Because the United States and Afghanistan must agree to such a probe, it is unlikely to happen.
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The Kunduz building was not a temporary makeshift facility but a large trauma center operated by MSF for four years, according to Shenk.
Accounts of the USA airstrike on a hospital in Afghanistan and the failure of us military training programs are two sides of the same awful story. “When there’s a firefight overhead and you see the map from the ground in real time, it doesn’t pop up as a grid map that says ‘hospital, ‘” he said. The statements made by the US make it clear that the hospital was not destroyed as a result of “collateral damage”, but rather due to complete disregard of worldwide human rights standards. These attacks escalated into street attacks in Kabul, terrorist bombings, assassinations, and more, all under the watch of the U.S. In fact, the US was so proud of their covert involvement in Afghanistan they put Osama Bin Laden’s face in all the papers and called him a hero and a liberator. The humanitarian organization said it had shared the Global Positioning System coordinates of its hospital with both United States and Afghan forces previously, yet it said the facility was “repeatedly hit very precisely” by bombs for more than an hour.
Barack Obama has apologized to MSF, admitting the strike was a mistake.
Although government forces have recaptured much of Kunduz, the city’s collapse to a relatively small militant force was a blow to the Afghan government and its Western allies, illustrating the Taliban’s potency at a time when foreign forces are winding down their long mission in the country. The manual explicitly requires such notification: ” Protection for civilian hospitals may cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded. But what choice do they have? “The latest operational information showed that more than 500 Taliban militants have been killed since the cleanup operations launched 10 days ago”, Ghafoori said. Yet still, the media interpretation of the air strike appears only slightly more deplorable than the act itself.
Earlier on Saturday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani appointed a team of investigators to look into the air strike as well as the circumstances that led to the Taliban’s brief capture of Kunduz. Journalists and mass media institutions are supposed to act as The Fourth Estate, playing the role of the watchdog. What turned it to a nation of “do unto them what we never wish done to us”? Congress needs to find out why.
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In 2012 the US military came under fire for a viral video showing Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. The country has since fallen apart amidst a back and forth with American forces, the Afghan Northern Alliance and the Taliban. Joe McCarthy’s red hunt, innocent blood will be shed in the name of an imagined utopian society. Liu complained that the attack in Kunduz was not just an attack on their hospital and a possible war crime but an attack on the Geneva Conventions that can not be tolerated.
