Sunrise near Forward Operating Base Bayough, Zabul, Afghanistan in 2009.
Bob Dreyfuss at
The Nation writes—
Air power inflicts horrific human-rights violations and has been thoroughly discredited as a means of fighting insurgencies:
The aerial destruction that rained down on a hospital complex run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, a provincial capital in northeast Afghanistan, on October 3 puts an exclamation point on the story of America’s 14 years of warfare in that Central Asian country. At least 22 people were killed, among them doctors, other medical personnel, and patients, including three children, and dozens were wounded in the attack.
Beyond the obvious, immediate implications of this massacre—which serves as a reminder that for all of those 14 years, the United States has engaged in a brutal, mismanaged and ill-conceived war—more broadly the ruins of the Kunduz hospital are a symbol of America’s unfortunate reliance on air power, including drone strikes and bombers, to combat a host of insurgent groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere in Africa. [...]
If there’s such a thing as an “Obama doctrine” of US national security policy in place, it’s built around two pillars: first, using air power to counter “malign” actors such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State, rather than direct, on-the-ground involvement of US forces; and second, the arming and training of proxy forces and newly built national armies to carry out the battles on the ground. Yet both pillars are crumbling. Few if any experienced national security policymakers and military experts believe that airstrikes can do more than harass or disrupt well-organized insurgencies, and the doctrine of using air power—developed during and after World War II in the Strategic Bombing Survey, proselytized by Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era Whiz Kids—has been thoroughly discredited, as argued convincingly this week by James Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Greg Grandin at
The Nation writes—
The historical record suggests that the US bombing of an Afghan hospital may not have been an accident:
“Bombing of Hospitals Called Routine.” That was the August 9, 1973, Newsday coverage of congressional hearings on “clandestine U.S. air and ground activities in Cambodia and Laos”:
U.S. commanders in Vietnam placed no restrictions on ground or air attacks against Viet Cong or North Vietnamese hospitals a Senate committee was told yesterday by several Vietnam veterans.
In direct testimony and in letters, the veterans said hospitals often were considered targets rather than areas to be avoided as required by the Geneva convention on warfare.…
The committee also has been trying to determine who ordered a dual reporting system in which 3,630 B-52 raids over Cambodia were recorded falsely as having occurred in South Vietnam [that would be Henry Kissinger].
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Green Diary Rescue & Open Thread: 350:
A seven-member team at the Economics for Equity and Environment have concluded in The Economics of 350: The Benefits and Costs of Climate Stabilization that quickly reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere to 350 parts per million would have significant economic costs. But authors Frank Ackerman, Kristin Sheeran and Eban Goodstein say that these costs would, at worst, amount to foregoing less than one year’s normal growth of about 2.5%-3% of GDP. And they would be far below the costs – both economic and otherwise – of not making the reduction or of not making it rapidly.
In 1990, at the Rio Earth Summit, it was thought that stabilizing the atmosphere at around 450 ppm of CO2 would mean holding the average rise in temperature to 2°C. The effects of this would be unpleasant and problematic – highly problematic in some parts of the world, especially low-lying and high-latitude areas, – but livable with adjustments. If current levels of increase continue, we’d hit the 450 ppm mark around 2040. But in the past few years, scientific opinion has shifted.
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