U.S. admits Afghan blunder
General confirms 16 punished over hospital attack.
WASHINGTON — Human error, violations of combat rules and equipment failures led to the mistaken U.S. aerial attack on a charity-run hospital in Afghanistan last fall that killed 42 people, a senior general said Friday. Investigators called the attack a “disproportional response to a threat that didn’t exist.”
Sixteen military members were given administrative punishments that could stall or end careers, but no one faces a court-martial. A senior defense official said one of the disciplined was a twostar general.
Gen. Joseph Votel said at a news conference as he released the Pentagon’s final report on the attack that none of the names of the 16 will be released to protect the privacy of the individuals and, in some cases, because they are still assigned to sensitive or overseas positions.
The AC-130 gunship, heavily armed with side-firing cannons and guns, fired on the hospital in the northern city of Kunduz for 30 minutes before the mistake was realized and the attack was halted, Votel said. The intended target was an Afghan intelligence agency building about 450 yards away.
Votel is commander of U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the greater Middle East and Afghanistan. At the time of the Kunduz attack he headed U.S. Special Operations Command.
No one involved knew the targeted compound was a hospital, Votel said, but investigators concluded the U.S. ground and air commanders should have known.
“They were trying to do the right thing. They were trying to support our Afghan partners,” Votel said. “Unfortunately, they made a wrong judgment in this particular case and ended up targeting this Doctors Without Borders facility.”
Votel expressed “deepest condolences” to those injured and to the families of those killed and said the U.S. government made “gesture-of-sympathy” payments of $3,000 to each injured person and $6,000 to each family of the people killed.
Zabihullah Neyazi, a nurse who lost his left arm, eye and a finger in the Oct. 3, 2015, attack, said administrative punishment for the American service members wasn’t enough and said a “trial should be in Afghanistan, in our presence, in the presence of the victims’ families, so they would be satisfied.”
Pharmacist Khalid Ahmad, 24, said those responsible “are criminals, and they must be jailed.” Ahmad still has shrapnel embedded in his waist and cannot move his right leg.
Doctors Without Borders, the international charity organization whose hospital was destroyed, said Friday that it still wants an “independent and impartial” investigation. It said the punishments were inadequate and “out of proportion” to the deaths, injuries and destruction caused by the mistaken attack.
“The lack of meaningful accountability sends a worrying signal to warring parties, and is unlikely to act as a deterrent against future violations of the rules of war,” the organization said.
John Sifton, Asia policy director of Human Rights Watch, called the punishments an “insult to the dead.”
“The Pentagon public affairs office can try to spin ‘counseling’ and ‘letters of reprimand’ as devastating and career-ending for implicated personnel,” Sifton said. “But the MSF attack ended people’s very lives and devastated the families and survivors of those who were killed.” MSF is the French acronym for Doctors Without Borders.
The Americans who called in and authorized the attack never laid eyes on either the intended target or the hospital, Votel said.
“This was an extreme situation” complicated by combat fatigue among U.S. special operations forces, Votel said. He said the ground force commander who authorized the AC-130 strike justified it on grounds of self-defense, but investigators determined that the attack was “a disproportional response to a threat that did not exist.”
Investigators concluded that certain personnel failed to comply with the rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict, but Votel said those failures did not amount to a war crime.
“The label ‘war crimes’ is typically reserved for intentional acts — intentional targeting [of] civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects or locations,” Votel said. “Again, the investigation found that the incident resulted from a combination of unintentional human errors, process errors and equipment failures, and that none of the personnel knew they were striking a hospital.”
The hospital was on a U.S. military no-strike list but the AC-130 crew didn’t have access to the list because it went on its mission on short notice and did not have the data loaded into its onboard systems. The investigation report, which was released Friday with many segments redacted for security or other reasons, said the person who emailed the data to the airplane while in flight did not follow up to confirm that it was received. It was not received.
Votel said the military has sought to avoid similar mistakes in the future by requiring that such data be pre-loaded into aircraft.