Much evidence counts against official account of US attack on Kunduz hospital

The official account of the October 3 bombing of a hospital in Kunduz by a U.S. gunship claims it was a mistake. Through a series of unlikely mishaps the hospital was attacked rather than a compound some distance away held by the Taliban.

General John Campbell explained that the "tragic but avoidable accident was caused primarily by human error." The attack killed 13 Doctors Without Borders(MSF) staff members, 10 patients and seven others not yet indentified, 30 in all. More than three dozen MSF staff members and patients were injured as well. The hospital was destroyed leaving several hundred thousand in the area without any access to emergency care.

As long ago as October 11, I argued that the evidence pointed to the attack being an error in intelligence rather than in the targeting. The recent official explanation is contradicted by much of the evidence and simply ignores factors important in understanding what happened making itdifficult to believe. A critical view was also taken by many analysts.

From the first, MSF has called for an independent investigation through the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission(IHFFC) and began the process of initiating the investigation, but any such investigation needs to be approved by both the Afghans and the U.S.:Now that the call to mobilize the IHFFC has been answered, we are calling for the United States and the Obama administration to consent to the IHFFC investigation into the Kunduz hospital bombing, as it must before a truly impartial truth-seeking investigation can be launched.So far both the U.S. and Afghans have resisted this independent inquiry. MSF recently delivered a petition signed by 547,000 to the White House. The petition demands an independent investigation into the deadly U.S. strike on the Kunduz hospital in Afghanistan.

The petition is particularly apt now that there is new evidence against the official story. In a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, California Republican Duncan Hunter, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, has quoted two U.S. servicemen as saying U.S. Special Forces called in the air strike because they believed the Taliban were using it as a command center, directly contradicting the official narrative that the attack was intended to be on a different building. Hunter claimed this new account, if true, shows the U.S. was manipulated by its partners. A Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged receipt of the letter but the department had no comment. The two servicemen said they were not aware that the building was still being used as a hospital and claimed the Afghans forces told them it was being used as a command post by the Taliban. One of the servicemen is quoted as saying: "There were enemy in there. They had already removed and ransomed the foreign doctors, and they had fired on partnered personnel from there." This account resembles an early account that was soon denied by NATO officials after MSF and independent witnesses refuted it. Hunter in his letter wrote that he worried "inaccurate information and poor intelligence was provided by Afghan forces--including information that was both incorrect and unverified by US intelligence and personnel." Hunter's letter ignores the fact that U.S. intelligence had been itself investigating the hospital for come time. It was not just the Afghans who thought that the hospital was being used by the enemy. The US thought that a top Pakistani intelligence operative was inside and had been monitoring the hospital days before the raid. One report claims:The special operations analysts had assembled a dossier that included maps with the hospital circled, along with indications that intelligence agencies were tracking the location of the Pakistani operative and activity reports based on overhead surveillance, according to a former intelligence official who is familiar with some of the documents describing the site. The intelligence suggested the hospital was being used as a Taliban command and control center and may have housed heavy weapons.

No wonder that the Afghans and U.S. do not want an independent investigation but will stay with their own concoction even in the face of its many critics.

Military report on Kunduz hospital attack leaves out key evidence it was no mistake

A U.S. military fact-finding investigation into an October 3 attack by an AC-130 gunship that killed 30 people found the pilot aimed at the hospital by mistake, intending to hit a compound nearby from which Taliban were firing.

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The hospital was run by Doctors Without Borders. It has demanded an independent investigation which both the U.S. and Afghan authorities have yet to approve.

General John Campbell, the top military and U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said: "The proximate cause of this tragedy was the direct result of avoidable human error, compounded by process and equipment failures." These failures are almost beyond belief and give rise to one ofmany different accounts of what happenedThe US has been accused of changing its version of events four times in the days after the incident, which is now the subject of three inquiries – by the US, Nato and Afghanistan.Several military personnel closely associated with the attack have been suspended from duties until the full adjudication process is complete, General Campbell said.

