When they turned on the TV back at the camp, the international media was indeed focused on the battle for Kunduz—but not on the Taliban’s defeat. Every major outlet was covering an American bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital that had led to the deaths of dozens of doctors and patients. There was barely any mention of the significance of the victory in Kunduz. It seemed the entire world had spent the last two days discussing whether the airstrike was a war crime.
The aid organization had provided a detailed accounting of its effort to share its GPS coordinates with the US military as recently as four days before the strike. It also said it had placed two flags bearing the group’s red-lettered logo on the roof of the hospital. The death toll included at least thirty people, among them staff and children sheltering at the facility. The tally was expected to rise as more bodies were identified; many of the remains had been burned beyond recognition.
“The main hospital building, where medical personnel were caring for patients, was repeatedly and very precisely hit during each aerial raid, while the rest of the compound was left mostly untouched. We condemn this attack, which constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law,” said Médecins Sans Frontières’ general director, Christopher Stokes, in a statement to the media. He called the act a war crime.
An investigation team led by Army Brigadier General Richard Kim had already reached Kunduz; they wanted to see Hutch immediately. The phrase “war crime” had sent a rattle of fear through everyone at the camp. Hutch finished briefing the Afghan generals at the 209th Corps headquarters and went straight to Brig. Gen. Kim’s office. An Afghan commander passed him on the way.
“What’s our story?” the commander asked.
“What do you mean, what’s our story?” Hutch said. “We’re just going to tell them what happened.”
Hutch was still wearing the same dust-covered, sweat-soaked uniform he’d worn in battle when he entered the room where Brig. Gen. Kim was waiting. He was sure the matter could be easily cleared up once he had a chance to explain. Everyone knew that the teams had been caught in an intense firefight for four days without respite. No one could question whether their decisions had been made in good faith. He pulled up a chair and sat down to face the investigators. The looks on their faces said otherwise.
They stared at him uncomfortably. The media was describing Hutch as a potential war criminal. A Médecins Sans Frontières hospital had just been bombed because of him. He refused to flinch during the questioning and assured them that he wanted to help with the investigation. He was as upset as anyone about the strike, but he believed they’d done the right thing by going into the city. If they hadn’t, the Taliban would be entrenched by now, and a door-to-door battle to drive them out would have yielded an even higher human cost. Everyone had done their best in a situation they should never have been put in in the first place.
It had been ten years since Hutch’s first tour in Iraq. A decade was a long time to learn how to process the horrors of war. It was clear the bombing was a mistake caused by equipment failure, exhaustion, and human error. He tried to console Ben, the Echo who had been talking to the aircrew on the night of the strike. Ben was in a state of shock.
“I called it,” Hutch kept repeating. “I called it.”
The facts didn’t seem to register with Ben. He blamed himself for the mistake. He tried to avoid reading the news, but he couldn’t help it. There was nothing Hutch could say to console him. Ben thought about the people inside the hospital and revisited his decisions over and over again.
At Camp Pamir, the other Green Berets were also coming down from their highs. Many of them felt angry and bitter. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that the soldiers had put their lives on the line for the United States’ most important battle in Afghanistan. They hadn’t known about the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the city. They thought the aid organization should have closed it down during the battle, instead of putting the lives of its staff and patients on the line. War is hell. Their view was that the airstrike was a tragedy, but as soon as politicians sent soldiers to war, bad things happened. The only way it could have been avoided was to not be at war in the first place.
Hutch tried to reason with them. There was nothing that justified the mistake, he told them. And the army’s decision to investigate was the right thing to do. But the others didn’t agree. Some felt that Hutch was being made a scapegoat for the poor decisions of their leaders, who had allowed them to lose a city to the Taliban.
At Bagram Airfield, an officer gathered the evidence the military had collected of Taliban activity on the hospital grounds and filed it away. If the intelligence became public, it would only cause the US position to look worse by making it seem possible that the hospital had been bombed on purpose.
Hutch called home.
“Is everything okay?” Tina asked. “Because they’re calling it a war crime.”
Footnote
1 As detailed later in the book, the final count was forty-two hospital staff and patients killed in the strike.
PART TWO
REVERSAL
CHAPTER 11
Damage Control in Washington
AT THE TIME OF THE STRIKE, Gen. Campbell, the top commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was headed to Washington to attend the National Security Council meeting with President Obama and testify on progress. When he landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he was told that the deputy chief of staff for operations was waiting on the line from Kabul.
