Once again, the US military has shown that it considers the lives of non-Americans cheap. Its vicious attack on a clinic in the Afghan town of Kunduz run by Doctors without Borders is just the tip of the iceberg. The difference is that America’s impunity from being held to account for its crimes is being challenged.
This incident has hit the headlines primarily because among the 22 dead were Doctors without Borders staff and the internationally respected organisation is rightly kicking up a rumpus labelling the action “a war crime” while demanding an International Humanitarian Fact Finding Commission be permitted to investigate.
Many of the victims, including three children, were burned alive in their beds within a facility that comes under the protection of the Geneva Conventions. Lajos Zoltan Jecs, one of the nurses on duty, said: “There are no words to describe how terrible it was,” seeing six patients being consumed by fire.
Whether the White House would consent to cooperate with any such inquiry is another matter. Unlikely, given that the US has declined to ratify its membership of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and has twisted the arms of its allies to enter into unilateral agreements leaving US military personnel immune from prosecution.
Moreover, the Obama administration rejected signing a Status of Forces agreement with Iraq allowing US troops to remain in the country after the withdrawal date, due to the Iraqi government’s insistence that off-duty forces must be held accountable under Iraqi law.
Plus, even when US soldiers do appear before a military court — such as those who perpetrated sickening physical and sexual abuses on detainees at Abu Ghraib and the marine who shot dead an unarmed wounded prisoner lying on the ground of a Fallujah mosque — either get off scot-free or receive insignificant sentences.
It’s more than probable that had the management and patients been wholly Afghan, the incident would have merited a mere footnote in newspapers and swiftly forgotten just as the thousands of Afghan and Pakistani civilians killed by US drone strikes have been.
Since, 2004, the lives of up to 1,700 Afghan and Pakistani civilians, including those of up to 220 children, have been cut short by American drone attacks according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
There is no excuse for this “mistake” as President Obama refers to the incident. Had those killed and injured been Americans targeted by the air force of a foreign country, his reaction would have been more emotionally charged.
Afghan officials had the clinic’s coordinates and ignored phone calls pleading with the air force to stop firing. Even without knowing the results of any investigation it’s evident that this was no innocent mistake because under the Geneva Conventions, hospitals, clinics and ambulances are inviolable.
Worse, the US has been anything but transparent. The Pentagon has been switching stories, initially referring to the deaths coldly as possible “collateral damage” before attempting to pass the buck to its Afghan partners as having called in the strike.
It was later admitted that the decision was made by the US military which purportedly believed armed Taliban fighters were firing from inside the clinic, although Doctors without Borders and all surviving witnesses vehemently deny that charge.
Obama softened the language calling it “a tragic incident” but the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has a different take. He’s called the airstrikes “utterly tragic, inexcusable, and possibly even criminal.”
Under pressure, the US President took the unusual step of phoning the President of Doctors without Borders, Dr Joanne Liu, to apologise but, by all accounts, his charm failed to melt the resolve of this feisty individual to push for an impartial probe.
Cornered by a mountain of witness testimony and international recriminations, the US Secretary of Defence admits US troops “probably did not follow their own rules in calling in the airstrike.” That’s a cop out when rules of engagement have gone by the board in Afghanistan and elsewhere since 2001 when George W. Bush binned the Geneva Conventions and international rules of war.
When pilots and drone operators have been given free rein to bomb just about anything that moves for so long without any comeback, it’s likely they threw out the rule book eons ago.
President Obama took office pledging to right those wrongs but rather than doing so, he’s been accused of conducting “shadow wars” upping drone attacks and extrajudicial assassinations. This particular incident shines a spotlight on America’s moral army, reflecting the standards of Israel’s — the self-ascribed most moral ‘defence forces’ on the planet.
