‘How Many Afghans Have to Grow Up Knowing Nothing but War?’

Janine Jackson interviewed Phyllis Bennis about the Kunduz hospital bombing for the October 9 CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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New York Times headline improved by @OneKade

Janine Jackson: If you ever need evidence that the US elite press are willing to distort journalism in order to carry water for the government, the New York Times gave it to you on a plate with this instantly infamous headline for an early report on the US bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan: “US Is Blamed After Bombs Hit Afghan Hospital.” (Avoiding passive voice constructions that obscure the chain of action is Journalism 101.) Days later, the paper was still soft pedaling US responsibility for the October 3 attack that killed at least 22 people at a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz (including patients who burned to death in their beds), reciting credulously the administration’s shifting explanations and justifications for what some say may constitute a war crime. The outrage of Kunduz is not about media, of course, any more than the outrage about the US war on Afghanistan is about Kunduz. This week marks 14 years of the US dropping bombs on that country, with no end in sight. Here to discuss the US terror war and possible alternatives is Phyllis Bennis. She directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror. She’s also the author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer, among other titles. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.

Phyllis Bennis: “There is now no question about US accountability; the real question will be whether there will be anyone held accountable for this decision.”

Phyllis Bennis: Great to be with you, Janine.

JJ: On the Kunduz hospital, the line, for a minute anyway, was “Afghan forces called in the air strike,” as though that provided some measure of absolution for the United States in the atrocity. Just to be clear, the US bears responsibility for where US bombs drop, does it not?

PB: It absolutely does, and I think that we saw that yesterday in a quite unusual move by President Obama to officially apologize, something he had not done before that. But yesterday he apologized for the strike, called the head of Doctors Without Borders and made clear that this was a US decision. Also earlier, I believe it was on Tuesday, the commanding general in Afghanistan made clear that the decision had been made by US forces and the decision had been taken up the chain of command.

So that at least made clear that there was no longer going to be an effort to say this was simply “somebody got the coordinates wrong,” or something, to try and keep it at a very low level. By saying the decision went up the chain of command, and the US apology, it means there is now no question about US accountability; the real question will be whether there will be anyone held accountable for this decision.

JJ: We now are hearing it described as a mistake, and, as you know, Obama has expressed condolences for it. John McCain, for one, says that it’s

ludicrous and insulting that people would say that because of this terrible accident that somehow a war crime was committed. The Taliban do these things on purpose and with a plan. This was a terrible accident. It’s called fog of war.

Well, while the Pentagon may in fact regret it, how appropriate is it to call this an accident?

The Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, before it was destroyed by US bombing (photo: MSF)

PB: I think that it’s not appropriate at all, clearly. One of the things that’s interesting about the facts as they come out is: While the US continues to claim that the Afghan call for a close air enforcement, a close bombing raid, on supposedly their soldiers who were taking fire–they claim this was going on in the hospital or in the compound; it’s been vague which one they’re talking about.

But in both cases, the people that were there at the time, those who survived from the Medecins Sans Frontieres staff, have been very clear that there was no one from the Taliban in the hospital, and that the compound had been sealed and that the only people in and around the compound and the hospital were medical staff, patients and families — that there was no fighting going on. So this claim by whatever Afghan soldiers called in an airstrike simply had no basis in fact.

Now, one can wonder, why would they call in an airstrike on a civilian hospital? That just sounds crazy. Well, we now know there is a reason for it, not a justifiable reason, but an explanation, which is that last July, three months ago, this same hospital was essentially invaded by armed soldiers of the Afghan military, who came in firing their weapons into the air to frighten people, which of course they did, demanding to take with them three patients that were in the hospital who they claimed were Taliban fighters.

Now, it’s certainly possible that three men were Taliban fighters who had been wounded. The ability of the Doctors Without Borders hospitals to function all over the world in heavy crisis zones is precisely their nonpartisan position. They will treat anyone in need of medical care, regardless of what side they are on, regardless of what they did before they were injured, whether they are on the government side or the opposition side, whether they are civilians or military. They will treat anyone, but no weapons are allowed into the hospitals. That’s their ground rules, and that’s enabled them to function all over the world.

In this case, the soldiers came in, said we don’t care about your rules. They were firing in the air, trying to take three patients out with them. Several doctors stood to protect the patients, and after about an hour they stood down and ultimately left the hospital. But it was clear they were very angry, this particular unit of the Afghan army, they were angry at this hospital for treating three injured people who they said, true or not, had been Taliban fighters.

