...said General Campbell in his Senate testimony.
Let's parse this. The Kunduz hospital coordinates were known to U.S. forces. The Afghans on the ground must have known what kind of building it was. The air strike on the hospital by a gunship guided by a U.S. team on the ground lasted for an hour in spite of repeated calls from Doctors Without Borders to U.S. authorities.
For Campbell's statement to be true, we have to assume that a) local Afghan troops decided to shoot up the local hospital, presumably on the grounds that it harbored Talebans b) crucial information on major protected civilian facilities in the area was either kept from, or ignored by both the operational commander who cleared the air strike, and the U.S. forward unit in charge of guiding the gunship c) communications from U.S. personnel in touch with NGOs to said forward units and/or gunship was very slow or nonexistent.
So, even if Campbell does not lie, which is far from proven to say the least, his account makes sense only if U.S. forces in the area rank protecting local civilian facilities and the people staffing them, NGOs included, way below killing Talebans on their list of priorities. If they didn't, such basic mistakes in the transmission of information could not happen, the forward units would be briefed about the main places to protect, commanders would jump on their communication systems the minute something went wrong, and requests for aerial support from the trigger-happy Afghan military would be checked against the list of such facilities.
The military shooting up this hospital because nobody among them really cared about it, and then refusing to be held accountable (meh, mistakes were made) is very similar to cops shooting up the wrong African-American teenager and letting him die on the sidewalk because who cares. It's a war crime in the same way cop killlings are murders; a fundamental departure from a basic behavioral rule of an armed force among civilians in a democracy. And yes, the Russians do it too. But who said Russia was a democracy these days?
Lastly, in spite of Meteor Blades's and La Feminista's efforts to keep this story alive, it has not even made front page on Daily Kos. That, to me, is the most frightening element of all. If My Lai happened today, would we even hear about it?
Wed Oct 07, 2015 at 9:21 AM PT: Clarification/addendum: by "this story" not being in the front page, in the last §, I meant Campbell's testimony, not Kunduz in general. And I am glad to see Kunduz back on the front page where it belongs thanks to last night's Open Thread for Night Owls!