Officials said the crew of an AC-130 gunship had been dispatched to hit a Taliban command centre in a different building, 450 yards away.
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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.
The timeline detailed by the USA military indicated that the 29-minute-long strike began at 2:08 a.m. By 2:20 a.m. a caller from MSF reported the attack to Bagram air base.
An American investigation finds the attack on a doctors without borders trauma hospital in Afghanistan could have been avoided.
US General John Campbell said Wednesday in Kabul that fatigue compounded by decision-making and equipment failures was responsible. Gen. Wilson Shoffner, a military spokesman in Kabul.
BOWMAN: Well, we’ll see what happens if there’s an independent investigation, but most people say that’s unlikely to happen.
“Chaos does not justify this tragedy”, Shoffner said. “It is shocking that an attack can be carried out when USA forces have neither eyes on a target nor access to a no-strike list, and have malfunctioning communications systems”.
It is close to two months since a hospital run by the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in the north Afghanistan city of Kunduz was devastated in an airstrike.
Campbell took the unusual step on Wednesday of releasing a brief summary of the investigation’s conclusions. The American AC-130 gunship thought the description relayed to him matched the building, which turned out to be the hospital. The charity further added that United States and Afghan forces had been provided exact coordinates of the hospital facility – which was bombed overnight in strikes that lasted over an hour. And during the flight the electronic systems malfunctioned, preventing the pilots from sending or receiving emails or electronic messages or transmitting video back to control rooms, Campbell said. That meant the Air Force controller on the ground was hampered in aiding the targeting.
“The destruction of a protected facility without verifying the target – in this case a functioning hospital full of medical staff and patients – can not only be dismissed as individual human error or breaches of the U.S. rules of engagement”, he continued, adding that the group reiterates its call for an independent and impartial investigation.
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“The extensive, quite precise destruction of this hospital… doesn’t indicate a mistake”. As a result, when the flight crew input the coordinates it had been given, the gunship’s computers inaccurately displayed an open field as the target, the report found. The investigation also found that the crew relied nearly entirely on a physical description of the building, as opposed to grid coordinates, which led to the strike on the wrong building. But some of the crew either ignored this or overruled this new information.
