WASHINGTON (AP) — Two servicemen have told Congress that American special forces called in an air strike on a hospital in Afghanistan because they believed the Taliban were using it as a command center, contradicting the military’s explanation that the attack was meant for a different building.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, quoted the servicemen without naming them in a letter he sent Tuesday to Defense Secretary Ash Carter. The letter highlights gaps in the military’s explanation of an October air strike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz that killed 31 civilians.
Hunter said the accounts provided to him raise the possibility that the U.S. was manipulated by its Afghan partners into attacking the hospital. If true, that would be a setback in the U.S. effort to work with and train a local force capable of securing that country.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said the secretary had received the letter but the Defense Department would not comment. Hunter declined to identify the servicemen because he said they feared disciplinary action.
The two servicemen told Hunter the U.S. special forces soldiers who called in the air strike were not aware the Doctors Without Borders building was still being used as a hospital. Afghan forces, they say, told them it had become a Taliban command and control center.
“There were enemy in there,” Hunter quotes one of the servicemen as saying. “They had already removed and ransomed the foreign doctors, and they had fired on partnered personnel from there.”
Doctors Without Borders leaders and independent witnesses insist there were no armed men in the hospital, and the military’s investigation supported that contention.
The military’s official account, a summary of which was disclosed on Nov. 25 by the commanding U.S. general in Afghanistan, says the soldiers and airmen intended the air strike to hit a different building a half mile away — an Afghan intelligence facility said to be occupied by the Taliban.
It was only because of technical failures and human error, Gen. John Campbell told reporters, that an AC-130 mistakenly struck and destroyed the trauma center in the Doctors Without Borders hospital.
Campbell’s account didn’t address the evidence that the U.S. had been focusing on the hospital.
The Associated Press has reported that military intelligence analysts had been tracking reports of Taliban activity at the hospital, including the presence of a Pakistani intelligence operative working with insurgents. Specific intelligence gathering flights over the hospital were requested by the analysts, according to records viewed by a current and a former U.S. official.
The day before the attack, a senior special forces commander wrote in a report that the hospital was in Taliban hands and his objective was to clear it. A senior Pentagon official called Doctors Without Borders to ask whether their hospital had been overrun; he was told it had not.
Even after it became evident the attack had killed civilians at a hospital, senior Afghan officials continued to insist that the strike was justified because Taliban had been present.
Pentagon officials have said they cannot discuss the case because of investigations pending into the culpability of individual service members, some of whom have been suspended from duty.
Hunter wrote to Carter of his concern “that inaccurate information and poor intelligence was provided by Afghan forces — including information that was both incorrect and unverified by U.S. intelligence and personnel.”
Campbell said the AC-130 was sent to attack a different building, but when its sensors malfunctioned, the crew used visual cues to home in on what turned out to be the wrong building. One minute before the attack, he said, the crew passed on the coordinates of the building it was about to strike to its headquarters, which knew Doctors Without Borders was in that compound but was unable to detect the mistake in time.
Campbell did not say how the AC-130 got the coordinates of the hospital it was flying over, so it is unclear whether the crew used the plane’s instruments to determine them or got the information from U.S. personnel on the ground, who were working with Afghans.
Campbell did not say whether Afghan forces gave the coordinates of the hospital to the Americans. Afghan special forces had raided the hospital in July and disliked that the hospital treated Taliban.
The military’s investigation was divided into two parts, one of which was a probe designed to examine civilian casualties, which the AP obtained. It says the accounts of service members about how and why the air strike was requested were inconsistent and would have to be resolved by the other investigation, the one examining culpability.
That investigation found that the rules of engagement were not followed, Campbell said, but he did not offer details. He acknowledged that no U.S. ground forces had a direct view of the hospital before or during the attack.
Hunter’s letter questioned how the military could misidentify an internationally run hospital that had been operating for years, given the billions of dollars that have been spent on technology designed to help commanders understand their battlespace.
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Follow Ken Dilanian on Twitter at https://twitter.com/KenDilanianAP.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The fog of war can have disastrous results. This is one reason I believe we should pulled out of this insane fight long ago.
I imagine a politician would have “questions”. Convenient ones too I imagine.
