the trucks. It was unbearably hot. There were bodies lying everywhere; they were completely carbonized.’
And this is how the scene was described to Amnesty International by another Afghan eyewitness:
“When we heard the planes flying everyone was scared and people began to flee the area at around 10.00 or 11.00 pm but then when people saw that the planes were only flying [and not bombarding] they returned to take the fuel. The number of the people were increasing every minute but after midnight the number started to decrease as many people obtained enough fuel and didn’t have enough containers to carry more fuel. It was around 1.00-1.30 am when the planes disappeared…
At about 1.45am we heard the planes return from our village. I tried to call my brother who was still at the scene. I knew that something was wrong if the planes returned but it seemed that the planes had blocked the telecommunication systems and we couldn’t get through to our relatives to call them to come back. Then I saw a big fire coming from plane and a big explosion with fire every where. I could see it from our village. Flames were very high and everyone rushed to the scene because most of the families had their children and family members out there.
As we arrived at the scene we could see nothing but flames and smoke. At that time it was almost around 3.00 [am] we saw the bodies burned and unidentifiable, others were badly injured and crying. The planes reappeared and then everyone fled in fear of being attacked and targeted. Some people got their family members’ bodies but not everyone. We couldn’t take the wounded people with us because the planes were still flying and we had to leave them there. As the planes disappeared, we went back and it was very early in the morning – everywhere were many bodies we couldn’t identify them at the time. Then every one carried the bodies to the villages and we had to bury some without knowing who they were. There were at least 20 children among the dead.”
Here is AFP video of the aftermath:
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad provide another extraordinary account in the Guardian:
What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker’s fuel. Poor people in one of the world’s poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.
“We didn’t recognise any of the dead when we arrived,” said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. “It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned. The bodies were like this,” he brought his two hands together, his fingers curling like claws. “There were like burned tree logs, like charcoal.
“The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone.”
So the elders stepped in. They collected all the bodies they could and asked the people to tell them how many relatives each family had lost.
A queue formed. One by one the bereaved gave the names of missing brothers, cousins, sons and nephews, and each in turn received their quota of corpses. It didn’t matter who was who, everyone was mangled beyond recognition anyway. All that mattered was that they had a body to bury and perform prayers upon.
If anybody still thinks that later modern war is somehow de-corporealized, they should read Abdul-Ahad’s full report. Ruttig takes up the story:
The number of people and specifically the number of civilians who were not ‘participating in hostilities’ killed in the strike is unclear to this day. It differs depending on the investigation report, some of which are published, while others remain classified. The still classified report by the then ISAF commander, General Stanley McChrystal – parts of which are cited in the report of the investigation committee of the German parliament, the Bundestag, that was published on 25 October 2011 – says “between 17 and 142 people” were killed. It does not seem to refer to killed civilians directly, but quotes local elders saying that possibly 30 to 40 civilians were killed. A report authored by a German military policeman who conducted an investigation at the location of the airstrike avoids stating whether there were what he called “non-involved civilians” among the dead …
The lawyers who brought the case before the Bonn court claim 137 people died, “undeniably many dozens of civilians”. An Afghan investigation commission, sent by President Hamed Karzai and led by police general Mirza Muhammad Yarmand, that was in the area between 4 and 10 September 2009, stated that 69 Taleban and 30 local residents – a term that leaves it open whether they were perceived as non-involved civilians or civilians that were supporting the Taleban in an operation – were killed.
An Afghan human rights group, Afghanistan Rights Monitor, which also conducted interviews with victims in the area, said on 7 September that 60 to 70 civilians were killed. Finally, UNAMA, as stated in its 2009 Protection of Civilians report (on p 18), after its own investigation, said that 74 civilians, including many children, had been killed. One of the problems, said UNAMA, was that the fireball produced by dropping munitions on the fuel tankers incinerated many of the bodies, making their identification impossible. However, according to probably the most extensive investigation, carried out by two Germans, Christoph Reuter, a journalist and occasional AAN author, and Marcel Mettelsiefen, a photographer, who repeatedly travelled to the region interviewing families and community members, ninety civilians “from children to old men” were killed. Reuter and Mettelsiefen published a moving book [Kunduz – above], naming the victims they had confirmed as having been killed and featuring photographs – ID documents, family photos and such – of each of the victims and their relatives. It was a powerful way to humanise the numbers of those killed and the scale of the loss to the community.
Military investigations and mediatizations
Immediately after the strike a senior ISAF officer made it clear that ‘The most important thing is for local official[s] to refute CIVCAS (civilian casualties).’ This is a leitmotif in ISAF’s response to incidents like this – CIVCAS reporting (or the lack of it) was a major preoccupation of the Uruzgan investigation – as the military battles to ‘control the narrative’ before the Taliban provide their own version of events. When McChrystal heard about the strike, however, he was reportedly furious:
He had just tightened up the rules for air strikes in the Afghanistan conflict. Bombs should only be dropped in the cases of acute danger to ISAF soldiers, in order to create the necessary trust in the foreign troops. The Kunduz air strike did not fit into this picture at all….
