Update On the Kunduz Hospital Attack

Note: I hope to write about a range of matters, here, of strategic-military importance, but the response to my first posting on the Kunduz hospital attack suggests that an update is in order. Willy B

    On Oct. 23, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that the preliminary report on civilian casualties in the Oct. 3 US attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz is taking longer than was expected. “We want to get this done, but we want to get it done right,” Carter  said at a Pentagon press briefing. “Accountability is part of our obligation to those who died in Kunduz and it must inform everything we do here at the Department of Defense.” He's also waiting for the broader military investigation, "But I think in both of these cases, what's important is that we get it right."
    MSF reported, at the same time, that the death toll has risen and will likely rise some more. "As of October 23 the revised figures now stand at 13 MSF staff members dead and one presumed dead; 10 patients dead and two patients presumed dead," it reported, and 27 confirmed wounded though that final figure may change, too. They have since adjusted the death toll to 30. "Beyond the immediate death toll, the destruction of MSF’s 94-bed trauma center will have a huge impact on access to surgical care for hundreds of thousands of people in the region," MSF said. In the past year, more than 22,000 people had been treated at the hospital and more than 5,900 surgeries performed.  "All that now remains of the three operating theaters, the ER and outpatient departments, and the intensive care unit are collapsed roofs, blackened walls, floors thick with dust, and twisted pieces of metal that were once beds or trolleys."
    Back in Washington, Huffington Post reported that there is growing support for an independent investigation among House Democrats. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) sent a letter, signed by fellow progressive caucus members, James McGovern (D-Ma.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), to Obama urging that he accept an investigation by an independent body with no ties to the US. “Cooperating with a thorough investigation conducted by the United Nations or other independent body would send an important message to the world that the United States is unequivocally committed to the transparency and accountability required to ensure such a catastrophic event does not happen again,” he wrote. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), a signer of Ellison's letter, is also circulating a letter to Carter calling for an Pentagon IG investigation. “The Department of Defense may not be able to fully disclose the sensitive details of operations in Afghanistan to a third party, leaving that investigation without critical insight,” Garamendi wrote. “Without clear rules for interaction and without a full understanding of American military operations, I fear that an international investigation alone could draw poorly-supported and unfair conclusions about the actions of our servicemembers.”
    Daniel Rothernberg,  co-director of Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War, in a  published in a commentary in Defense One, makes the distinction between acts committed under the laws of war, or the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) as the US military calls it, and larger questions about the legitimacy and efficacy of US policy and strategy. The US military actually takes the laws of war quite seriously but this is often confused with the broader policy questions. "So, at the same time as the post-9/11 conflicts have led to devastating civilian consequences in Afghanistan (over 26,000 killed) and Iraq (at least 150,000 killed, over 4 million displaced), the U.S. military has taken seriously its legal commitment to protecting civilians in its operations," Rotherberg writes (It seems to me that the civilian death rates are much higher, specially in Iraq, when the second and third order effects of the policies of collapsing institutional infrastructure of what were functioning--even if only barel--–states is taken into account). The key point, Rothernberg writes, "is that U.S. adherence to LOAC is not the same as the broad-based impact of nearly a decade and a half of major foreign military operations."
    "One concrete way to address this situation would be for the U.S. military to cooperate openly and fully with an independent investigation of the attack, not as a public relations measure, but as a clear expression of the seriousness of its commitment to the rule of law," Rothenberg concludes.
    Gen. John Campbell, the US/NATO commander in Afghanistan, announced, on Oct. 24, that  U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William Hickman and two brigadier generals--Brig. Gen. Robert Armfield, USAF and Birg. Gen. Sean Jenkins, USA--had been appointed from outside the NATO command (They're all from US Central Command) to run the investigation of the US bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz. "We will be forthright and transparent and we will hold ourselves accountable for any mistakes made," Campbell said in a statement. "While we desire the investigation to be timely, what's most important is that it be done thoroughly and correctly."
    Also on Saturday, the Operation Resolute Support coalition announced that yes, indeed, civilians were killed in the attack. "The Combined Civilian Casualty Assessment Team determined that the reports of civilian casualties were credible, and we continue to work with the government of Afghanistan to fully identify the victims," Resolute Support spokesman Brig. Gen. Wilson Shoffner said in a statement.
    This morning, Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis confirmed that the CCAT investigation was taking longer than initially expected because the team is trying to both determine how many people were killed in the attack and who they were.

Comments

[Will]

Associated Press has a lot of detailed info on this:
http://www.wsiltv.com/story/30351130/troops-who-sought-strike-thought-taliban-had-hospital

[mbrenner]

Frankly, this procedural playacting is itself evidence that the Obama people already know what happened but need time to figure out a strategy to fudge the story and accountability for what happened. There are, in fact, very few people involved; if the Afghans are excluded they can only number in the single digits. Interviewing them is a half-day's work that hardly requires three Generals and their staffs. Of course, those are Central Command's data analysts cannot be expected to available on a moment's notice given the criticality of the work they're doing looking for ISIL targets in the desert.

[esq]

Feel free to disagree with international law, but that AP article gets it wrong--it is LEGAL to attack a hospital if one has a reasonably good basis for believing there are armed Taliban present (and if expected civilian casualties are not disproportionate to the military goal sought--here, I suspect, killing Taliban leadership cadres).

Maybe bad optics, maybe bad morally, etc. etc. But international law is clear--LEGAL.

[Eric Dönges]

It seems to me that if you are going to deliberately attack a hospital, you should make damn sure that there are actually armed Taliban present, if for no other reason than to avoid bad press. And you really should get the story you are going to tell the world straight before you start shooting, and not change it multiple times after the fact.

[DeWitt]

The problem with your assertion is that the evidence does not support it; MSF repeatedly denied there were Taliban in the hospital, much less that they were under Taliban control:

"The AP previously reported that U.S. analysts believed a Pakistani operative, working for his country’s Inter-Service Intelligence directorate, was using the hospital to coordinate Taliban movements, and after the attack, the Pakistani operative was purported to have been killed. But there is no public evidence to suggest that a Pakistani died at the hospital, and DWB, which has repeatedly denied that the compound was under Taliban control or that gunmen were firing from it, says that none of its staff was Pakistani."

http://gawker.com/ap-green-berets-who-ordered-strike-thought-taliban-had-1738792204

Confirmed civilian death toll 30+, suspected Taliban, maybe 1, maybe 0. This guts your third point, making your final verdict anything but clear.

[esq]

That's fair.