Just an Accident

Sure.

Doctors With Enemies: Did Afghan Forces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?
By MATTHIEU AIKINS, The New York Times
MAY 17, 2016

For the last hour, the American gunship had been circling high above the city, carefully observing its target with night-­vision sensors and waiting for clearance to strike. It was 2 in the morning on Oct. 3, 2015, and Kunduz City was enveloped in total darkness. The city’s power had gone out five days before — soon after the Taliban took over the provincial capital, in a humiliating blow to the American and Afghan governments — and it stayed off through the bitter fighting that followed, as commandos from both nations counterattacked. The aircraft’s target, a distinctively T-­shaped building set on an expansive lawn, was lit by generators, a beacon in the blacked-­out city.
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An AC-130 circles its target like a ball swung from a string, raining down gunfire along the radius. At 2:08 a.m., the gunship began its assault, starting on the eastern end of the T-­shaped building and working methodically west. For half an hour, the AC-130 fired its 105-­millimeter howitzer, the largest airborne gun in existence, and its 40-­millimeter Bofors cannon, which shoots exploding incendiary rounds and is ideal for hunting people who flee targeted buildings by foot, often referred to by pilots as “squirters.” There were about 50 squirters at the site, the crew noted, a surprisingly high number. Through the infrared scope, the building glowed as it burned, while ghostly shapes that flitted from inside were gunned down.
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The report asserts that it was an accident, a result of equipment failures and bad decisions on the part of the gunship crew and the Special Forces. “The investigation concluded that the personnel involved did not know they were striking a medical facility,” Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of the military’s Central Command, said at a news conference. “They were absolutely trying to do the right thing.”

Even taken at face value, the report reveals more than a simple error. The circumstances that led to the destruction of the hospital are a direct result of how the Special Forces were made to bear the weight of the United States’ contradictory strategy in Afghanistan, which seeks to both end its involvement in the war and prop up the struggling Afghan government. Restricted to a supposedly noncombat role as advisers, the Special Forces in Kunduz ended up calling in the airstrike, which was in support of Afghan troops against a target a quarter-mile away, as self-defense, which meant that it bypassed many safeguards intended to prevent civilian casualties.

Moreover, there is evidence — both buried in the report and from interviews conducted on the front lines in Kunduz — that suggests that Afghan troops may have deliberately provided the hospital as a target. Though the Special Forces later said they were unaware that it was the hospital, the redacted investigation documents show that they passed a description that matched the M.S.F. compound to the AC-130 as a target — a fact that the military elides in its summary of the bombing. This description originated from their Afghan partners. In my conversations with them in November in the aftermath of the bombing, some of the Afghan forces in Kunduz, citing false intelligence that the hospital had been taken over by insurgents, said that it had been justifiably targeted.
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In 2011, M.S.F. opened the hospital in Kunduz, a location it chose because it believed, presciently, that the province’s bloody past presaged a violent future. But some members of the Afghan government and security forces there had little respect for M.S.F.’s neutrality and resented its treatment of wounded Taliban. When I visited Kunduz in November, their anger was still surprisingly raw, despite the recent destruction of the hospital. “They give them medicine; they transport and treat their injured,” Gard, the commander of the quick-­reaction force, told me. “Their existence is a big problem for us.” And though the hospital treated many more wounded for the government, there were rumors that M.S.F. had carried out unnecessary amputations on them, according to Fawzia Yaftali, a member of the provincial council. “The general perception was that M.S.F. supported the Taliban,” she said.

On July 1, an episode occurred that should have been, in retrospect, a warning sign for all involved. A team of Afghan police commandos from elite units mentored by United States and NATO special forces — the 222 and 333 Battalions, which were later part of the Afghan forces sent to Kunduz with the Green Berets — had arrived in Kunduz Province to track a high-­value target, a militant commander named Abu Huzaifa. After targeting Huzaifa in an airstrike, the commandos believed that he had been wounded and taken to the M.S.F. hospital in Kunduz City. They drove there and forced their way inside, where they physically assaulted the staff members and fired their weapons into the air, according to M.S.F. Huzaifa was nowhere to be found.
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Huzaifa would be killed seven weeks later — by an American drone, according to a senior Afghan special forces commander — but bitterness about the hospital raid lingered among the Kunduz security forces. “They hid him,” Gard told me, without offering any evidence. His men had accompanied the police commandos to the hospital. “The people who work there are traitors, all of them.”
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Unknown to M.S.F., Afghan forces in Kunduz were coming to the false conclusion that the hospital was being used as a Taliban stronghold and headquarters, which would have meant the loss of its protected status. “All their most important leaders were inside the hospital, especially Tajiks, Uzbeks and high-­ranking Pakistanis,” Gard said. He claimed his information came from local informants who had been inside the hospital and witnessed the Taliban operating there. “They had raised their flag and established their headquarters there.”

