The Obama administration has yet to realize that his Middle East campaign is more harmful than it is beneficial, Dreyfuss wrote. For 14 years, the US has engaged in a "brutal, mismanaged and ill-conceived war," and the October 3 aerial destruction is just a reminder of the bankruptcy of Obama's policy.
"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, and Libya," the columnist wrote.
US airstrikes killed 22 people in a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, among them medical personnel and three children. After the attack MSF staff demanded an investigation by impartial international institutions, emphasizing they believe it should be considered a war crime. MSF's general director Christopher Stokes expressed his disgust with attempts by Afghan government officials to justify the attack by saying Taliban fighters were present. Strokes claimed the excuse was invented and bashed the US for its amorphous excuses.
"Not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the MSF hospital compound prior to the US airstrike on Saturday morning. The hospital was full of MSF staff, patients and their caretakers," Stokes said.
"[The US] description of the attack keeps changing-from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government," he added.
The Nation author noted that the number of civilian victims in Afghanistan is growing annually. Though mostly it is the result of Taliban attacks, many deaths were caused by "pro-government" forces, a.k.a. the US and its allies. Previously, Dreyfuss together with investigative journalist Nick Turse conducted research to provide an account of the ongoing slaughter. They found out that between 2001 and 2012 6481 Afghan residents died in 458 separate cases, and in all those cases the US was to blame.
Dreyfuss believes that the pillars of Obama's "national security policy" constitute an overreliance on air power and training and equipping of proxy forces and newly built national armies that perform all the dirty work on the ground. Both pillars are crumbling, he argues.
"The seizure of Kunduz by the Taliban, the first provincial capital it has controlled since 2001, is a glaring sign of that failure," Dreyfuss wrote.
It seems that the Obama administration have learned the lesson that deploying hundreds of thousands of US troops in useless "state building" missions doesn't help to reorder affairs in the Middle East to conform with American ideas about democracy, Dreyfuss concluded.
"But it has yet to grasp the related lesson that Washington cannot defeat insurgencies, even terrorism-inclined ones, by remote control via drones or by air power that deploys fighter jets and AC-130 gunships," he says.
