Last Tuesday, the U.S. military took responsibility for airstrikes on an Afghan hospital, run by Doctors Without Borders, in the city of Kunduz. According to the New York Times, 22 patients and hospital staff members died in the attack. Afghan forces had requested American air support to fight the Taliban in Kunduz. Army General John Campbell said that the attack was the result of an error in the chain of army command. Some Republicans who attended the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday believe the Afghan government is too reliant on the remaining United States forces: currently, 10,000 American troops serve a training role for Afghan soldiers.  According to a testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Campbell expressed the desire to withdraw almost all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year. Médecins Sans Frontières is calling for a war crimes investigation into the U.S. bombing of the city of Kunduz. How do you react to the U.S.’s airstrike on the Afghan hospital, and do you support a decreased military presence in the region?


Prof. Jytte Klausen (POL)

The strike against the hospital was a tragic mistake. It is clear that the U.S. command called in the strike but feel that they received misleading information from the Afghan troops. The U.S. command has acknowledged responsibility which is the chain of command. So much is evident.  In effect,General John Campbell is saying: “It is their fight [meaning the Afghans].” The U.S. Army cannot win this war through proxy fighting, and no one is willing to take on a new war in Afghanistan except perhaps Sen. John McCain. The recommendation to scale back to 1,000 embassy troops implies a withdrawal from Afghanistan. I suspect the U.S. Army forecasts more liabilities from a partnership down the road. It is worth remembering that this incident comes on the back of reports of sexual abuse of minors by top Afghan leaders, and the inability of U.S. military personnel to stop it.
Prof. Jytte Klausen (POL) is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation. 
Prof. Gordon Fellman (SOC) 
I believe a war crimes charge against our foreign-policy-inept government is in order. The U.S. has now destroyed Iraq as a country and murdered tens of thousands of people. We helped destroy Libya and create sustained chaos there and in Afghanistan. If we involve ourselves in Syria, too, it will see even more disasters than have been tragically visited upon it already.Imagine what Iraq would be if the US had spent a trillion dollars building hospitals, schools, housing, infrastructure, etc. instead of on destruction. War is a business, and its U.S. investors thrive on all this, just as gun merchants in the U.S. thrive on mass killings, after still more guns are sold. The U.S. should pull out of its 800 to 1,000 military bases around the world, and also end its disastrous actions in the Middle East. It should define the well-being of all people and our planet itself as more important than corporate profits and manipulations of U.S. policies.
Prof. Gordon Fellman (SOC) is the chair of the Peace, Conflict and Coexistence Studies program.

Dr. Daniel Terris (PAX) 
The bombing of the hospital in Kunduz provides an important test of the willingness of the United States government to cooperate with an international fact-finding organization in order to establish the truth about this tragic incident.  Doctors Without Borders has called for the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to undertake an inquiry.  The IHFFC was set up under the Geneva Conventions, of which the United States is a signatory, but it can conduct an investigation into a specific situation only if it has the consent of the country or countries involved.  No doubt the U.S. government will undertake its own analysis into what went wrong in Kunduz. Nevertheless, American cooperation with the IHFFC (which only finds facts, and has no power beyond that) would send a signal that the U.S. believes in the principle that an independent investigation is more likely to produce a complete and credible account than an internal inquiry. 
Dr. Daniel Terris is the director for the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life. 

Prof. Andreas Teuber (PHIL)
As deeply disturbing as the American bombing of the hospital in Kunduz has been, it’s a reminder that human rights are not merely fictions, floating independently of the world, but the property of real people who have aims and interests, too, and lives that matter. In her call for an independent investigation last week, Dr. Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders, 22 of whose staff members and patients were killed in the attack, not only condemned the action as a potential war crime but seized the moment as a teaching opportunity, ending her remarks with a single, short, declarative sentence, delivering it without great fuss, simply, so: “Even war has rules.” It’s a lesson worth teaching. Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote the book “On War,” thought otherwise: “War is an act of force which  . . .  theoretically can have no limits.” Many agree. We still do not know exactly what happened in Kunduz, but Dr. Liu made the case against Clausewitz, against “realism,” against the convenient view that in war “anything goes.”  There are rules; there are limits. Or as she put it most simply: “Enough.”
Prof. Andreas Teuber (PHIL) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and teaches the “Human Rights” course this semester.