Afghanistan: How the Kunduz Air Strike Shapes the Debate

The bombs fell about three hours before dawn. Two seven-foot-long steel torpedo shapes sliced silently through the darkness, each packed with 192 pounds of Tritonal high explosive, released and guided by American F-15E strike fighters high over Kunduz province, Afghanistan.

Hours later the news broke, briefly interrupting reports of the latest bickering over health care reform, Michael Jackson's memorial service and unrest in China. Two gasoline tanker trucks, hijacked by the Taliban, had exploded in the attack, killing dozens of insurgents and perhaps civilians. The incident in early September ignited a brief flare-up of questions about air strike policy and civilian casualties, before attention turned back to point scoring on health care and speculating when Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghan war assessment would be unveiled.

Maybe there's no other way to think about the Afghanistan war except in the most abstract terms. Air strikes or "boots on the ground"? Nation-building, or population-centric security? Counter-insurgency strategy, or counter-terrorism strategy?

But it has struck me, coming back to Washington after six weeks inside the war in Afghanistan, how disconnected the debate over Afghanistan seems from the reality that Afghans live through, day, by day, by day. Here, the Kunduz air strike has become a data point, used to stake down one corner of the argument about whether the war is immoral and unwinnable, or just temporarily going badly.

Perhaps part of our difficulty, as the world's most powerful nation grappling unsuccessfully with a very small, if nasty, collection of terrorists, is that we sometimes ignore the continuing human struggle to accommodate the realities of the war. It may be that the struggle of ordinary people, caught up in violence not of their own making, might help guide our thinking on the war's abstract issues.

Here's an extraordinary piece of reporting on that struggle by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad of the British Guardian newspaper. It's well worth reading the entire piece, but here are excerpts:

At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.

Taliban drivers had gotten the two hijacked fuel trucks stuck in a stream outside the village of Eissa Kheil; desperate to move before daylight, they demanded that villagers come help.

The air strike, for which McChrystal apologized, is still under investigation, both by the U.S.-led command in Afghanistan and by German authorities examining the role of the German officer who called in the air strike. It may be that either the German officer or the U.S. pilot, or both, violated strict U.S. military guidelines designed to minimize civilian casualties. Clearly, the Taliban also are responsible for involving civilians in a military operation.

It may also be that none of that matters to the villagers who are living with the aftermath.