That would provide an explanation, not a justification, but an explanation of why they may have completely falsely called in the coordinates of this hospital, knowing it was a hospital, knowing it was the hospital that had stood them down, essentially, in a confrontation three months ago. Now, again, we don’t have evidence to prove that that was in fact the case, but it does provide a kind of indication of what may have been going on. If that was the case, it means that it wasn’t an accident at all, it was an act of war.

And if it appears to be the case that the United States, whoever took the call from the Afghans saying “we’re taking fire,” didn’t check, didn’t check it against the known list of coordinates of hospitals which had been provided to them just a couple of days earlier by the Doctors Without Borders staff — there’s specific coordinates — that means that the US is complicit in that action, and it may well be a war crime. It’s true it doesn’t necessarily become a war crime when a civilian target is hit, but it certainly opens the possibility that it may well have been a war crime, and that there must be an independent investigation to determine it.

MSF’s Kunduz hospital on fire, after being bombed by the US/NATO (photo: MSF)

JJ: Is there not some sense that this has happened before, that US military has been sort of manipulated, if you will, to settle scores within Afghanistan?

PB: Absolutely. This has been true in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in all of these places where the US is relying on, often, maybe most of the time, very shaky intelligence, fraught with corruption, fraught with personal vendettas. We know that people who have been arrested and spent years in prison in Guantanamo, in Bagram, in Abu Ghraib, often were people who were simply caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, and were turned over to the Americans to get either a cash bounty that was being offered, or to go after a neighbor to settle a longstanding land dispute.

There’s all kinds of indications of this kind of activity, and the fact that after 14 years — as you mention, this is the 14-year anniversary, if you will, of the US war in Afghanistan, this US war in Afghanistan, there was an earlier one of course — the fact that they don’t take that seriously, knowing, knowing that this is exactly how this incredibly corrupt government and its incredibly nonaccountable corrupt military function, is by itself a crime of some sort. I don’t know if it’s the kind of war crime we’re talking about here, but it certainly should be some kind of a crime.

US soldiers burning a house in Afghanistan alleged to have been used by the Taliban. (photo: US Army/Justin Holley)

JJ: John McCain’s comment is clearly meant to say that there are good people and bad people; and I don’t think it’s putting it too crudely to say that the operative idea is that anything that good people do is good and anything that bad people do is bad. That’s a powerful world view because it’s so simple.

But many media readers know that the Taliban is the official enemy in Afghanistan, but we know that the US has also worked with the Taliban, as we’ve been saying, paid them for security at times. I mean, a thoughtful person can be forgiven for just not understanding what the US goal is in this now 14-year-old project, much less why horrific human impact should be accepted as in aid in that goal.

PB: I think that’s absolutely right, Janine, and what we’re looking at is not only a situation where the US has allied itself with the Taliban, we also have to look at the very small distinction between the Taliban and the so-called good guys in Afghanistan, who the US military are supposedly protecting.

So what does that mean? It means, for example, that when we talk about women’s rights, what happens to women under the Taliban:  What happens to women under the Taliban is horrific – period, full stop. Next sentence: What happens to the women under the vast majority of the current Afghan government, put in place, armed, paid, supported by the United States, by our tax money, is horrific – period, full stop.

Now, you can look at it and say, well, the Taliban is worse, and in some areas that’s probably true, in others areas it may not be; but I think we have to be clear that what has made the lives so terrible for the women in Afghanistan is not only treatment by–whether it’s the Taliban or the warlords disguised as a government who now run Afghanistan, but rather the war itself, in conjunction with that. That is what has made the lives of women in Afghanistan so impossible. Afghanistan remains the lowest ranked country in the world for a child to be born and to survive to her first birthday.

So when we look at what the US has brought about–$65 billion of our tax money has been spent to create and arm this Afghan army and police force that is supposed to be representing democracy, women’s rights and all good things. Well, look what has happened under that military, under that government backing that military: Life is horrific for most Afghans. There is a small number of people in the cities, in Kabul in particular, who have benefitted from the US presence, there’s no doubt about that, we shouldn’t try to deny that. Some women are better off in the cities, where lives are somewhat better protected. But the reality is that the vast majority of women in Afghanistan don’t live in the cities; they live in small villages, isolated across this vast country. They don’t have access to the kinds of new institutions that have sprung up in very small scale in Kabul. And this is what has been left behind after 14 years of fighting.

And now of course we hear that Obama’s plan to have all the troops out beyond some hundred, maybe as much as a thousand to protect the embassy, after the end of 2016, that that is now being reconsidered, and perhaps there will be thousands of troops left permanently engaged until who knows when, when Obama leaves office. So we’re looking at permanent war on a whole new level.

