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kunduz
Before the Bombs Drop, the Platitudes Fall
Planet Earth is in desperate need of an honest discussion about the elimination of nuclear weapons and, God help us, ultimately transcending war.
Jan 05, 2023
What is democracy but platitudes and dog whistles? The national direction is quietly predetermined — it’s not up for debate. The president’s role is to sell it to the public; you might say he’s the public-relations director in chief:
“. . . my Administration will seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position the United States to outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors, tackle shared challenges, and set our world firmly on a path toward a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow. . . . We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure.”
These are the words of President Biden, in his introduction to the National Security Strategy, which lays out America’s geopolitical plans for the coming decade. Sounds almost plausible, until you ponder the stuff that isn’t up for public discussion, such as, for instance:
The national defense budget, recently set for 2023 at $858 billion and, as ever, larger than the rest of the world’s military budget combined. And, oh yeah, the modernization — the rebuilding — of the nation’s nuclear weapons over the next three decades at an estimated cost of nearly $2 trillion. As Nuclear Watch put it: “It is, in short, a program of nuclear weapons forever.”
And the latter, of course, will go forward despite the fact that in 2017 the countries of the world — well, most of them (the vote in the United Nations was 122-1) — approved the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which flat-out bans the use, development and possession of nuclear weapons. Fifty countries ratified the treaty by January 2021, making it a global reality; two years later, a total of 68 countries have ratified it, with 23 more in the process of doing so. Not only that, as H. Patricia Hynes points out, the mayors of more than 8,000 cities all across the planet are calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
I mention this to put Biden’s words in perspective. Does “a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow” ignore the demands of most of the world and include the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons, many still on hair-trigger alert? Does it mean the ever-present possibility of war and the ongoing manufacture and sale of every imaginable weapon of war? Is a near-trillion-dollar annual “defense” budget the primary way we intend to “outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors”?
And here’s another flicker of reality that’s missing from Biden’s words: the non-monetary cost of war, which is to say, the “collateral damage.” For some reason, the president fails to mention how many civilians’ deaths — how many children’s deaths — will be necessary to secure a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow. How many hospitals might it be necessary, for instance, for us to accidentally bomb in coming years, as we bombed the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2015, killing 42 people, 24 of whom were patients?
Public relations platitudes do not seem to have room to acknowledge videos of U.S.-inflicted carnage, such as Kathy Kelly’s description of a video of the Kunduz bombing, which showed the president of Doctors Without Borders (a.k.a., Médecins Sans Frontières) walking through the wreckage a short while later and speaking, with “nearly unutterable sadness,” to the family of a child who had just died.
“Doctors had helped the young girl recover,” Kelly writes, “but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. ‘She’s safer here,’ they said.
“The child was among those killed by the U.S. attacks, which recurred at fifteen-minute intervals, for an hour and a half, even though MSF had already issued desperate pleas begging the United States and NATO forces to stop bombing the hospital.”
Those who believe in the necessity of war — such as the president — may well feel shock and sadness when a child, for instance, is unintentionally killed by U.S. military action, but the concept of war comes complete with flowers of regret: It’s the fault of the enemy. And we will not be vulnerable to his whims.
Indeed, the dog whistle in Biden’s brief quote above is the calm acknowledgement of U.S. intention to stand up to the dark forces on the planet, the autocrats, who do not share our vision of freedom for all (except little girls in bombed hospitals). Those who, for whatever reason, believe in the necessity, and even the glory, of war, will feel the pulse of the U.S. military budget coursing through his positive, happy words.
When public relations circumvents reality, an honest discussion is impossible. And Planet Earth is in desperate need of an honest discussion about the elimination of nuclear weapons and, God help us, ultimately transcending war.
As Hynes writes: “If the U.S. could once again replace its masculinist power with creative foreign policy and reach out to Russia and China with the purpose of dismantling nuclear weapons and ending war, life on Earth would have a heightened chance.”
How can this become a country with a creative foreign policy? How can the American public move beyond being spectators and consumers and become actual, literal participants in U.S. foreign policy? Here’s one way: the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, an online event scheduled for November 10-13, 2023.
As Kelly, one of the organizers, describes it: “The Tribunal intends to collect evidence about crimes against humanity committed by those who develop, store, sell, and use weapons to commit crimes against humanity. Testimony is being sought from people who’ve borne the brunt of modern wars, the survivors of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, and Somalia, to name but a few of the places where U.S. weapons have terrified people who’ve meant us no harm.”