“Sir,” Major General Jeffrey Buchanan said. “We bombed a hospital.”
Médecins Sans Frontières was reporting that the strike had killed at least twenty-two people, including twelve staff members and ten patients, of which three were children. The number was set to rise as more remains were identified.
It was Saturday morning in Afghanistan, and the story was already spinning out of control in the media. The US military spokesman in Kabul had issued a statement saying that the United States had carried out an airstrike that may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby hospital. The statement had to be corrected when more details emerged about the bombing, making it seem that the military was deliberately trying to cover up what had happened.
The spokesman provided reporters with a new version of the story in the evening, but it, too, would turn out to be inaccurate, fueling suspicion that the US military had deliberately bombed a protected facility and possibly committed a war crime.
“US forces conducted an airstrike in Kunduz city at 2:15 a.m. (local), October 3, against insurgents who were directly firing upon US service members advising and assisting Afghan Security Forces in the city of Kunduz,” Col. Brian Tribus said. “The strike was conducted in the vicinity of a Doctors Without Borders medical facility.”
But there were no US forces out in the road at the time of the strike, nor any insurgents firing directly at them. There was not even any evidence that the Afghans had been under threat at the time of the bombing.
The Afghan government, meanwhile, claimed that the hospital had been bombed deliberately because it was sheltering Taliban fighters, which only made the US military look worse. The Afghan army had long hated the hospital for treating the Taliban, and some officials openly defended the bombing. Hamdullah Danishi, the acting governor of Kunduz, went as far as claiming that the Taliban had been shooting on government forces from the hospital.
“The hospital campus was 100 percent used by the Taliban,” he told the Washington Post. “The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there. We tolerated their firing for some time.”
Other Afghan officials confirmed Danishi’s version of events, asserting that the Taliban used the hospital as a base from which to plan attacks against US and Afghan forces.
“There were ten to fifteen terrorists hiding in the hospital last night and they came and attacked,” Sediq Sediqqi, the interior ministry spokesman, told reporters on camera. “They are killed, al
l of the terrorists are killed, but we also lost doctors.”
GEN. CAMPBELL was under pressure to explain to reporters in Washington what had happened, but the US military was still gathering all the facts, and it was difficult to get a grasp of the situation. Looking somber, he appeared on Monday morning in the Pentagon briefing room to take questions from the press. It was October 5, 2015, two days after the strike, and information was still coming in.
“We have now learned that on October 3, Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from US forces. An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat and several civilians were accidentally struck,” he said in his opening statement. “This is different from initial reports which indicated that US forces were threatened and that the airstrike was called on their behalf.”
He did not say whether the hospital had been the target of the airstrike, nor did he explain why Afghan forces had been able to call in the airstrike when the US military was supposed to have stopped providing air support to local forces. Under the new mission, the United States was meant to operate in a training and advisory role and was allowed to strike only in self-defense or to defend Afghans in extremis. The rules prohibited offensive strikes against the Taliban. The degree to which the US military stretched the interpretation of the rules to carry out strikes in favor of Afghan commandos had not been made public. Reporters now suspected, correctly, that the military had not disclosed the full scope of its operations in Afghanistan.
“Do those rules of engagement allow for the Afghans to call in American airstrikes? And what kind of fallback or fail-safe system is there in that process?” NBC reporter Jim Miklaszewski asked.
Gen. Campbell declined to answer.
“I don’t want to go into those great details yet until we get the—the investigation,” he said. “And I don’t want to cover the rules of engagement in this format at this point in time.”
Reporters continued to ask how the strike could have been authorized, and about details provided by Médecins Sans Frontières, including the fact that the organization had repeatedly shared the hospital’s GPS coordinates with the US military. To each question, Gen. Campbell replied that it was too early to say, and the investigation would determine the answers.
“I just wanted to make it crystal clear. There were no US JTACs [combat controllers] under fire at the tactical level when this airstrike was called in?” another reporter asked.
Gen. Campbell repeated his opening statement. “What I said was that the Afghans asked for air support from a Special Forces team that we have on the ground providing train, advise, and assist in Kunduz,” he said. He clarified that early versions of events provided by the US military in Kabul had been wrong. “The initial statement that went out was that US forces were under direct fire contact. What I’m doing is correcting that statement here,” he said.
