U.S. General Says Afghans Requested Kunduz Strike

WASHINGTON — The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell, said on Monday that Afghan forces had requested the airstrike that destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the city of Kunduz, conceding that the military had incorrectly reported at first that the response was to protect American troops said to be under direct threat.

But General Campbell’s response to criticism of the American airstrike during a brief news conference at the Pentagon did little to clarify the military’s initial claims that the strike had been an accident. Nor did it explain how an AC-130 gunship, a powerful and precise attack aircraft, killed 22 people, including patients and hospital staff members, during more than 30 minutes of firing on the hospital on Saturday morning as Afghan forces fought to retake Kunduz from the Taliban.

Who called in the strike remained an open question, and the military itself appeared uncertain about whether any of the Afghan or American troops involved in the strike knew that they were unleashing a sustained air attack on a hospital.

At his news conference, General Campbell said that Afghan forces had come under fire near the hospital and then called for help. “This is different from the initial reports which indicated that U.S. forces were threatened and that the airstrike was called on their behalf,” he said.

He suggested that American advisers in Kunduz had a role in coordinating the strike after “the Afghans asked for air support from a Special Forces team that we have on the ground.” But when asked how close the Americans were to the scene of the fighting — in other words, whether they could see the target when the strike was called in — General Campbell refused to answer, repeating that it would “come out in the investigation.”

The answer may well prove crucial. Investigators are already looking at where exactly the American advisers were when the strike was called in, and whether they were relying solely on information from the Afghan forces, defense officials said.

The investigators are also trying to determine why the attack lasted as long as it did. Doctors Without Borders said that its staff in Kabul and Washington repeatedly called the military to tell them that the aircraft was firing on a hospital, but the message either went unheeded or did not get through to commanders with the power to stop the attack.

In an apparent attempt to justify the strike, Afghan officials have begun saying that there were Taliban insurgents on the south side of the hospital. But Doctors Without Borders has insisted there was no fighting around the hospital at the time of the strike, and that it had sent the American military the precise coordinates of its hospital days before the strike.

General Campbell, for his part, was unequivocal when asked on Monday what the rules were on striking a hospital. “Very broadly, we do not strike those kind of targets, absolutely,” he said.

After the news conference, Doctors Without Borders, which said Sunday that it was pulling its operation out of Kunduz, released a statement calling for an independent investigation, and criticizing the shifting American accounts. The military’s “description of the attack keeps changing — from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government,” Christopher Stokes, the general director of Doctors Without Borders, said in the statement. - Read More at NYT

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