Victims of war will be interviewed. Those who wage war, and those who profit from it, will be held accountable to the world. My God, this sounds like real democracy! Is this the level at which truth shatters the platitudes of war?
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'Unacceptable': Kunduz Survivors Lambaste Pentagon Claim of No War Crime
'They should be treated as murders'
Apr 30, 2016
"Unacceptable."
That's the reaction from 27-year old Hamdullah to the Pentagon's announcement Friday that the U.S. military's deadly airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan did not amount to a war crime.
His uncle was among the 42 people killed in the October 3, 2015 strike.
"This was a deliberate bombardment by the American forces, and we are not satisfied that they have said this was not a war crime," Hamdullah told Agence France-Presse. Those responsible, he said, "should be publicly put on trial."
Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym, MSF, along with other human rights groups criticized the U.S. military's assessment of the strike, and the fact that 16 individuals involved face no criminal charges for their roles in the attack.
"The threshold that must be crossed for this deadly incident to amount to a grave breach of international humanitarian law is not whether it was intentional or not," said Meinie Nicolai, MSF President, in reference to CENTCOM head General Joseph Votel's statement that it was not a war crime because it was not intentional. Donna McKay, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, said that the mere administrative punishments represent "an affront to the families of the more than 40 men, women, and children who died that night, punished merely for being in a hospital, a supposed safe haven in a time of war."
Abdul Samad,who lost his nephew in the bombardment, told Stars and Stripes, "Right now, they are 100 percent murders and they should be treated as murders in their own country ... and we want the United States to implement the law over them as murders."
Twenty-four year old Zahidullah, whose cousin was killed in the strike, told AFP the military's assessment that it wasn't a war crime was "a joke" and "unacceptable."
A press statement from MSF Friday referred to the punishment of the personnel--which included "suspension and removal from command, letters of reprimand, formal counseling and extensive retraining"--as "out of proportion to the destruction of a protected medical facility, the deaths of 42 people, the wounding of dozens of others, and the total loss of vital medical services to hundreds of thousands of people."
MSF continues to call for an independent and impartial investigation into the Kunduz strike.
Ahead of a UN Security Council vote May 3, 2016 on a resolution meant to prevent future strikes on hospitals, healthcare workers, and patients, the medical humanitarian organization is hoping to strengthen the message, and is encouraging people to convey support on Facebook and Twitter with hashtag #NotATarget
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Backing MSF, Human Rights Watch Says US Must Consent to War Crimes Probe
'We believe that there is a strong basis for determining that criminal liability exists,' group states in new letter to Gen. Carter
Dec 21, 2015
There is "strong" evidence that the U.S. military attack on a Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan two months ago constituted a criminal act, and should be investigated as such, Human Rights Watch said Monday in a letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter (pdf).
"The attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz involved possible war crimes," said the advocacy group's Washington director Sarah Margon. "The ongoing U.S. inquiry will not be credible unless it considers criminal liability and is protected from improper command influence."
The 30-minute airstrike on October 3 killed at least 42 patients and staff and wounded several others. In November, the Pentagon released the summary of its internal inquiry into the bombing, which blamed the attack on "human error," a conclusion that human rights groups rejected and which MSF said provided "more questions than answers."
The Pentagon's report, as well as the military's "poor record prosecuting alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq," demonstrates the urgent need for an investigation conducted by an independent source rather than the government or the army, HRW said.
"It is essential that you publicly and explicitly clarify that ongoing investigations into the Kunduz attack include a thorough inquiry that considers the possible criminal liability of U.S. personnel, including at the command level," the letter to Carter states. "We believe there is a strong basis for determining criminal liability exists... We also call on you to take all necessary steps to ensure the investigation is independent and not subject to undue command influence."
Carter said the Pentagon's inquiry was "thorough and unbiased," but numerous critics questioned the legitimacy of the government investigating itself for possible war crimes.
"U.S. military commanders who oversaw the Kunduz military operation shouldn't be deciding who gets prosecuted for the MSF hospital attack," Margon said Monday. "The U.S. government should recognize that its resolution of this horrific incident will have repercussions for U.S. military operations far beyond Afghanistan."
MSF has also repeatedly called for the U.S. government to submit to an inquiry conducted by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, which was created under the Geneva Conventions in 1991. The commission has said it was ready to carry out an investigation but could only do so with the U.S. government's consent.