“Freely admit what we don’t know and say we are investigating,” he ordered the Germans. He assumed the first assessement that there had been no civilian victims had been incorrect. There was no way one could have made that determination from the air. The angered ISAF chief said he was “deeply disappointed.” The first statements from the Germans had been “foolishness.” He also said he had doubts that the rules of engagement had been followed and asked why soldiers were first sent to the scene three hours after the first accusations in the media of civilian casualties.
McChrystal was on the scene the next day – though Klein urged him not to go in case he was shot at – demanding to know why the Bundeswehr had waited so long to send a team to the strike site to conduct a ‘boots on ground’ Battle Damage Assessment and to provide a casualty report. On 9 September he announced the establishment of a Joint Investigation Board, which included a Canadian major-general (ISAF’s Air Component Element Director), officers from the USAF and the Bundeswehr, and military legal advisers (McChrystal’s detailed instructions to the Board are here).
Franz Josef Jung, Germany’s Minister of Defence, was soon on the offensive. He insisted that the Taliban’s seizure of the tankers ‘posed an acute threat to our soldiers’, that the strike was ‘absolutely necessary’ and that his officers had ‘very detailed information’ that the Taliban had planned to use the tankers to launch an attack. He was clearly displeased at McChrystal’s attitude (and determination), and five days after the strike had his Ministry set up a special task force (‘Group 85’) both to exploit an inside track to the investigation and to create a ‘positive image’ of the events. By then, an internal Bundeswehrinquiry had been completed. Its brief report described the incident as ‘Close Air Support’, determined that the Rules of Engagement for a ‘time-sensitive target’ had been followed and that Klein had the authority to order the strike, which was deemed ‘appropriate’, and declined to say whether ‘non-involved civilians’ had been killed alongside the Taliban.
But the subsequent, much more extensive report from ISAF’s Joint Investigation Board (75 pages plus 500 pages of attachments) flatly contradicted the German versions of what had taken place. According to Der Spiegel, which had seen the leaked report, the Board concluded that
‘Klein relied on only one person for “intelligence gathering,” which, even when combined with the aerial video images, was “inadequate to evaluate the various conditions and factors in such a difficult and complex target area.”
The report states it was not clear “what ROE (rule of engagement) was applied during the airstrike,” and that there was a “lack of understanding” by the German commander and his forward air controller (JTAC), “which resulted in actions and decisions inconsistent” with ISAF procedures and directives. Moreover, the report concludes, intelligence summaries and specific intelligence “provided by HUMINT (human intelligence) did not identify a specific threat” to the camp in Kunduz that night — the mandatory condition for an airstrike.’
In short, Klein knew that there were no ‘troops in contact’ but ‘believed that by declaring a “TIC” he would get the air support he wanted.’
Ironically, in 2008 Human Rights Watch had published a report showing that the likelihood of civilian casualties from air strikes in Afghanistan increased in TIC situations:
‘…we found that civilian casualties rarely occur during planned airstrikes on suspected Taliban targets… High civilian loss of life during airstrikes has almost always occurred during the fluid, rapid-response strikes, often carried out in support of ground troops after they came under insurgent attack. Such unplanned strikes included situations where US special forces units — normally small numbers of lightly armed personnel — came under insurgent attack; in US/NATO attacks in pursuit of insurgent forces that had retreated to populated villages; and in air attacks where US “anticipatory self- defense” rules of engagement applied.’
In any event, Klein’s own account was markedly different. In a two-page report ‘for German eyes only’, der Spiegel revealed,
Klein portrays himself as the person who tried to rein in the American fighter jets. He wrote that he called for smaller bombs to be used “contrary to the recommendation of the B-1B and F-15E pilots.” The German colonel also says that he limited the use of force to the tanker trucks and people in the immediate vicinity and forbade strikes on people elsewhere on the river bank. He wrote that the bombs were dropped solely on the sandbank “in order to definitively exclude the possibility of collateral damage in the neighboring villages.”
In January 2010 a Bundestag committee started to investigate how such different versions emerged and to determine who was responsible for the strike. Its final report is here and supporting documents here. ISAF still refused to release its own report, even to the parliamentary investigation:
There are many other ways of ‘seeing’ what happened, of course, and the strike has been the subject of at least two films. The first, Raymond Ley’s Eine mörderische Entscheidung (2013), A fatal decision, is a docu-drama shot for German television. You can watch the trailer with English-language subtitles here. The full German-language film is available on YouTube here: it’s long, but if you start at 1:13:10 you’ll pick up the story as the informant is phoning in to the Forward Operating Base; the immediate prelude to the strike starts at 1:22:37. There’s an English-language discussion by Verena Neeshere, which translates the title as A murderous decision but gives a good extended synopsis of the film. (The production company uses both English-language titles, but ‘fatal‘ is a better representation of the tenor of the film).