The crew of the AC-130 gave the coordinates of their target to command headquarters, who knew those coordinates were of a hospital and yet somehow managed not to conclude that the strike was on a hospital:The aircrew provided the coordinates of the trauma center -- a known protected site -- as their intended target one minute prior to firing, the report said. The operational headquarters at Bagram Airfield were aware of the coordinates for the trauma center Campbell said, but "did not realize the grid coordinates for the target matched a location on the no-strike list or that the aircrew was preparing to fire on a hospital."Such incompetence seems highly improbable to me. More likely technical people are having to take the rap for a story concocted to show that the U.S. would never intentionally attack a medical facility. But Afghan special forces, trained by the U.S., had already attacked the Kunduz hospital:In July... Reuters reported that Afghan special forces “raided” this exact MSF hospital in Kunduz, claiming an al Qaeda member was a patient. This raid infuriated MSF staff: The French aid group said its hospital was temporarily closed to new patients after armed soldiers had entered and behaved violently towards staff."

Afghan officials have long been resentful of the fact that the Kunduz hospital treats Taliban and government forces wounded equally. At first, the Afghans insisted the hospital was being used as a command center by the Taliban. Early reports also claimed U.S. and Afghan forces had been under attack from the hospital. A version quickly jettisoned. The early reports in mainstream media claiming the hospital was being used as a Talban base are now all deleted from memory:Fox News yesterday, citing anonymous “defense officials,” said that while they “‘regret the loss’ of innocent life, they say the incident could have been avoided if the Taliban had not used the hospital as a base, and the civilians there as human shields.” In its first article on the attack, the Washington Post also previewed this defense, quoting a “spokesman for the Afghan army’s 209th Corps in northern Afghanistan” as saying that “Taliban fighters are now hiding in ‘people’s houses, mosques and hospitals using civilians as human shields.'” AP yesterday actually claimed that it looked at a video and saw weaponry in the hospital’s windows, only to delete that claim

Even some Afghan officials continued with the narrative that the attack was justified. Abdul Paiman a member of parliament from Kunduz said; “I know that there were civilian casualties in the hospital, but a lot of senior Taliban were also killed,.”

There are other reports indicating that US special operations analysts had been gathering intelligence on the hospital days before it was attacked since they also though that it was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity:The special operations analysts had assembled a dossier that included maps with the hospital circled, along with indications that intelligence agencies were tracking the location of the Pakistani operative and activity reports based on overhead surveillance, according to a former intelligence official who is familiar with some of the documents describing the site. The intelligence suggested the hospital was being used as a Taliban command and control center and may have housed heavy weapons.This has all been deleted from the memory banks of the mainstream press, it appears.

According to the official narrative, the crew of the gunship found the coordinates provided them by the Afghan authorities turned out to be an empty field. They decided they would attack the hospital nearby since it roughly met the description of the target. The hospital had two large flags on top identifying it as a hospital. Not surprisingly Doctors Without Borders was not enthusiastic about the report: “It appears that 30 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of people are denied life-saving care in Kunduz simply because the MSF hospital was the closest large building to an open field and ‘roughly matched’ a description of an intended target.”

General Campbell did not take questions nor would any official comment on whether they thought an independent investigation should be conducted. It took 17 minutes for the U.S. military to respond to the 18 frantic calls from the hospital to stop the attack. This gave the gunship enough time to finish its attack.

US still refuses to approve independent investigation of Kunduz hospital bombing

There are three different investigations being carried out of the air attack by an AC-130 gunship on a hospital run by Doctors without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

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The three investigations are led by U.S., NATO, and Afghan officials. All are themselves connected to the attack. MSF has demanded an independent investigation. The death toll from the U.S. air strike has now reached 30 and could yet go higher.

MSF wants the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to investigate the attack: The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) is an international body that is available to perform investigations of possible breaches of international humanitarian law. The Commission may investigate matters to determine what has happened, but does not pass judgement on issues it raises.

The IHFFC was activated in the middle of October according to MSF:"MSF has been informed that the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission has been activated. This is the first step needed to undertake an independent investigation into the attack."Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said that the U.S. would work with those affected by the attack to determine appropriate amounts of compensation. However, the U.S. has not agreed to an independent investigation as the MSF demands, and in spite of the fact that the IHFFC has been activated. The Commission vice-president, Thilo Marauhn, sent letters to the United States and Afghanistan asking for permission to go ahead with their investigation. So far there has been no response from either party.