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Evidence Mounts that US Military Knew They Were Bombing Active Hospital
Reporting raises new questions about potential war crimes in U.S. bombing of Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan
Oct 26, 2015
The Associated Press provided new evidence Monday that the U.S. military knew that the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was an active medical facility before they bombed it, bolstering the aid agency's charge that the attack--which killed at least 30 people--amounted to a war crime.
"A day before an American AC130 gunship attacked the hospital, a senior officer in the Green Beret unit wrote in a report that U.S. forces had discussed the hospital with the country director of the medical charity group, presumably in Kabul, according to two people who have seen the document," reports journalist Ken Dilanian.
In addition, MSF spokesperson Tim Shenk told the AP that in the days leading up to the bombing, a U.S. official asked the aid agency whether their Kunduz hospital "had a large group of Taliban fighters in it." According to Shenk, the group "replied that this was not the case. We also stated that we were very clear with both sides to the conflict about the need to respect medical structures."
"Taken together, the revelations add to the growing possibility that U.S. forces destroyed what they knew was a functioning hospital, which would be a violation of the international rules of war," notes Dilanian.
MSF executive director Jason Cone argued in a strongly-worded op-ed published Friday in the New York Times: "Assertions that armed Taliban combatants were on the grounds of our hospital have been discredited, both in this newspaper and elsewhere. Neither our staff members nor Kunduz residents reported seeing armed combatants or any fighting within the hospital compound before the airstrikes."
"Even if there had been 'enemy' activity within the compound," Cone continued, "the warring parties would still have been obligated to uphold basic tenets of the laws of war, including respecting the protected status of hospitals, understanding the nature of targeted structures, and factoring in the potential toll on civilians of any intended attack."
What's more, MSF says that it informed coalition and Afghan officials of its GPS coordinates before and during the attack--to no avail.
Therefore, MSF has charged that the bombing of the hospital--a protected space under humanitarian law--amounts to a war crime, and only an independent probe can be trusted to reveal the truth about the attack. While the U.S., NATO, and Afghan authorities have launched their investigations, MSF argues, "it is impossible to expect parties involved in the conflict to carry out independent and impartial investigations of military actions in which they are themselves implicated."
Earlier this month, the group launched a petition asking the U.S. to consent to "an independent international investigation into the events of October 3 by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC), the only permanent body set up specifically to investigate violations of international humanitarian law." The petition has attracted nearly 325,000 signatures so far.
The AP reporting comes just days after MSF announced that the death toll from the attack "is still rising," with the number of known dead including 10 patients, 13 staff, and seven unrecognizable bodies.
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Investigators Ready to Go, But Will US Consent to Hospital Bombing Probe?
'We need to know if the rules of war have changed,' says MSF
Oct 14, 2015
Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) on Wednesday are waiting for a response from the U.S. and Afghanistan to approve a formal investigation into the bombing of its charity hospital earlier this month.
MSF announced that a formal request had been made to the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) to investigate the U.S. military airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, marking the first time the Commission has been activated since its inception in 1991 under the Geneva Conventions.
"The IHFFC stands ready to undertake an investigation but can only do so based on the consent of the concerned State or States," the commission wrote in a statement Wednesday.
It is unclear if the U.S. or Afghanistan will permit the investigation. MSF has consistently said it cannot rely on internal investigations by the U.S. Department of Defense, Afghan officials, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which are currently underway and previously called on both governments to allow for an independent probe of the October 3 bombing that killed 22 people, including patients and staff.
President Obama formally apologized to the medical charity, and the Pentagon has said it plans to give "condolence payments" to victims' families. Still, MSF international president Dr. Joanne Liu has maintained that the organization's biggest priority is an impartial inquiry into the airstrike.
"We have received apologies and condolences, but this is not enough. We are still in the dark about why a well-known hospital full of patients and medical staff was repeatedly bombarded for over an hour," Liu said Wednesday. "We need to understand what happened and why."
"We need to know if the rules of war have changed, not just for Kunduz, but for the safety of our teams working in frontline hospitals all over the world," Liu said.
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Why Bombing the Kunduz Hospital Was Probably a War Crime
Oct 11, 2015
Did the U.S. military commit a war crime when it bombed a hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz and killed at least 22 people? It's too early for experts to say for certain, but there's good reason to believe the attack may have violated international humanitarian law.
