Zemairy, an Afghan boy, receiving treatment at Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) after a mortar exploded in his yard, and recovering from a drug-resistant bacterial infection, lies in an isolation ward in Kunduz June 11, 2015. The hospital was hit and 60 patients and staff killed or wounded in a U.S. airstrike Saturday.
American officials said Monday that repeated U.S. airstrikes on Oct. 3 that killed 22 staff and patients and wounded dozens of others at a hospital in the northern Afghanistan city of Kunduz were called for by Afghan military authorities. Officials originally said the strikes were sought by U.S. troops, who, along with elements of the Afghan army were fighting Taliban fighters who had taken over large parts of the city.
The hospital was run by the France-based organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). That group, known for its pro bono medical work in 20 countries worldwide and as the winner of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, announced on Sunday that it was leaving Kunduz, saying the hospital was no longer functional. None of the international volunteer medical workers were hurt in the airstrikes, but several Afghans on the MSF staff were killed or wounded.
A U.S. official said Saturday that the attack was carried out by an AC-130 gunship at the request of U.S. ground troops coming under fire. That would mean it wasn't pre-planned. Under U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, pre-planned attacks require a collateral damage estimation but ad hoc airstrikes to assist troops on the ground do not. A U.S. general, John Campbell, said at a Monday press conference that "several civilians were accidentally struck." The Pentagon version of "stuff happens."
The Pentagon is now saying that it was not American troops who called for the strike but rather the Afghan military:
"Their description of the attack keeps changing—from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government," Christopher Stokes, General Director of MSF, said in a statement.
"There can be no justification for this horrible attack. With such constant discrepancies in the US and Afghan accounts of what happened, the need for a full transparent independent investigation is ever more critical." [...]
The medical charity said that despite frantic calls to military officials in Kabul and Washington, the hospital was "repeatedly, very precisely" hit for more than an hour.
Gen. Campbell said the Pentagon is investigating the incident. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for an impartial investigation.
More about this below the fold.
MSF's Stokes called statements by Afghan authorities saying that the Taliban was using the hospital as a base from which to target civilians indications that the U.S. and Afghanistan worked together to specifically target the hospital. "This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimize the attack as 'collateral damage'," he said.
According to 15 reports from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), there have been 22,849 documented civilian deaths from military actions in the war-blasted nation. As the charts below show, 4,416 of those deaths were caused by Afghan or coalition forces; 1,707 were killed in airstrikes.
Athough the hospital deaths will no doubt be soon forgotten by the American media, the Taliban's success, albeit temporary, in taking a major city will surely give new impetus to those U.S. politicians who seek to maintain or expand American forces in Afghanistan. Expect their argument to run along the lines that Obama shouldn't have tripled U.S. troops there in 2009-2010 but rather
sextupled them and committed them to a 30-year stay.
That way, the U.S. could have been sure the Taliban wouldn't make any major advances until sometime in 2040 in the latest effort to add another notch to Afghanistan's record as the graveyard of empires.