A wounded staff member of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), survivor of the US airstrikes on the MSF Hospital in Kunduz, receives treatment at the Italian aid organization, Emergency's hospital in Kabul on October 6, 2015. Afghan forces called in a US air strike on a Kunduz hospital that killed 22 people, the top American commander in Afghanistan said October 5, 2015, after medical charity MSF branded the incident a war crime. AFP PHOTO / Wakil KohsarWAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty ImagesWAKIL KOHSAR/AFP / Getty Images
Early on Saturday morning, U.S. forces in Afghanistan destroyed a hospital run by the international humanitarian group Médecins sans Frontières. Since then, U.S. officials have compounded the damage with contradictory statements that spread confusion where absolute clarity is required.
Fog of war is a feeble and fashionable catchphrase that makes it too easy to overlook deadly errors in armed conflict. As an excuse for the slaughter of innocent civilians and medical humanitarians, it becomes an outrageous deflection of responsibility.
The U.S. account of the attack has shifted constantly. At first, the hospital deaths were termed "collateral damage" in air strikes targeting nearby Taliban forces threatening the city of Kunduz, and the building was said to have been hit accidentally. But almost immediately it became clear that the hospital was the sole focus of a precise air bombardment that gutted the facility, killing 22 people and wounding 37 more.
All kinds of explanations can be devised for why the world's most advanced military may have believed it was destroying a Taliban stronghold and not a health-care facility. A few of these excuses have been advanced in the past few days, only to be modified as angry rebuttals from MSF officials show them to be dubious and self-serving.
That the building was known to be a hospital is beyond doubt. MSF regularly notified military authorities of the facility's GPS co-ordinates. Hospitals are protected under international humanitarian law, and to attack them deliberately would constitute a war crime.
Once the attack began, MSF personnel repeatedly pleaded with American and Afghan officials to stop the carnage. Yet the firing continued for 30 minutes until the building was a bombed-out shell.
U.S. officials initially justified the attack as a response to Taliban incursions from close to the hospital – one Afghan spokesman said the enemy force were using the hospital as a base. MSF insists there was no fighting in the immediate environs, while categorically denying that Taliban fighters could have been in the hospital.
MSF does not distinguish who it treats by political or military allegiance – and that refusal to take sides may have angered Afghan authorities. But even if the U.S. was given bad intelligence, it has an overriding obligation to protect a hospital, not destroy it. MSF has called the attack a war crime. An impartial investigation is required to find the cause of this tragedy, and determine responsibility.