Is Command-Inspired Ground Confusion a War Crime? — The Kunduz MSF Hospital Bombing

10 May 2016

Is deadly ground confusion, attributable to irresponsible command, a war crime?

The American military claims that its Kunduz (Afghanistan) hospital bombing last October was a mistake and not a war crime.

As summarized by The Guardian:

On Friday, the general in charge of US forces in the Mideast and South Asia, Joseph Votel, said the strike was “not a war crime”, since a US AC-130 gunship crew did not realize it was striking a hospital. Votel’s predecessor took disciplinary action against a dozen service members, though no criminal liability will follow.

The inquiry found that MSF contacted a US military liaison within minutes of the strike. But when the message was relayed to the ground commander in Kunduz, it did not “immediately register” with him, Votel said, as the ground crew believed the AC-130 was striking a different location used by the Taliban.

Votel, a former special operations commander, said the investigation determined the hospital never served as a staging ground for attacks by the Taliban, nor did any enemy fire come from the hospital, as MSF has long said and in contradiction to Afghan officials.

According to the then-commander of US forces in Afghanistan, John Campbell, elite US forces operating out of Kunduz called in an airstrike on a building seized by the Taliban miles from the hospital.

But the AC-130 launched early, flew off course, dodging what the inquiry determined was a surface-to-air missile, and experienced a series of on-board communications and sensor system failures largely cutting it off from the ground during the pre-dawn mission.

After a further sensor failure, crew mistakenly became convinced the hospital was the area it was ordered to attack – in reality, some 400 metres distant – through visually identifying the likeliest physical location.

The report found that some onboard were unsure and repeatedly sought clarification, but neither the ground spotter for the strike nor the ground commander at Kunduz airfield knew the AC-130 was in the wrong location and urged the strike to take place.

Higher headquarters, notified by MSF within 11 minutes of the first wave of firing that its hospital was under attack, did not realize the aircrew was hitting the hospital until it was “too late”, the report found.

Yet the inquiry found no combatants were firing on US or Afghan forces from the hospital, raising questions about how the gunship crew could have considered it a hostile staging area.

Votel said it was “not uncommon” for crews looking through sensors to not see incoming fire. The report said the AC-130 crew observed the hospital and personnel around it for 68 minutes before firing 211 rounds.

Nobody the Guardian spoke to [in Kunduz] seemed to believe that a military with such sophisticated equipment and surveillance would mistake a hospital.

Votel said the strike did not rise to the level of a war crime since striking the hospital was not an “intentional act” – something John Sifton of Human Rights Watch called “simply wrong as a matter of law”.

Nebulous rules of engagement

A few days later, came the following from Reuters:

[T]he 700-page report, much of it blacked out for security reasons, sheds light on how the rules are not fully understood, even by some troops on the ground, compromising the mission to stabilize the nation and defeat a worsening Islamist insurgency.

Amid fierce fighting after the Taliban captured the northern Afghan city of Kunduz last year, U.S. special forces advisers repeatedly asked their commanders how far they were allowed to go to help local troops retake the city.

They got no answer, according to witnesses interviewed in a recently declassified, heavily redacted Pentagon report that lays bare the confusion over rules of engagement governing the mission in Afghanistan.

"'How far do you want to go?' is not a proper response to 'How far do you want us to go?'" one special forces member told investigators in a report into the U.S. air strikes on a hospital in Kunduz that killed 42 medical staff, patients and caretakers.

That incident was the biggest single tragedy of the brief capitulation of Kunduz to Taliban militants, and there is no suggestion that the mistake was the result of a lack of clarity over the rules of engagement.

This is what happens when responsibility-dodging (politically-oriented) commanders shirk their leadership duty for fear of soiling their professional futures with potential errors.

Or sheer stupidity?

From the Washington Post:

The Army Special Forces unit that fought its way into the Afghan city of Kunduz after it was seized by the Taliban in October initially did so without proper maps, according to recently declassified documents.

The documents, released last month, were part of a heavily redacted report on the Oct. 3, 2015, bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital . . . .

According to Adrian Bonenberger, an Army company commander who was deployed in Kunduz in 2011, his unit had detailed maps and satellite imagery of the city.

Bonenberger thinks those maps were not properly handed over to Army Special Forces when regular Army units pulled out in 2012.

“This is indicative of how the United States fights its wars,” Bonenberger said. “It’s a profound flaw in the ‘deployment’ system that encourages unit compartmentalization and limits cross-communication.”

But — maybe it was on purpose

My guess is that The Intercept’s investigative reporter May Jeong’s well-researched implication is correct — Afghan forces thought that the hospital was being used as a Taliban staging point, and they inveigled United States into bombing it:

The general sense among the Afghan forces was that the war was going nowhere good. In a losing battle, all becomes fair, including the bombing of a hospital that many had come to believe was harboring insurgents.

The moral? — War crime, whether by intent or reckless lack of attention to detail

If there were an American screw-up in this, it had to do with either:

(a) not recognizing that there would be hell to pay after an illegal hospital bombing

(b) negligently encouraging (unprepared and improperly equipped) combat “underlings” to pick up the ball and run with it.

Both possibilities constitute war crimes.

We do not need to imagine how outraged Americans would be, if somebody else did the same thing:

An airstrike on a pediatric hospital in Syria has killed 50 people, rights and humanitarian groups say, as the United Nations warns that the situation in Aleppo has become "catastrophic" amid intensified fighting in recent days.

The airstrike killed at least 50 people, according to Pablo Marco, operations manager for Doctors Without Borders in the Middle East.

[S]ix of the dead were hospital staff: Two doctors, two nurses, one guard and one maintenance worker. The death toll could still rise.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the attack and pointed a finger of blame at the Syrian government.

"We are outraged by yesterday's airstrikes in Aleppo on the al Quds hospital supported by both Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which killed dozens of people, including children, patients and medical personnel," he said in a statement.

"It appears to have been a deliberate strike on a known medical facility and follows the Assad regime's appalling record of striking such facilities and first responders. These strikes have killed hundreds of innocent Syrians."

When evaluated in the light of Kunduz, Secretary’s Kerry’s statement is superbly representative of our now characteristic hypocrisy.

PeteFree.com

Is Command-Inspired Ground Confusion a War Crime? — The Kunduz MSF Hospital Bombing