I fear that amid all the self-righteous blameshifting and  frantic second-guessing of the attack, which was launched from an American fighter jet, but ordered by the German Oberst Klein, we haven't learned nearly enough.

We haven't learned nearly enough about this mayhem of a failed state and the chaos that even the well-intentioned regime changes or peacemaking bring.

We haven't learned nearly enough about the nightmares, that result all too often, when the high and mighty West comes to the rescue.

ISAF, MNF-I Go Home? - not so fast.

This isn't a simple question of surging or withdrawing: from this nightmare, there is no waking up.

We need to learn a lesson, of what happens when we disrupt and exploit divided, traditional societies, equip them with technology and weaponry far outmatching their level of development. From this responsibility, there is no escaping.

It's a simple lesson, we all accept before entering a store: if you break it, you buy it.

Surely, we must ask whether the bombing was commensurable and responsibility must be borne, all the way up the chain of command from Oberst Klein to Chancellor Merkel. Judgement of these necessarily highly complicated matters, however, must await the results of the parliamentary investigation commission.

But there is more: we must ask what the condition and dynamic of asymmetric conflicts under limited statehood is. I recentlywrote about post-invasian Iraq and suggested that the security vacuum was filled by rivaling "racketeers", who morphed into competing insurgency factions as they scaled up their production of violence (and security), as well as provision of other services.

One may conclude that regime change, that interventions in general, are too reckless to ever undertake. And in Iraq, certainly for the reasons (vulgo: lies) stated, that may be so.

There is a prayer intended to give strength, when, in Iraq, AfPak and elsewhere, we are faced with circumstances we don't want to accept:

God grant us the serenity
To accept the things we cannot change;
The courage to change the things we can;
And wisdom to know the difference
The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr, adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous

In this case, however, the circumstance may be of our own, Western making. And that changes things.

Pre-Westphalia, only with better guns

Europe knows this Hobbesian struggle of competing racketeers in the absence of a potent state. Over a Thirty Years War, and many others, it brought untold sorrow and decimated its populations.

The civil wars, failed states and security vacuums of today are not much different, except in the technology of killing. We may find the Muslim Brotherhood's ideology to be quite medieval, but their AK-47s and the roadside explosives they employ surely are distinctively modern.

You don't have to go as far as Edward Luttwak, who wants to "Give War a Chance", so that a stable set of Westphalian master-racketeers, otherwise known as states, eventually emerges. But it doesn't take a lot, let alone Lutwak's this cynical strand ofmodernization theory to appreciate that technological and socio-economic development have gone in tandem in the West, and for good reason.

A Prime Directive, violated already

As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Starfleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely.
The Prime Directive of the Starfleet, from the fictional Star Trek universe.

The West of course, has violated this Prime Directive over, and over again.

Today, distinctively pre-modern jihadists fight with grenade launchers, introduced by the West in some past proxy conflict. Today, tribal societies are confined to borders drawn by colonial rulers, regardless of otherwise affiliations. A few years back,genocidal slaughterers almost left none to tell the story, equipped with freight containerloads of machetes, mass produced and shipped from abroad.

We hope for democratic governance and prosperity, in weak states, boiling with essentialized identities and pre-modern mindsets, and no concept of enlightenment. To hurry the coup along, we introduce some armored vehicles. Or, in a more benign form, we foster foreign direct investment, bringing in powerful technology and advanced organization. And yet, we wonder if things go awry?

Introducing messy modernity

We can generalize this dynamic seen in one form or another in underdeveloped and developing societies, turned violent or fragile.

Modernity arrived only partially and in a highly disaggregated fashion, often in the form of a colonial legacy, or through imported technology. These modern innovations then violently transform, and integrate societies, typically through population boom and nascent division of labor in the absence of the institutional and attitudinal corollaries of modernization that keep its might in check in the West: emancipation and secular-rationality, in the terms of political sociology.

Star Trek's Prime Directive is indeed a fictional choice, long foregone. In one way or another we have interfered in virtually all forms of human civilization. Where we stand now, Prime Directive-isolationism may be now no better than grandiose interventionism.

A messy version of modernity has arrived already, hurried along, incomplete, inorganic.

And even if the omnipresent automatic firearm hadn't made their conflicts much, much worse, wouldn't be morally compelled to spare others their violent struggle towards Westphalia?

Be ready (but not willing)

Either way, we need to better understand the dynamics of this messy modernity, we've brought unto the world, and heal and avoid its calamitous contradictions as best we can.

And yes, we need to be ready for more intervention, just as we need to be humbler in our ambitions to bring peace and order.

For the military, that means we must comprehensively revise our planning, equipment and training. "New Wars" are different, and they are here to stay. They require counterinsurgent capabilities, asymmetric warfare, and most importantly, they require efficient policing, right from the start.

Past, resent and future interventions raise vexing questions, both of morality and effectiveness. These are questions that require hard thinking and open discussion in the light of day.

This, I think, is the best tribute we can pay to those who senselessly perished in Kunduz. No less, it is our duty towards the men and women in uniform we send in harms way and a moral obligation towards those like Oberst Klein, whom we task to make the impossible choices.

No politics of inevitability ...

This is no politics of inevitability, and it must not be. Bishop Margot Käßmann, in one of the few substantive contributions to the German post-Kunduz debate, was right to note that "nothing is good in Afghanistan" and to ask for more "imagination for peace".

None of this necessarily justifies intervention, let alone the burning of by-standing civilians.

But when we understand that this circumstance is of our own, Western making, we can no more accept serenely these things we cannot change.

... but of responsibility

Where the disruptive might of modernity has enabled a nuclearly armed, but fragile Pakistan or rogue-turned, racketeering North Korea, we might have to act.

Where the historical plight of colonialism and proxy conflicts have grandfathered in violent strife and genocide, as in the plains of Darfur, Sudan or where we have failed to prevent such from happening through peaceful resolution, we might have to act.

And even where - or if - we bear no "White Man's Burden" for the dangers and atrocities, we might have to act.

For if we broke or break it, and be it through our exporting of "messy modernity", we have to buy it.

(Download an extended version of the argument here).