The day after a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders was bombed in Aleppo, Syria, killing 14 people, including two doctors, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that the Pentagon will announce it has disciplined 16 service members involved in the U.S. attack on a hospital in Afghanistan last October. No criminal charges will be filed, however. The attack killed 42, including 14 medical staff and 24 patients who burned to death in their beds. Scores of other people were injured.
The punishments are expected to be announced Friday by Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of U.S. Central Command. No names will be released because all those disciplined are still deployed overseas. A heavily edited version of the Pentagon’s 3,000-page report on the incident will also be released Friday on the Defense Department website after Votel’s announcement:
The 16 found at fault include a two-star general, the crew of an Air Force AC-130 attack aircraft, and Army special forces personnel, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal investigation.
One officer was suspended from command and ordered out of Afghanistan. The other 15 were given lesser punishments: Six were sent to counseling, seven were issued letters of reprimand, and two were ordered to retraining courses. [...]
“The gravity of harm caused by the reported failures to follow protocol in Kunduz appears to constitute gross negligence that warrants active pursuit of criminal liability,” Donna McKay, executive director of the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, wrote in a letter to the White House and Pentagon on Monday.
The hospital was attacked by an AC-130 gunship in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz October 3. Even though the facility was clearly marked as a hospital and staff made several phone contacts with military officials in Afghanistan and in Washington to try to stop the attack while it was underway, the gunship fired 211 shells into the hospital compound. The military concluded in its report that the attack lasted 29 minutes. Hospital staff said it continued for about an hour.
Doctors Without Borders, known more widely under its French name of Médecins Sans Frontières, labeled the attack a possible war crime. Human Rights Watch in December wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter calling for the Pentagon to treat its investigation into the Kunduz attack as a criminal matter. The group’s Washington director, Sarah Margon, said: “The attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz involved possible war crimes. The ongoing US inquiry will not be credible unless it considers criminal liability and is protected from improper command influence.”
The MSF collected 557,000 names on a petition asking President Obama to consent to an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. That consent has not been granted and no such investigation can be undertaken without it.
May Jeong at The Intercept has an in-depth assessment of the whole affair, including the Pentagon’s investigation. Here’s one small piece:
According to the former government adviser, in the days following the hospital strike, the Afghans were under immense pressure from the U.S. military to stay in line. President Ashraf Ghani, who issued a statement expressing his “deep sorrow,” was sympathetic to MSF’s call for an independent fact-finding mission, but when the U.S. refused to participate, the Afghans were “put in a position of saying no.”
“The Americans put their foot down and said that’s not going to happen,” the former adviser said. “[They] made it very clear that that could result in a loss of support.” The threat of possible war crimes charges loomed over the discussion. [...]
A former Afghan special forces commander who was at the command and control center in Kunduz during the fight assured me I would never get to the bottom of the attack. The reason why I couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened, he said, was the fog of war. “Ground truth is impossible to know. Even those who were there wouldn’t be able to tell you what they saw.” Not the MSF internal investigation, not the joint Afghan-NATO inquiry, not the Saleh commission, and certainly not the 5,000-page military investigation by U.S. Central Command would tell us what happened that night, he assured me. “Have you ever been in a fire fight? It passes like a dream.” The final sentence of the Saleh report echoed his sentiment. “Facts are never solid and we cannot feel them and they will remain this way.”
As Jeong notes, however, one solid fact is that 42 innocent people are dead.