I don’t see that anyone should be charged with a war crime in this situation, unless there are facts not already known.
[QUOTE=Ken001]
The problem is the insurgents (or patriots from another point of view) aren’t silly. They know they can use a hospital for cover.
[/QUOTE]
They may not even know that they are not supposed to fire from a hospital. They just shoot at their enemies whenever they see their enemies, no matter where they are.
This situation seems to me to be different from what other insurgents/terrorists do. Hizbollah, for instance, deliberately puts their rocket launchers into schools and hospitals and such, in order to maximize the chances of “collateral damage” so they can blame Israel for war crimes. I don’t think the Afghani insurgents are necessarily doing that. They just don’t play by the rules.
And AFAICT MsF is not deliberately allowing their hospitals to be used as a base from which the insurgents can attack. If they allow anybody to bring anybody else in who is wounded or needs treatment, they are going to wind up with a lot of insurgents on the premises who may or may not respect the rules of war. But if the insurgents start firing from the grounds, then the grounds are going to get return fire and/or airstrikes.
I don’t know how MsF could enforce a policy of “don’t start no shit from the hospital grounds”. But I don’t think it is reasonable to expect the US-backed side to simply accept that sometimes the Talibs will fire on them from purportedly neutral ground, and not do anything about it.
War can’t be made clean entirely. That’s why it’s a bad thing.
I have some family that has worked with MSF (not in Afghanistan, thank God) so I’ve been watching this. I don’t believe they keep guards. I haven’t heard of them letting weapons on hospitals grounds. (I thought that’s was how they kept the peace of treating both sides in a war)
They let all the armies know where this hospital was before they opened it and reminded them it was there and in operation. Even IF coalition forces thought Taliban were firing mortars, missiles, or . . . cows from the hospital, they would have been aware they were launching an airstrike on an active hospital.
As it was pointed out upthread, it would be the US Amy’s job to notify MSF their protection was gone and give them time to clear out before repeatedly bombing them.
The idea that MsF should be liable for a war crime is risible. That is essentially putting every neutral party on notice to not even try to help, because if someone else breaks your neutrality or uses you as a shield YOU are the one liable.
That said, I would not put it beneath some of our Afghan “allies” fingering someone they want out of the way for US strike and not caring who else gets taken out in the process.
I don’t see a war crime, but I see plenty of room for abuse. If non-combatants want to operate in war zones they have to take the moral responsibility when things go wrong. I recall something about a road to hell and good intentions.
There’s absolutely no evidence that, in fact, there were people firing on Afghan or American troops from the hospital.
There’s just some anonymous general who says there was. Without giving his name. A “senior military official”. Who can’t give his name for national security reasons.
The claim that the Taliban were shooting from the hospital appears to be a false. Made up. The anonymous general who made this claim was just making stuff up.
It could be that the Afghan National Army thought that they were being shot at from the hospital, so your conclusion that it is a lie is premature.
Mistakes like that do happen. Last year, several American servicemen were killed when other Americans from the exact same unit mistook them for the enemy, and called in an airstrike on them. Link. I’m afraid not enough is known right now to conclude whether the civilian deaths are the result of maliciousness, incompetence, confusion, or something else.
Mistakes happen in war all the time, we bombed a Chinese Embassy during our air campaign in the Balkans, and killed several Canadian soldiers early in Afghanistan, just as two quick examples.
I’m not an international lawyer, but negligence I don’t believe usually qualifies as a violation of the laws of war. I thought all the various conventions prohibit targeting noncombatants, but surely they can’t prohibit accidentally killing noncombatants. It’d be nice if we could magically make it so it was illegal for any NC to die, and then make it so everyone followed that law, so only combatants died in war, but my understanding of the various treaties and conventions establishing the laws of war is that this is not the case.
We still don’t have a clear narrative of what happened in this bombing. Whether there were Taliban forces in the compound, or whether the Afghan National Army was mistaken, or whether we were mistaken. Or whether WE and the ANA was mistaken etc.
But I think unless we literally knew it was a noncombatant facility and then deliberately attacked it, knowing there were no enemy forces there and that we were bombing it specifically to kill said NCs, it wouldn’t be a war crime. Negligence perhaps, and maybe even actionable (civilly) negligence, but not a war crime.
No more than our accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy was a war crime.
Well, if mere “confusion” by military personnel results in known-about civilian doctors being targeted, I think we’d have to call that at least a species of incompetence.
But, basically, that’s right; we don’t yet know where the failure on the military side was. We can dismiss the notion that the doctors did anything wrong!
I also don’t discount that I don’t know what “known about civilian doctors” means in an operational sense. As in, what is the means by which every coalition pilot in Afghanistan is supposed to know where hospitals, schools, mosques, or other protected areas may be? Are they marked on a map and the pilot didn’t refer to the map? Is it the responsibility of the troops on the ground to alert the pilot to such protected areas? Is it just some guys in headquarters who know where these sites are, and they are supposed to jump on the radio if they think a mistake is about to be made?
I’m genuinely curious as to how this works, and I hope the investigations (or someone here) can explain it.
I was waiting until the pentagon released the video before commenting, as the debate had reached a stalemate. So far thats not happening, and heard something about washington accepting responsibility for the act. So Diplo blah blah and MSF probably gets a shit load of money to go away and stop crying war crime.
This was not a fighter bomber dropping on gps co-ordinates, this was an AC-130 spectre firing 105 mm shells deliberately into an area, IF there was firing from the hospital, it would have been shown, and the only question was if the insurgents had maneuvered there from another area, or had been there all the time.
The next time the Geneva or Hague accords get updated, this needs to be addressed. There is no requirement, that I have found for third parties in a conflict to self report, this is going to happen again.
If a protected place is announced, I don’t believe that failure to de-declare it a protected place for any particular reason should be considered a crime by those who didn’t de-declare it. That’s totally bonkers.
“Hey, looks like we’ve got some people shooting from out our windows!”
“whaaa? Well, OK then. Better let everyone die in their hospital beds and call in an airstrike on this hospital then. This is clearly the obvious moral course.”
I don’t think anyone thinks the doctors did anything wrong - the consensus of the thread is that the idea of blaming them for the incident is more than far-fetched. The question is if the Afghani government and the US were wrong in thinking that insurgents were firing on them from the hospital. The MsF representative says that none of his staff saw it; the Afghanis say they did see it. I don’t know if the US military actually saw it, or just believed the Afghanis.
I doubt we will ever get definitive evidence, so everyone will assume what they want.
If they had no knowledge of armed parties using their facilities as a shield, directly or after hot pursuit, then I would not have them charged either. Thats on the insurgents.
If they did have knowledge that insurgents were using their facilities and vehicles, and failed to report, then thats on them, and its actionable.
This is totally separate from doctors and staff medicating wounded, no matter the affiliation or having insurgents in the hospital, who are obviously concerned about buddies that have been wounded, but not doing anything else.
Pragmatically, I don’t expect to see any medical or third party type being brought before a war crime trial, much the same as I dont expect to see the US calling out Kabul if this turns out to be the other way around.
However MSF and the Red Cross/ Crescent need to show they are trust worthy, and self police if needed.
I was referring to the fact that the American command definitely knew about the location, long in advance. How and when the information is operationally disseminated, or if it adequately was, we don’t know. The locus of the American failure may well be sonewhere in there.
Each organization should form a protective police unit with paramilitary wings ready and able to fight for and protect the core of the Médecins Sans Frontières Movement or the Red Cross State. They could battle the enemies within by trying doctors who have not reported sufficiently to les Americaines; and conduct pitched fire-fights with enemy combatants inside and outside the hospitals.
They could wear black.