These unconfirmed reports were lent additional weight by signals intelligence. Yaftali, the K.K.A. commander, told me that his unit’s Wolfhound radio direction finders, which allowed them to determine the range and bearing of enemy radios, picked up Taliban transmissions from inside the hospital. “We located about 10 to 15 radios from there,” he said. “The Taliban were inside and outside the hospital.”

The Afghan forces I spoke to said they relayed these reports to the American military, and it’s clear that, before the strike, some Americans were aware of the concerns that the M.S.F. hospital had been taken over by the Taliban. On Oct. 1, Carter Malkasian, a civilian adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, emailed M.S.F. in New York to ask about the safety of its staff and whether Taliban fighters were “holed up” inside the hospital.

Maj. Gen. Mark Quantock, Campbell’s intelli­gence deputy, told investigators: “Although we assessed that there were Taliban using the hospital, you cannot shoot up a building under the current authorities. Period.”

Molinie, M.S.F.’s head of mission in Kabul, said he was then unaware of the American military’s suspicions, which he criticized as baseless. On Sept. 29, he provided Resolute Support with GPS coordinates for four of M.S.F.’s facilities in Kunduz, including the hospital, as a precaution. And the day before the bombing, he coordinated the delivery of three truckloads of medical supplies to Kunduz with an officer at the Special Forces’ headquarters at Bagram. “He informed me of the number of beds, number of international aid workers in the hospital, and that the Taliban were ‘protecting’ the hospital and were treating the government casualties well,” the officer later wrote.
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The AC-130 had already been on station above Kunduz for three hours when, around 1 in the morning, Hutchinson informed the gunship that the Afghan commandos were planning to raid the N.D.S. headquarters and requested that the gunship perform a “defensive scan” of the area. Hutchinson passed on the correct grid coordinates for the N.D.S. compound, which had been given to him by the Afghans; but because the gunship was flying higher than normal to avoid surface-­to-­air missiles, its navigation system pointed the sensor — a powerful night-­vision telescope, essentially — at an empty field, located between the N.D.S. headquarters and the M.S.F. hospital. Confused, the sensor operator scanned around and noticed a large facility nearby with people walking around at night. He started observing it to determine if this was the target. In fact, it was the hospital. The gunship hadn’t been given the building’s coordinates before the mission, and although the hospital had a flag with the M.S.F. logo on its roof, it wasn’t marked with a red cross or a crescent.

The next step was crucial. Hutchinson, who had been conferring via an interpreter with the K.K.A. ground force and couldn’t see the target himself, then gave the AC-130 an “updated description of the compound of interest.” He later told investigators that the Afghans described “a long T-­shaped building with a small offshoot.” He continued: “I can’t remember the word I would have used for it. It’s a walled-­in compound with multiple outbuildings, and there was a gate facing to the north with an arch.”

That description didn’t resemble the N.D.S. headquarters. It matched the hospital.
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Sixteen service members have been disciplined for their role in the airstrike, but the military has declined to pursue criminal charges. The military has argued that while both the Special Forces and the AC-130 crew made serious errors, and in doing so violated the Geneva Conventions, they were not guilty of crimes because they had not known they were targeting a hospital. “The label ‘war crimes’ is typically reserved for intentional acts — intentional targeting of civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects or locations,” Gen. Joseph Votel said. Hutchinson was relieved of command and reprimanded, but he was recently assigned as his battalion’s executive officer, according to Representative Hunter’s office.
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(B)ecause the strike was carried out under the special self-­defense-­of-­others designation given to the Afghan commandos, it didn’t have to be approved by anyone besides Hutchinson and the aircraft commander. Hutchinson, who was inside the police compound, claimed that he thought he saw the K.K.A. convoy nearby and then heard them come under machine-­gun fire. In fact, the report states, the convoy was still five and a half miles away from the target and had not yet been attacked. The investigators concluded that Hutchinson violated the rules of engagement and stated that his “version of events surrounding his decision to authorize the strike is internally inconsistent, implausible and contradicted by other available sources of credible information.”

