Doctors Without Borders closes Afghan hospital, says U.S. may have committed war crime

This is the thing with these stories. Take a step back and assess it for a minute, and it's pretty obvious it was a colossal fuck up. Whatever you think of the reasons for the U.S. being in Afghanistan in the first place, I think it's safe to say that there was some reason why an American air strike would target a hospital. Whether it was bad intelligence, miscommunication, some fog of war stuff going on, whatever, Americans don't randomly target hospitals to get their jollies off. Especially with airstrikes, which require a coordinated effort among a number of units.
There will be a paper trail, and someone will pay. At the very least, careers will be ended. Hopefully, if it was gross negligence, someone (maybe not the right one, but someone) is court martialed and sent to Leavenworth. In either event, I have more faith in the U.S. military than almost any other nation's military to figure out what happened and punish those responsible.

 

As an aside, how can an airstrike go on for "more than an hour?" I might be ill-informed on operational specifics, but that doesn't add up at all:
1) That's a hell of a long time to be exposing yourself over a target in hostile territory.
2) Assuming the bombardment was constant, that's also a lot -- and I mean A LOT -- of ordinance to expend to blow up a few buildings. There were World War I artillery barrages that didn't last that long. Keeping up that volume of fire with a few planes for that long is not only inefficient, it's almost impossible. You'd have planes running low on fuel, for one, if they stayed on station that long. For two, most planes can't carry that many bombs. If they really needed to flatten a building, they'd be better off dropping one bunker buster or a big salvo, like a B-52 carpet bombing. Either way, the strike would be over quickly and wouldn't last more than an hour.
The nature of airstrikes is you get in, you get out. Maybe you make a pass to survey the damage before leaving. You do not stick around and wait for some yahoo to take a shot at you.

 

Tillman and Lynch were clear attempts to lie and propagandize their incidents.

This incident hasn't been investigated yet. And the Taliban, a group who doesn't exactly have the greatest credibility in the world, has, in the past used civilians as human shields.

And please spare us the "social justice warriors" bullshit. Especially by the party that has had 8 investigations into the meaningless actions of Hillary Clinton* and never did a thing about the war that caused the deaths of 4,800+ Americans.


* Oh, sorry, the deaths of 4 Americans.

 

Are you questioning the credibility of MSF, a Nobel Peace Prize winning organization?

They're the ones who say no Taliban was in the hospital, that no fighting was occurring around the hospital, that they let the U.S. know the coordinates of the hospital, and they are the ones calling it a war crime.

 

So having a Nobel Prize infers credibility? I'm sure Obama will be happy to hear that.

That being said, if, after the investigation shows that certain members of our military did this on purpose, I hope they get tossed in Leavenworth. If it was a fuck-up or collateral damage, well, as a wise man once said, "stuff happens," right? Maybe we should, oh, I don't know, surrender, or cut and run out of there, and then we won't have to worry about horrible incidents like this.

 

The word you seek is "implies."

 

Using "infers" incorrectly really impacts your credibility, doesn't it?

 

The reason Obama is bombing Afghanistan or Iraq or Iran or any other part of that global hellhole is because if he wasn't, the RWSM would be going into orbit screaming what a Mooslim-appeasing surrender monkey he was.

So he continues to bomb and we continue to keep troops over there and we keep Gitmo open, etc. etc. Happily it has had great effects convincing the RWSM of his competence and resolve as a military leader.

 

I knew we would eventually get down the the heart of the matter, which is that it's the right-wingers' fault. Why, they practically pulled the trigger!

 

Can we just put aside the game of trying to blame the left or the right for once? This was a military fuck up, not a political one. Some military officer and his underlings are responsible for this, and I'm fairly certain they made the call without consulting the White House beforehand.

And, oh, what a fuckup it is. Hard to imagine many more effective ways to quickly turn global opinion against you than attacking a Doctors Without Borders hospital ...is there any organization with a higher global likeability/approval rating right now?

 

It's a fuck-up. By the war machine.

Plenty of blame to go around in a war machine.

 

Sure, I agree. I was just riffing on the latest entry in the Starman oeuvre ...