While the MSF noted that it had received apologies and condolences, Joanne Liu, the MSF head said this was not enough:"We are still in the dark about why a well-known hospital full of patients and medical staff was repeatedly bombarded for more than an hour. We need to understand what happened and why."

The official U.S. story has changed several times. Testifying before a U.S. Senate committee, General John Campbell, commander of the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan, gave a fourth account of the attack. He said Afghan forces had requested air cover while fighting with the Taliban near the hospital. Unlike an earlier account he had given he now admitted that Afghan forces had no direct communication with the pilots of the AC-130 gunship that carried out the attack. Campbell said: “Even though the Afghans request that support, it still has to go through a rigorous US procedure to enable fires to go on the ground. We had a special operations unit that was in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires.”

Campbell insists the hospital was mistakenly struck. This explanation is hard to accept. The coordinates of the hospital were regularly shared. There is another reason to disbelieve the "mistake explanation" as well.

U.S. special operations analysts were busy gathering intelligence on the hospital days before it was destroyed in the attack. The group believed the hospital was being used by a Pakistani intelligence operative to coordinate Taliban activity. Originally the attack was explained as an attempt to protect U.S. troops in a firefight, then it was supposedly ordered by Afghans, and finally it turns out that it was ordered by U.S. special forces but was a mistake. Surely the special forces would have the information from intelligence sources about the supposed use of the hospital as a command unit to direct the Taliban battle. According to one report:After the attack — which came amidst a battle to retake the northern Afghan city of Kunduz from the Taliban — some U.S. analysts assessed that the strike had been justified, the former officer says. They concluded that the Pakistani, believed to have been working for his country’s Inter-Service Intelligence directorate, had been killed.The mistake may not have been bombing the hospital but acting upon false intelligence.

This year US Special Forces deployed to 147 countries

The US special forces are some of the best trained, best equipped soldiers in the world. Many are experts in weapons, intelligence gathering and even medicine on the battlefield.

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Although critics point out that some special forces operations have failed, a statement on the US Army Special Forces Command boasts:“In the last decade, Green Berets have deployed into 135 of the 195 recognized countries in the world. Successes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Trans-Sahel Africa, the Philippines, the Andean Ridge, the Caribbean, and Central America have resulted in an increasing demand for [Special Forces] around the globe.”

The Army’s Special Forces or Green Berets are among the best known of America’s elite forces,. However there are many other groups including the Navy Seals and Marine Corps Raiders as well as hordes of logisticians, analysts, and planners. The growth in US Special Operations Command(SOCOM) has been phenomenal: In 2015, according to Special Operations Command spokesman Ken McGraw, U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to a record-shattering 147 countries – 75% of the nations on the planet, which represents a jump of 145% since the waning days of the Bush administration. On any day of the year, in fact, America’s most elite troops can be found in 70 to 90 nations.

Linda Robinson, a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, thinks that it may be a mistake to have so many deployments of special forces. She suggests there should be a more thoughtful and focused approach and cited long term missions in the Philippines and Colombia as more successful special ops. Given what happened in the Philippines this January to a group of commandos trained by the U.S., the Philippine operation may have its critics as well. An elite U.S.-trained force attacked an encampment of Muslim rebels in the middle of the night hoping to capture or kill a high value target. They did not tell local authorities or the regular forces about the attack. They ended up attacking at the wrong place but roused a large group of rebels who ambushed the forces, killing 43 and causing a huge scandal since there was a ceasefire with the group attacked. No regular or local forces were able to rescue the hapless elite unit for some time since they knew nothing about the attack.

A recent failure of Special Forces training programs was the $500 million program run by the Green Berets to train a New Syrian Force of 15,000 moderate rebels over several years. This force would exclusively fight the Islamic State in Syria. Only two small groups ever made it into Syria before the program was ditched in favour of supporting and training rebels fighting the Islamic State already inside Syria. The first group was quickly over-run by the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra front and their equipment captured. The second group simply gave up its arms to the same group in return for safe passage.

Some operations go so badly, they damage an already tarnished image of the U.S. abroad. A recent example is the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz — Doctors Without Borders has called a "war crime." While it has been characterized as a mistake it seems the attack was deliberate as a high value Pakistani intelligence operative was thought to be in the hospital:American special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on an Afghan hospital days before it was destroyed by a U.S. military attack because they believed it was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity, The Associated Press has learned.