JJ:    I was just going to bring that up, that Gen. John Campbell has said that Kunduz shows that we need more troops in Afghanistan after 2016, and that seems to be the typical “we’re shaped like a hammer and everything looks like a nail.” Assuming some type of continuing US engagement, what might a political way forward look like, beyond stopping dropping bombs on the country?

PB: You know, the irony is that everybody acknowledges that at some point there will be a political, diplomatic solution to the crisis in Afghanistan. The real question is, how many more people have to die before we get there? How many more years of fighting have to go on? How many more generations of young Afghans have to grow up knowing nothing but war before we finally get to the table? Will the Taliban have to be at the table? Of course they will! Because they are a player, they are a force in this war.

As former Sen. George Mitchell taught everybody after the Good Friday Accords, which he helped to lead, he said the most important lesson coming out of this process is that if you are serious about diplomacy, everybody has to be at the table. Not because you like them, not because you think they’ve suddenly become good guys. But because if they’re not at the table, they have no reason to abide by whatever is decided. If you’re serious, everybody has to be there.

That means the Taliban is going to have to be at the table. Does that mean compromises are going to have to be made that we don’t like? Of course it does, of course it does. It’s not our country. If the war was being fought in our country with an equivalent level of casualties, civilian casualties on a daily basis, I don’t think there’s any question that we would be demanding this kind of diplomacy, these kinds of negotiations. We need to have that now. And if that means that a government is created that is more religious than you or I would like to live under, that’s the reality that we’re going to have to deal with.

It’s not our country; we don’t get to decide that we are going to have a nationally focused, strong national presence with a president and a parliament– that’s never been the reality of Afghanistan. Afghanistan, unlike, say, Iraq, doesn’t have a history of having a strong central leadership. It has a history of diffuse leadership, where the leadership includes a government but also includes religious figures, it includes women in local areas, it includes tribal leaders, all of whom are part of a complicated, culturally developed kind of governance that the US has no understanding of. So when we try to put in place a replacement for that, and say no, we’re going to have a president, a parliament, a secretary of this and secretary of that, and imagine that they are actually going to have influence outside of a little bit of Kabul, we are really deluding ourselves.

The aftermath of the US bombing of Doctors Without Borders’ hospital in Kunduz (photo: MSF)

JJ: Let me just bring you back to Kunduz, finally. US public opinion seems to sometimes matter, somewhat; some moments are more teachable than others. Do we have hope for an independent investigation of this incident, like Medecins Sans Frontieres is calling for, though the Pentagon says they are going to investigate themselves? And then what use could be made of the results of such an investigation?

PB: I think there is right now the possibility, as you say, of a teaching moment. This is something we used to call the CNN factor, maybe now we should call it the Twitter factor, but it’s what happens when, for whatever reason, a particular incident sparks a public reaction that hadn’t happened before.

It may be this time because the victims included international medical workers, who have access to Twitter and Facebook and the internet and television and international broadcasting, and they speak English, that may be why.  I may be sounding a bit cynical, but that’s OK if we can take advantage of that. This is not the first hospital to be hit in Afghanistan. Others have been hit before, doctors have been killed before, but they were Afghan doctors, and they didn’t generate the kind of response that this did.

Does that mean that the demands, the very legitimate, really minimalist demands of Medecins San Frontieres for an independent investigation, will go forward as they’ve requested?  I’m guessing not, but I’m thinking there may be some effort to have some kind of international engagement. If there isn’t, if the Pentagon insists we, and we alone, will carry out some kind of investigation, I think it’s very possible that there will be the kind of informal investigations we’ve seen in the past, like the Russell Tribunal investigating the US war in Vietnam, like the Russell Tribunals that have looked at the Israeli occupation and apartheid policies in recent years, or perhaps something in the United Nations, something equivalent to the Goldstone Report.

The problem would be, of course, the refusal, very likely, by the Pentagon and the Obama administration to provide to any such investigation the necessary documents. We know, for example, that the warplane that was used to bomb the hospital has an audio recording in the plane, the equivalent of sort of a black box. Who gets access to that? Does it go into the public domain, as it should? I think these are all demands that are going to have to be part of the mobilization.

There’s a petition drive underway that was organized by people like Credo, Win Without War and others of our colleagues and friends in the anti-war movement. Everybody should sign that petition. Sign every petition, sign on to every call to members of Congress, call members of Congress. That kind of campaign makes clear to those in Washington that this is not something that is going to go away easily, with some Pentagon official saying, “We’re sorry, now let’s move on, we look to the future, not the past, let’s move on.” There is no moving on from this kind of slaughter.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror. Phyllis Bennis, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. PB: Thank you, Janine.