Re: The International Red Cross facility.
washingtonpost.com
Bombing the Red Cross
By William M. Arkin
Special to Washingtonpost.com
Sunday, November 4, 2001; 8:17 PM
At one o'clock in the afternoon on Oct. 16, an F/A-18 Hornet fighter attacked a warehouse of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, injuring a security guard and destroying foodstuffs, blankets, and plastic sheeting. The Pentagon quickly explained that the warehouses "were among a series of warehouses targeted … because the Taliban used them for storage of military equipment." The U.S. did not know that the ICRC was using the warehouses, the Defense Department said.
"We felt horrible when we learned that the Red Cross … warehouse had been struck," White House chief of staff Andrew Card told Meet the Press.
So horrible that at 8 o'clock on the evening of Oct. 25, two more Hornets dropped two 2,000 lb. guided weapons on the warehouses. The next morning a B-52 bomber delivered three more 2,000 lb. smart bombs. A third Hornet dropped another bomb that missed the warehouses and hit a residential area 700 feet to the south.
"The U.S. sincerely regrets this inadvertent strike on the ICRC warehouses and the residential area," the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) stated on Oct. 26. The Florida based command blamed "human error in the targeting process"--a euphemism, I guess, for the United States hasn't got a clue.
A week later, with reports of increasing numbers of civilian casualties and worsening conditions for the civilian population as winter approaches, we still don't have a good explanation of what happened in the bombing of the Red Cross facilities.
To many, the attacks symbolize American arrogance and lack of concern for civilian life. To me, the attacks more reveal a bankruptcy in strategy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may stress that Enduring Freedom is a marathon and not a sprint, but it seems that this kind of bombing cuts our Achilles heel before we've even run a few miles. High-level military sources tell me that the bombing of the Red Cross facility was both deliberate and justified and that the Pentagon and government are dissembling to protect fragile coalition partners. But both the air warriors and the Pentagon just don't get it. The road to success in toppling the Taliban or getting Osama bin Laden does not go through some obscure warehouse complex two kilometers south of the Kabul airport.
He Said, She Said
Why, you might ask, didn't U.S. officials responsible for selecting and approving targets know where Red Cross warehouses were? The Red Cross says that the facility was "clearly distinguishable from the air by the large red cross painted against a white background on the roof of each building." The ICRC says it "informed" the United States government of the location of its facilities in Afghanistan. It calls the attacks on a building with a Red Cross emblem "a violation of international humanitarian law."
U.S. military sources see the situation somewhat differently. They point out that the ICRC did not include a Kabul warehouse on a map of its operations in Afghanistan that was published on Sept. 21. They also claim that even if the Red Cross provided information about the Kabul facility to someone, the warehouses were never placed on any "no strike" target list by the State Department or CENTCOM.
Regardless of the Red Cross on the roof, U.S. targeters also say they watched Taliban military vehicles go in and out of the facility, and that there was growing general intelligence of how the Taliban was stealing supplies of non-governmental organizations for their own forces. What is more, sources say, the second attack was completely justified because the Taliban plundered the facility after the initial attack.
"We are not sorry for taking supplies away from the Taliban, and if the Red Cross thought those supplies were going to anywhere else than the Taliban murderers they are just plain foolish," says a senior U.S. officer directly involved in the bombing.
A senior Air Force lawyer further explains that it is conceivable that the ICRC did report to the U.S. where its facilities were in Afghanistan, but he says "it would not surprise me if certain things are not on the `no strike' list." The reason, he says, is that such a list "isn't intended to cover every conceivable thing that cannot be lawfully hit. Thus, for example, it would not necessarily list every school, hospital, mosque, etc. If a marked ICRC compound wasn't on it, the explanation may well be that it was assumed to be inconceivable to even think about striking it."
Nonetheless he says, "simply because something is not on the no-strike list, doesn't mean that it can be struck." There are "several filters" for selecting and approving targets, he says. In the case of dual-use civilian and military targets, there may be reasons, some purely political, not to strike them. In other words, there should be no assumptions that a target can be hit just because military activity is detected.
That is why the U.S. has officially apologized and why the British government calls the attack "regrettable." A senior Navy officer told me even if the targeters are correct on all points, "it was bad judgment to think that they [the warehouses] were targets."
The Weakest Link
I'll leave the legal black and white to the lawyers. But nothing is black and white when it comes to warfare. When it comes to air warfare, the troika of doctrine, strategy and targeting are key. Doctrine and strategy have become ever more sophisticated since the Gulf War, and weapons have continued to advance in accuracy while cost has declined. Targeting is the weakest link. At the Defense Intelligence Agency, gigantic databases of objects of prospective military value are created. For some countries, such as North Korea, the most militarily significant are finely understood. But most of the time, the U.S. finds itself with the unanticipated cases-the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait or the war in Afghanistan--where it really doesn't have a textured understanding of its opponent, or much information about the very things that the United States needs to know to prosecute precision guided air war. In the lingo of war planners, targeting is done "on the fly," with generic airfields and barracks from the databases targeted first while more significant targets are "developed" that "support" political and military objectives.
In the Afghanistan strategy, the bombing itself is intended not just to destroy the enemy's capacity but to generate new targets. By watching the Taliban's response to attacks and how its reduced operational security functions, the U.S. finds new places to attack.
In fact, the United States is not following a single bombing strategy in toppling the Taliban or finding bin Laden in Enduring Freedom. There is one effort to synchronize bombing of fixed targets with intelligence collection and special operations to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda command structures directly. Then there is a separate effort to bomb Taliban forces in the north and around Kandahar to weaken Taliban ground forces.
Bombing thus has to be seen on two tracks. The primary effort, even if it is not the main effort in terms of sorties and strikes, goes into finding and hitting the "critical nodes" and exotic places. This has been the leading strategy in all recent air wars - going after Saddam's palaces, the factories of Slobodan Milosevic's cronies in Yugoslavia, and now al Qaeda's caves in Afghanistan. This is a hypnotic and highly secretive enterprise, where the best intelligence, the best minds, and the best weapons are combined in hopes of delivering the silver bullet that will clinch victory.
Academics love to debate whether "strategic bombing" in this form is effective. But there is a much more immediate question in Afghanistan: Should the U.S. refrain from hitting food and blankets in the course of pursuing its overall war strategy, particularly when its very ability to run the quiet and true marathon depends on coalition support rooted in the credibility that precision war is sparing civilians? Since the United States is trying to build a future for an impoverished and angry Afghanistan, the answer is clearly yes. The U.S. should clearly refrain from hitting targets that cannot be explained in any way other than its marginal importance. The Red Cross warehouse should not have been bombed because such a mistake - even the perception of mistake - undermines an otherwise just and necessary war.
© 2001 Washington Post Newsweek Interactive
About the Author
• William M. Arkin, the author of ten books and numerous studies on military affairs, is a consultant to numerous organizations, and a frequent television and radio commentator. He was an Army intelligence analyst during the 1970's, a nuclear weapons expert during the Cold War, and pioneered on-the-ground study of the effects of military operations in Iraq and Yugoslavia. In 1994, his "The U.S. Military Online: A Directory for Internet Access to the Department of Defense" was published. |