Hospitals enjoy a special status that protects them from deliberate attack. They are generally filled with protected persons—medical personnel, civilians, sick or wounded soldiers, enemy and friendly—none of whom may be willfully wounded or killed.
"While hospitals can lose that protection if they're being used for military purposes, the standard is very high," says James Ross, the legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch. What if the unsubstantiated Afghan claims about Taliban fighters being deployed at the hospital are true? "Even if this were the case, it would not have allowed for the kind of attacks that struck the hospital," Ross told me.
On October 3, a U.S. AC-130 gunship fired on a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, for more than 30 minutes, killing 12 staff members and at least 10 patients while wounding 37 others. "There are no words for how terrible it was," said MSF nurse Lajos Zoltan Jecs, who was in the trauma center during the airstrike. "In the Intensive Care Unit, six patients were burning in their beds. The first moments were just chaos. Enough staff had survived so we could help all the wounded with treatable wounds. But there were too many that we couldn't help."
One of the last providers of medical care in Kunduz -- the first major enclave to fall to the Taliban since the Afghanistan War began in 2001 -- MSF has since withdrawn its personnel from the city.
Initial reports from the U.S. military alleged that U.S. forces were under attack in the vicinity of the hospital, prompting the airstrike. Gen. John Campbell, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, later said this was not the case and that Afghan forces requested air support. However, he also said, speaking broadly about sites like medical facilities and schools, that "we do not strike those kind of targets." Afghan officials later claimed the "hospital campus was 100 percent used by the Taliban," a charge that MSF strenuously denies.
Even if there was any truth to those allegations -- and to date, no evidence has emerged of the Taliban fighting from the hospital grounds -- the bombing would likely still be a violation of international law.
"These statements imply that Afghan and U.S. forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present," Christopher Stokes, MSF's general director, said in a statement. "This amounts to an admission of a war crime."
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Not Satisfied With Obama Apology, MSF Repeats Demand for Independent Probe
Head of aid organizations says only acceptable response is US endorsement of an independent, global investigation into what happened in Kunduz
Oct 08, 2015
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) officials signaled on Wednesday that they are not satisfied with President Barack Obama's apology for his military's deadly bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, and reiterated their demand for the U.S. to "consent" to a global, independent investigation.
In a sharply-worded statement, MSF International president Dr. Joanne Liu said, "We received President Obama's apology today for the attack against our trauma hospital in Afghanistan."
"However," Liu continued, "we reiterate our ask that the U.S. government consent to an independent investigation led by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission [IHFFC] to establish what happened in Kunduz, how it happened, and why it happened."
"Whatever apology or excuse Obama has prepared he can save it because, at the end of the day, what counts here is accountability."
--Suraia Sahar, Afghans United for Justice
Obama's rare phone call from the Oval Office came five days after the deadly attack and followed reluctance from the White House to issue a formal apology. It followed at least four changes in the U.S. military's official story about how and why its forces carried out the bombing that killed 22 people--three of them children--and wounded 37.
According to a statement from the White House, the president "assured Dr. Liu of his expectation that the Department of Defense investigation currently underway would provide a transparent, thorough, and objective accounting of the facts and circumstances of the incident and pledged full cooperation with the joint investigations being conducted with NATO and the Afghan Government."
However, the pledge falls far short of what MSF is asking for: an independent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, created in 1991 under the Geneva Conventions. The humanitarian organization declared, "The IHFFC is set up for precisely this purpose: to independently investigate humanitarian law violations, such as attacks on hospitals, which are protected in conflict zones. "
In a less publicized development on Wednesday, the president also called Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to express "his condolences for the Afghan civilians killed and injured" in the attack on the MSF hospital.
However, the U.S. bombing of the MSF-run hospital was by no means unique. As Jon Schwarz pointed out at The Intercept on Wednesday, the United States has a long history of bombing civilian facilities and infrastructure, from the Al Jazeera office in Kabul, Afghanistan (November 13, 2001) to the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq (April 8, 2003).
"Whatever apology or excuse Obama has prepared, he can save it because, at the end of the day, what counts here is accountability," Suraia Sahar, an organizer with Afghans United for Justice, told Common Dreams. MSF's status as a well-known foreign organization is "the only reason this even got attention," Sahar said.
"If we were to collect the number of times they killed Afghans," she added, "Obama should have given countless apologies."
Meanwhile, General John Campbell, who oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan, is using the bombing to bolster his argument to prolong the war in Afghanistan, which entered its 15th year on Wednesday.
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