Pentagon punishes 16 for Afghan strike
No charges filed, as rights groups had sought, after hospital attack
WASHINGTON — Mistakes by the crew flying an AC-130 gunship, compounded by equip- ment and procedural failures, led to the devastating attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan last year, the Defense Department announced Friday, and 16 U.S. military personnel, including a general officer, have been punished for their roles in the strike.
The punishments for the Oct. 3 attack, which killed 42 people, will be “administrative actions” only, and none of those being disciplined will face criminal charges, because the attack was determined to be unintentional. The punishments include suspension and removal from command as well as letters of reprimand, which can seriously damage or end a career.
The new top officer of the military’s Central Command, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, made the announcement during a Pentagon news conference. He said the military had conducted “a thorough investigation,” which was “painstaking” in seeking a complete account of what occurred.
Its conclusion is that neither the crew members of the gunship who fired
on the hospital in the northern city of Kunduz nor the Special Forces on the ground who were directing the strike “knew they were striking a medical facility” and that the attack on the hospital was a result of human errors compounded by “process and equipment failures,” he said.
“This was an extraordinarily intense combat situation,” Votel said. The troops on the ground, he added, “were doing a variety of actions at the same time: They were trying to support their Afghan partners, they were trying to execute resupply operations, and they were trying to protect themselves.”
Demand for charges
But Votel was clear on one point: The hospital was a protected facility that was at no time being used by active Taliban fighters, though some wounded insurgents had been treated there. His statement directly contradicted the claim by many senior Afghan officials that the hospital was being used by Taliban fighters and was therefore a legitimate target.
Still, the release of the investigation’s findings and the announcement of the disciplinary measures, some of which were first leaked by defense officials last month, were unlikely to satisfy Doctors With- out Borders and other human rights groups, many of which have said the attack may have constituted a war crime and called for an independent criminal investigation.
After the announcement, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the French name of Doctors Without Borders, reiterated its calls for an independent investigation, saying in a statement “that it cannot be satisfied solely with a military investigation.”
“Today’s briefing amounts to an admission of an uncontrolled military operation in a densely populated urban area, during which U.S. forces failed to follow the basic laws of war,” said Meinie Nicolai, the group’s president. “It is incomprehensible that, under the circumstances described by the U.S., the attack was not called off.”
John Sifton, the Asia policy director of Human Rights Watch, disputed Votel’s assertion that the airstrike did not constitute a war crime because it was the unintentional result of mistakes and equipment failures, not an intentional attack.
The failure to bring any criminal charges was, “simply put, inexplicable,” Sifton said.
“Gen. Joseph Votel’s assertion that a war crime must be deliberate, or intentional, is flatly wrong,” Sifton added. He said that there are legal precedents for war crimes prosecutions based on acts that were committed with recklessness, and that recklessness or negligence do not necessarily absolve someone of criminal responsibility under the U.S. military code.
The Afghan government said it had seen the report and that it welcomed the decision to discipline U.S. troops. But Dawa Khan Meenapal, a spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, declined to elaborate when asked if the Afghan government had reversed its conclusion that the hospital was being used by the Taliban fighters.
3,000-page report
The broad outlines of what took place in Kunduz, which days earlier had been overrun by Taliban fighters, were established in the weeks and months after the attack: A U.S. AC-130 gunship, responding to a call for support from Afghan commandos who said they were under fire, mistook the hospital for the intended target — a building in the city being used as a base by the Taliban — and unleashed sustained and repeated barrages from its heavy guns on the medical facility, despite frantic calls from Doctors Without Borders to military commanders.
Friday’s announcement and the release of the report by investigators, which runs more than 3,000 pages, provided the most detailed accounting of the U.S. version of events to date.
Investigators concluded that steps taken by several U.S. service members during the attack were “inadequate,” and they identified 16 people whose conduct warranted disciplinary action. Twelve were punished by Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of the U.S.led coalition at the time of the attack, and four others were disciplined by Votel, who at the time was the commander of U.S. Special Operations command.
Votel said Friday the 16 service members were not being identified for privacy reasons and because some were still serving in sensitive deployments overseas.