There was another pre-election pageant on Wednesday. The U.S. Republican presidential candidates took the stage for the third time, and as usual, there was extensive commentary everywhere on the Internet: Ted Cruz gave a monologue about the media, Ben Carson looked sleepy, Marco Rubio finally hit his mark and Jeb Bush did not. Normally, I love this kind of post-debate banter. The theatrics of presidential campaigns are fun, if nothing else. They’ve taken up most of our attention, especially in the past month.
But these campaigns are not the only news happening right now. The world still exists outside of the 2016 election, and we ought to feel ashamed that we haven’t been paying that much attention. While we’ve been watching the circus, the United States may have committed a war crime.
In the early morning hours of Oct. 3, U.S. combat advisors authorized an airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. According to an Associated Press report, a group of U.S. Army Green Berets requested the bombardment, even though they knew it was a hospital, because they believed there was Taliban activity inside. However, that’s not even close to the end of the story.
According to The Washington Post, the U.S. military’s account of what happened changed several times in the days following the attack. Initially, the military reported that they “mistakenly struck” the hospital while they were trying to support Afghan security forces. Their story gradually shifted to calling the bombardment intentional because officials believed the hospital was being used as a “base” for the Taliban.
Doctors Without Borders — known internationally in French as Médecins Sans Frontières — has said it is “disgusted” by these attempts to justify the attack, calling the claim that the hospital was a Taliban base “spurious” and demanding a transparent international investigation. MSF stressed that it “communicated the exact location of the hospital to all parties to the conflict,” yet the bombing continued for 30 minutes while “patients were burning in their beds.” The organization said it made frantic calls to both Washington and Kabul during the attack.
The death toll, originally estimated to be around 19 people, continues to climb. On Oct. 23, the number of known dead had risen to at least 30. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein called the event “utterly tragic, inexcusable and possibly even criminal.”
The hospital was the only one of its kind in the area, providing life-saving trauma care to the northeast region of Afghanistan. It will not reopen after this attack, and the closest hospital is now hours away.
The U.S. Department of Defense is currently performing an internal investigation, but MSF has requested an independent body perform the investigation, saying the United States investigating its own crime is “wholly insufficient.”
There are a lot of questions here and almost no answers. U.S. President Barack Obama has said he “expects a full accounting” of the event from the Pentagon, but that’s not enough. This situation is too serious for an internal investigation.
Convention I of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the body of international humanitarian law that just about every state in the world follows, protects the wounded and medical personnel from military attack. If the United States broke that law — and it appears that they did — someone needs to be held accountable. Forgive me for being skeptical that the United States would take full responsibility on its own. Where were the officials in Washington while MSF was calling the night of the attack? Why would we expect those in charge to be forthcoming now?
This incident is what The Washington Post calls “the worst example of errant U.S. air power in recent years,” yet the incident is barely breaking headlines. There has been plenty of outcry in the international community over this airstrike, but we haven’t tuned in. Because it’s election season, just about everything else has become second string. We’re too distracted by the soap opera antics of our presidential candidates to care about anything else.
It’s not that we shouldn’t be concerned with the election — we are choosing the next leader of our country, after all. But when analyzing every facial expression made by candidates of either party takes precedence over a tragic international incident of the worst kind, we ought to check our priorities.