But Hutchinson was arguably only doing what he was asked to do by his higher-­ups: fight with Afghan forces to retake the city of Kunduz as quickly as possible. “If someone must be held accountable, let it not be the man who was ordered to sky-dive without being given a parachute,” a Green Beret officer in Kunduz — his name is redacted — said, complaining of “moral cowardice” and an “abject failure of leadership.”

As a result of the self-­defense justification, an airstrike against a building — which would normally have gone all the way to General Campbell for approval — could be approved on the spot. These safeguards around airstrikes (which succeeded in reducing civilian casualties from airstrikes, to 204 in 2012 from 353 in 2011, according to United Nations figures) were intended not only to prevent simple errors or collateral damage but also to avoid acting on bad intelligence provided by Afghan sources, who had in the past been careless in passing on unverified rumor as fact, or even seeking to maliciously use American air power to target their rivals.

This, in turn, raises the question of what targeting information was provided by the Afghan forces. The military has focused on the N.D.S. headquarters’ coordinates, which the gunship’s targeting system mistakenly indicated as an open field. But those grids were passed to the Special ­Forces at 6 p.m., when the Afghans informed them of their plan of attack for that night. When Hutchinson asked them, seven hours later, after the confusion with the gunship’s targeting system, about the compound to strike, they gave a description of a “long T-­shaped building” with a north-­facing gate, which he in turn passed to the gunship.

Maj. Gen. William Hickman, who led the military’s investigation, described this as “an ambiguous physical description” that “appeared to match the M.S.F. trauma center.” But it’s actually a rather specific description that corresponds to M.S.F.’s distinctive layout. It does not at all resemble the N.D.S. headquarters, which is a trapezoidal compound with a south-­facing gate and two main rectangular buildings facing each other across a cramped courtyard.

Indeed, according to the report, when the AC-130 returned to a normal altitude, the sensor operator, worried that the navigation system had failed earlier, tried punching in the original grid coordinates, and this time it aimed his sensor at the N.D.S. headquarters. The crew members then did a “side-by-side comparison” of the N.D.S. and M.S.F. sites using both of their sensors, but based on Hutchinson’s description, they decided that they were 100 percent confident that the T-­shaped building was their target.

Hutchinson and the other Special Forces on the ground later told investigators that the Afghans had a second target that night, in addition to the N.D.S. headquarters. They all claimed not to know or recall what exactly it was. “There was actually two targets they said they were going to hit, but they didn’t even have a location for the other one, so we didn’t concern ourselves much with it,” Hutchinson said. Another Green Beret said the Afghans had provided two sets of coordinates, one for the N.D.S. headquarters and the second for what was described as an insurgent command-­and-­control location, but he didn’t know precisely what the other grid referred to. “I don’t recall and don’t want to speculate,” said a third, who claimed to have passed both grids to the aircraft. A member of the gunship crew also said they received “multiple grids” that night.

Could the second target have been the hospital? Did Afghan forces, influenced by their longstanding animosity for M.S.F., believe that it had become a Taliban headquarters and needed to be taken out? Unless their findings have been redacted, the military’s investigators seemed not to have probed these questions.
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On May 3, denouncing a pattern of attacks against medical facilities in conflict zones, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2286, which called for an end to impunity for those responsible. Oddly, some of the individuals seated around the Security Council’s horseshoe-­shaped table represented countries involved in these strikes.

In Yemen, for example, the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and supported with American and British intelligence and weaponry has repeatedly struck medical facilities; it bombed an M.S.F. clinic on Oct. 26, despite having been provided with its coordinates. In Syria, M.S.F. does not provide coordinates of the medical facilities it supports to the Assad regime or the Russian forces backing it, out of fear that the information will be used to target them. Aid and human rights groups have accused both governments of deliberately attacking medical facilities, including an M.S.F.-­supported hospital in northern Syria on Feb. 15, an accusation they have denied.