It started, as these things often do, with a tweet.

Mr. Grim’s tweet there is in reference to NATO forces hitting a Doctors Without Borders hospital during an airstrike in the city of Kunduz. Which is having its own problems over the last several days. Which led to the coalition opting to bring on the airpower in an urban environment. Which is always problematic. Questions we should be asking:

1. What prompted an airstrike that close to a hospital?
   That’s a call one doesn’t make lightly. Because, well, buildings and people and a whole lot of innocents in the area who might get very dead because of that decision. Of course, if you do, you get Kunduz. If you don’t, you get Bengahzi.
2. What were the Taliban doing that close to the MSF facility?
   By setting up any kind of activity in the vicinity of that hospital, the Taliban intentionally put innocent civilians in harm’s way. Doesn’t excuse the choices that led to dropping ordnance on a city center, which are always complex and painful decisions to make in a war zone. But making it all about the coalition gives the Taliban an undeserved pass.
3. What don’t we know yet about the airstrike?
   Technical questions that are less fun in the midst of social media hype, but things like what kind of munitions were involved, the threat to the force that prompted the airstrike in the first place, and whether everyone involved knew that fires were being directed that close to a medical facility are still all things we don’t know.

Safeguarding civilian populations is the burden of the good guys, and anytime those good guys kill other good guys, it raises a lot more questions than just another report of the Taliban blowing up a bunch of Afghans because insurgency. Still, we do a grave disservice to thoughts on the latest war in Afghanistan if we ignore the fact that these Talibanitarians are the same folks who really hate volleyball.

Condemning that airstrike underscores our collective fascination with all things airpower. That if we can just bring enough weapons to bear from the skies, that we can fix all the intervention things. That these machines we’ve invented put us above the fog of war and make it nigh impossible to kill people who don’t deserve it. That in the fog of war when the bullets are flying and whoever’s on the ground is calling for help, the only reason civilians would die is because someone planned it that way.

Wars are simple things. Battles are often less so. They are noisy things unwilling to simplify the lives of those who fight them. And in the midst of that barely controlled chaos, awful things can happen. Whatever happened in Kunduz so far seems like a terrible, tragic mistake. And it’s the kind of mistake that we should never be so accustomed to that it doesn’t alarm us and break us a little more every time it happens.

To spin this as an indictment of coalition forces and compare their actions to that of the Taliban is intellectually disingenuous and morally reprehensible. If it turns out that US airpower was directed against a hospital, there are no reasons good enough to explain that away. But let’s stop giving the volleyball haters a pass on this one.