U.S. view blocked in clinic strike, notes say

The charred remains of the Doctors Without Borders hospital is seen Oct. 16 after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
The charred remains of the Doctors Without Borders hospital is seen Oct. 16 after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. special forces soldiers who called in an airstrike on a hospital in northern Afghanistan were half a mile away, could not see the target and ordered the attack at the request of their Afghan partners, according to notes of an Afghan security meeting obtained by The Associated Press.

Those new details add to mounting indications that the U.S. military struck a medical facility and killed at least 30 noncombatants without properly vetting information provided by its Afghan allies. The Doctors Without Borders hospital treated Afghan security forces and Taliban alike, but the charity said it refused to admit armed men.

Immediately after the strike, Afghanistan's national security adviser told a European diplomat that his country would take responsibility because "we are without doubt, 100 percent convinced the place was occupied by Taliban," according to notes of the meeting.

More than a month later, no evidence has emerged to support that claim. Eyewitnesses said they saw no gunmen at the hospital, nor did they see evidence of Taliban activity in the days before the attack.

The hourlong attack by an AC-130 gunship came after days of fighting in the northern Afghanistan city. About 35 members of the 3rd Special Forces Group had been helping about 100 Afghan special forces soldiers retake Kunduz from the Taliban, a former U.S. intelligence official said. From their position in the governor's compound, they came under heavy assault by waves of Taliban fighters and sought to use air power to destroy the Taliban's remaining command-and-control nodes around the city.

The Afghans insisted that the hospital had become one of those command centers and urged it to be destroyed, the former official said.

The U.S. commander could not see the medical facility, so he couldn't know firsthand whether the Taliban were using it as a base. Afghan officials said their forces were also a half-mile away, so they were not in a position to know, either.

Members of the special forces unit have told Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who serves on the Armed Services Committee, that they were unaware their target was a functioning hospital until the attack was over, said Joe Kasper, Hunter's spokesman.

The strike raises questions about whether the U.S. military can rely on intelligence from Afghan allies in a war in which a small contingent of Americans will increasingly fight with larger units of local forces.

Also at issue is how U.S. commanders, with sophisticated information technology at their disposal, allowed the strike to go forward despite reports in their databases that the hospital was functioning. Even if armed Taliban fighters had been hiding inside, the U.S. said it would not have been justified in destroying a working hospital filled with wounded patients.

President Barack Obama has apologized for the attack. The Pentagon said it was a mistake that resulted from both human and technical errors and it is investigating, along with NATO and the Afghan government. The U.S. has not endorsed Doctors Without Borders' call for an independent probe.

"No other nation in the history of warfare has gone to the lengths we do to avoid civilian casualties," Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis said in a statement.

The U.S. 3rd Special Forces Group knew the hospital was treating patients, according to a daily log by one of its senior officers written Oct. 2. Doctors Without Borders had made sure the U.S. military command in Kabul had the exact coordinates of the hospital.

But 3rd Group also believed the compound was under the control of the Taliban, the daily log says, without explaining why. That belief was so pervasive in the Pentagon that Carter Malkasian, a senior adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, emailed Doctors Without Borders two days before the attack to ask about it. He was told it wasn't true.

A Section on 11/13/2015

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