The second is Stefan and Simona Gieren‘s Kunduz (2012), a short film which builds on eyewitness reports to create a fictionalised German-Afghan photographer who witnessed the strike and tells his story to German doctors as he is is flown out from the area. You can see the trailer on vimeo here.
Preliminary observations
I still need to work my way through the Bundestag report in detail, but already several lines of inquiry are emerging that bear on my other case studies of ‘Militarized vision’.
(1) Militarized vision is not a constant. It’s an obvious point, but it can be sharpened because I don’t mean to confine this to the mundane (but still important) observation that political technologies of vision are constantly changing. So they are, but it’s clear that the ability of militaries to ‘see’ is differently and differentially distributed; there is a geography to militarized vision, and what Klein and his advisers saw on their screen was not what the F15E pilots saw – and that in turn was different to what the crew of the B-1 were able to see. This is about more than the resolution level of different imaging technologies, because:
(2) The politico-cultural construction of a wider ‘landscape of threat’ is crucial to the production and performance of a specific ‘space of the target’. In this case, the transition of the Bundeswehr‘s operational posture – the powerful sense of increasing and even impending Taliban attacks and the determination to take the offensive – clearly shaped the way in which Klein and those advising him (mis)read the developing situation. This in turn is shaped by developing legal geographies:
(3) The use of military force is clearly governed by international law which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, has an intimate relationship with technologies of vision. This extends beyond the requirements imposed by proportionality and distinction – including the US military’s ‘prosecution of the target’ and the ‘visual chain of custody’, though in this case it is notable that no military lawyers were involved in authorising the strike – because the legal armature that surrounds military violence is located at the intersection of international law, military law and domestic law. The relevance of McChrystal’s updated Tactical Directive and revised Rules of Engagement to the pilots’ field of vision is clear enough, but the refusal by Bonn to describe its military operations in Afghanistan as ‘war’ materially affected the way in which German law was brought to bear on Klein’s actions: his criminal prosecution was dropped soon after the government determined that the Kunduz affair was indeed a punctuation point – in fact an exclamation mark – in an armed conflict.
(4) And – to return to my first point from a different direction – what military investigations ‘see’ after an incident (and what they allow the public to see) is often radically different from what those caught up in the event-scene were able to see…
More to come.
Readings
There is a commentary on the strike by Constantin Schüßler and Yee-Kuang Heng,’The Bundeswehr and the Kunduz air strike 4 September 2009: Germany’s post-heroic moment?’, in European security 22 (30 (2013) 355-75. They explore not only the doctrine of force protection (in which risk is transferred to others in the field of view – see the still from Fatal Decision below – as I discussed in my commentary on what Grégoire Chamayou calls ‘necro-ethics’) but also the legal and media apparatus that enveloped the incident. For a more detailed treatment of the (il)legality of the strike, see Andreas Fischer-Lescanoand Steffen Kommer, ‘Entschädigung für Kollateralschäden? Rechtsfragen anlässlich des Luftangriffs bei Kunduz im September 2009’, Archiv des Völkerrechts 50 (2) (2012) 156-990, which makes extensive use of the Bundestag investigation, and Lesley Wexler, ‘International Humanitarian Law transparency’, Illinois Public Law and Legal Theory Research Papers Series 14-11 (2013) available via ssrn here.
For a discussion of the political landscape within which the strike took place, see Timo Noetzel, ‘The German politics of war: Kunduz and the war in Afghanistan‘, International Affairs 87 (2) (2011) 397-417; Thomas Rid and Martin Zapfe, ‘Mission command without amission: German military adaptation in Afghanistan’, in Theo Farrell, Frans Osinga and James A. Russell (eds), Military adaptation in Afghanistan (2013) 192-218. For the ethical perspective, Anya Topolksi has an extremely interesting essay, ‘Relationality: an ethical response to the tensions of network enabled operations in the Kunduz airstrikes’ forthcoming in the Journal of military ethics. Finally, Christine G. van Burken has an essay on ‘The non-neutrality of technology‘ in Military Review XCIII (3) (2013) 39-47 that spirals around the Kunduz strike and some of the issues that are central to my own focus on the political technologies involved.
The Contents List is topical and – to my regret – doesn’t seem to include anything on the overlapping and sometimes confounding geographies of military and civilian medical care, but it still looks like an excellent survey:
geographical imaginations 