Nation/World

U.S. Military Suspends Members Over Kunduz Hospital Strike

KABUL, Afghanistan — The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell, said Wednesday that several service members had been suspended from duty after an internal military investigation of the U.S. airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz last month.

Calling the airstrike a "tragic mistake," Campbell read a statement announcing the findings of the investigation, which he said concluded that "avoidable human error" was to blame, compounded by technical, mechanical and procedural failures. He said that another contributing factor was that the Special Forces unit had been fighting continuously for days in Kunduz and were fatigued.

The strike, which involved repeated attack passes by a Special Operations AC-130 gunship early Oct. 3, gutted the main hospital building and killed 30 people, mostly patients and Doctors Without Borders staff members. The aid group said the attack went on for more than an hour despite repeated calls by staff members to the military, and despite the hospital's coordinates having been repeatedly sent to the U.S. command.

Campbell and his staff did not explain how many people were being disciplined, or how severely. But a senior U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that among those punished was the Army Special Forces commander on the ground in Kunduz during the fighting. The official would not identify the commander by name but said the officer, a captain, was relieved of his command in Afghanistan on Wednesday morning.

Campbell said the gunship's crew believed it was firing on a different building identified as a Taliban base within Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan that had been invaded by the insurgents days before. The general said the aircraft's targeting systems failed to deliver accurate information, and in addition, email and other electronic systems on board the aircraft, including a live video feed that would normally have brought pictures to higher-level commanders in real time, also failed during the operation.

Nonetheless, he said, U.S. Special Operations troops on the ground did not follow the rules of engagement and the airstrike should not have taken place. After reading the statement, he left the briefing room at his headquarters in Kabul without taking questions or detailing any of the disciplinary action.

Following up, the spokesman for the U.S. command, Brig. Gen. Wilson Shoffner, sought to deflect a reporter's suggestion that responsibility might rest higher up the chain of command. He said the actions of the aircrew and the Special Operations forces "were not appropriate to the threat that they faced." And he repeatedly noted that "some of the individuals involved did not follow the rules of engagement."

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Asked if the military's investigators had questioned Campbell in the course of their inquiry, Shoffner declined to comment. Campbell was in ultimate charge during the incident at Kunduz, but he was reportedly in an aircraft at the time, on his way to testify before Congress on Afghanistan, according to a military official in Kabul.

"I won't comment on Gen. Campbell's position as he is reviewing some of the recommendations that have been made in his capacity as the appointing officer of the investigation," Shoffner said.

Many of Campbell's comments raised more questions than they answered.

The general confirmed that Medecins Sans Frontieres, the French name of the aid group, succeeded in reaching the Special Forces commander to inform him they were attacking a hospital about 12 minutes into the airstrike, at 2:20 a.m. But he said the strike was not called off until 2:37 a.m. — after the aircrew had already stopped. Further, that timeline did not agree with accounts by the aid group and other witnesses, who said the strike went on for more than an hour.

The aid group has called for an independent international inquiry into the airstrike, by a body set up under the Geneva Conventions, but U.S. and Afghan officials have refused to allow that to proceed. The group did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Campbell's remarks, saying it had only been given short notice about the announcement.

But Human Rights Watch reiterated its call for a criminal investigation.

"The Kunduz strike still warrants a criminal investigation into possible war crimes, but the Pentagon did not clarify whether recommendations made to senior commanders include possible criminal investigations," said John Sifton, the Asia Policy Director for Human Rights Watch. "We are deeply concerned that any decision-making about any possible criminal charges — if they are made — remains within the chain of command responsible for military operations in Afghanistan."

In Campbell's account of the investigation, which is said to be 3,000 pages long but has not been publicly released, he said that the targeting system failure on the AC-130 gunship that carried out the airstrike pointed to what proved to be an empty field. Realizing that was not correct, the crew on the gunship then decided to target the Doctors Without Borders hospital as the nearest building to the target coordinates that matched the description of the intended target.

"The investigation found that the actions of the aircrew and the Special Operations commander were not appropriate to the threats that they faced," Shoffner said. "We did not intentionally strike the hospital, and we're absolutely heartbroken over what happened."

Shoffner said that Campbell had directed that U.S. soldiers receive additional training on targeting, planning and rules of engagement.

Neither the commanding general nor his spokesman made any comment on the repeated insistence of senior Afghan officials that the hospital was being used as a base by the Taliban to attack coalition forces.

"This was a tragic but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error," Campbell said. "The medical facility was misidentified as a target by U.S. personnel who believed they were striking a different building several hundred meters away where there were reports of combatants."

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