Lets go over this by the numbers. The MSF guys had notified Military Forces their location was a hospital. No one disputes that. The hospital was struck my a US AC 130. No one disputes that. MSF did NOT notify the crew on that AC 130 of their location’s nature and the Command and Staff guys that should have did not. The strike happened because the folks on that AC 130 did not have a grid restriction on that location. That is a Command error. A serious one but an error.
The Afghan forces that asked for the support had claimed the location was a Taliban C and C location and had done so well before the strike. It is possible they received fire ( in that past ) from that location by Taliban that entered it against the rules of MSF. MSF is very quiet on this.
But no the story seems to becoming clear. Afghan ground troops claimed to be under small arms assault from that location. Not disputed. They called their American counterparts for assistance. Not disputed. Those Americans, also ground forces, opted for an air strike and called it in to USA forces. Not disputed. The location was struck because the crew on the AC 130 had not been told of its nature. Not disputed.
It was not a deliberate strike on a hospital by USA forces and MSF can go fuck themselves for saying it was. But way back in the beginning of this mess there was an idea that Afghan troops may have called the location in with full knowledge of its nature because of past events. I am combat experienced and fought with 3rd world troops. Nothing surprises me. But if that’s the case MSF owes America an apology and they fucking owe it right now. And a bunch of Liberal goody two shoers that love to rag on all things American can go fuck themselves. And a bunch of Conservatives that milked this for anti-Administration anti-Obama purposes can join in that self fucking.
The Airmen on that AC 130 crew are probably sick over the killing those innocents. I’ve done it and it still bothers me 45 years later. But the garbage that was spewed by “politicians with questions”, MSF and other holier than thous at that crew was just fucking disgusting.
That “sensors … malfunctioned” has been sufficiently clarified, over several rounds of effort by the Pentagon to “clarify”, that we now know there was in fact no such hardware malfunction at all.
We KNOW from the previous media outreaches that the gunship was provided with specific coordinates for the target.
We KNOW the CLAIM is that those coordinates were to site of a previous bomb run by US forces and that all that was left thereafter was “an empty field”; indeed it appears it was the very same US gunship that had bombed the building that used to be in that field.
We KNOW the CLAIM is that the gunship’s crew ‘looked about’ for a building that fit the description of the target - even tho there’s been absolutely no description of the allegedly earlier-bombed-out building for us to allow a reasonable ‘testing’ of that claim - which is somehow supposed to be ‘excuse’ why the gunship then proceeded to make multiple attacks on the hospital over the course of more than 45 minutes, including straffing runs at civilians trying to escape the hospital while it was under attack.
The ONLY other reference to the computerized and night-vision-enabled targeting system in the course of the entire pathetic effort to ‘explain’ this atrocity is that apparently at some point OUTSIDE the system’s DESIGN limits, or so goes the claim, someone on the gunship tried to get a long-distance ‘look’ at the target, or a target, or SOMETHING, and of course failed to do so because THAT’S NOT HOW THE SYSTEM’S DESIGNED TO WORK!
What Rep Hunter is doing here is, I would think, a pretty clear attempt to interfere with the pending courts martial that are looking into the atrocity. Hunter’s dad, the former duck or earl or whatever we’re supposed to call the heirs to congressional seats passed from parent to child, was dumber than a box of defective nails, yet he’s a freaking theoretical maths and physics supergenius compared to junior here, so I put the odds on current Rep Hunter getting anything right on this and having any meaningful contribution to make other than further noise and bullshit at 1 part in a kabillion cubed.
I don’t think this was ‘fog of war’ at all: that US airship’s crew is currently under investigation for courts martial.
I call bullcrap on your little fantasy here. MNF has NOT been “quiet” on this at all: in fact, THEY are who initiated the complaint that led to the reports that are screwed up deliberately by Afghani and US forces and has since been put under further investigation aimed at potential proceedings in the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
Yes, the US is not a formal signatory to the ICC’s jurisdiction, but this is a UN operation so US forces are legally under UN joint authority here. The REASON the Pentagon has been hinting at courts martial here is because they want to pretend their way past some US-specific limitations date in hopes of politically bluffing the International Raporter.
Every site where this gets discussed, some sock puppet clowns show up to scatter further fairy dusty in hopes of obfuscating what happened here.