The briefing only raised more questions about what the US military was doing in Afghanistan. The strike had revealed that the full scope of its operations there had not been made public. A day after facing reporters at the Pentagon, Gen. Campbell went to Capitol Hill to testify about US operations in Afghanistan in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The focus of the conversation changed. Whereas the media was interested in an explanation for the hospital bombing, senators were mostly focused on the imminent US drawdown in Afghanistan.
Gen. Campbell was explicit about his opposition to going to zero troops by 2016. The plan, he told senators, neglected to take into account the rise in violence in Afghanistan and risked compromising the success of the mission there. He described the fall of Kunduz and other territorial losses as a setback but credited the Afghan forces for rallying and regaining control of most of the city.
He did not acknowledge the critical role that SOF had played in the battle for the city, and the senators did not ask for details about their involvement.
“I’ve offered my chain of command several options for a future laydown in 2016 and beyond,” Gen. Campbell said, stating that much had changed in Afghanistan since the United States had decided to withdraw all its troops within a two-year time frame.
He declined to discuss the options in detail but insisted that the Afghan forces were worth the investment and that removing US assistance too early would be a mistake. He added that the emergence of a local Islamic State branch was a factor for consideration, along with the Taliban’s resurgence and the escalation in attacks. He was careful not to exaggerate the Islamic State threat. The reporting was still unclear, and he was concerned that a warning might not go down well with senior Obama officials, who were already reluctant to support a delay in the planned withdrawal of troops.
He found a sympathetic audience in the committee. The chairman, Republican senator John McCain of Arizona, expressed regret for the Kunduz airstrike but did not press him on the circumstances or why US Special Forces were in the city. He, like the other committee members, was more concerned with the Obama administration’s plan to fully withdraw from Afghanistan the following year.
“I just don’t understand why this administration does not understand that if we do what is presently planned beginning three months from now, that we will see the Iraq movie again,” McCain told the committee, referring to the plan to continue to draw down forces. “There is no doubt in anybody’s mind about that.”
CHAPTER 12
Obama Changes the Plan
THE SITUATION ROOM at the White House was packed the following day for the National Security Council meeting to strategize about the way forward in Afghanistan. All the main government departments and agencies were due to brief President Obama ahead of the decision on whether to keep troop numbers stable or continue with the plan to draw down. Peter Lavoy, the NSC’s senior director for South Asia, pulled Gen. Campbell aside before the meeting started.
The national security adviser, Susan Rice, had eventually consented to an interagency review of military force options, and Pentagon officials had the impression that the argument for extending the US troop presence had gained favor. They hoped she would support their recommendation to keep Kandahar Airfield running in the south, where Helmand was at risk of falling. But Rice remained deeply skeptical of any path that did not lead to an embassy-only presence in Kabul by the time President Obama left office.
“They want to go a different route,” Lavoy told Gen. Campbell.
“What? I thought we had agreed on this,” Campbell said.
President Obama walked in, and the meeting started. Rice laid out the agenda for the session, and then each agency provided an update.
Gen. Campbell offered an update on the situation in Kunduz and asserted that it demonstrated that Afghan forces had been able to rally against the Taliban to regain the city. He shared the latest information available on the hospital bombing and the ensuing investigation. The CIA and the State Department broadly supported the military’s case for staying in Afghanistan, but Lavoy’s warning proved correct. Rice recommended proceeding with the closure of Kandahar Airfield and the plan to draw down to fifty-five hundred troops that year.
President Obama turned to General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s highest-ranking military officer.
“Joe, what do you think?” he asked.
The gray-haired former Marine commandant with watery blue eyes had served as the top US general in Afghanistan until 2014. He looked over at his replacement.
“Sir, you need to talk to Gen. Campbell,” Gen. Dunford responded.
President Obama turned to Gen. Campbell.
“J.C., what’s your recommendation?”
Gen. Campbell told him that the United States needed to keep a more robust presence in Afghanistan than originally planned. The Taliban’s gains, along with the emergence of the local Islamic State branch, threatened the achievements the United States had made over the past decade and a half and risked allowing a resurgence of al Qaeda. Furtherm
ore, Afghanistan’s collapse threatened stability in the whole region. He recommended keeping troops in the country beyond 2016.
President Obama found himself between two unappealing options. He didn’t want a permanent war, but nor did he want to leave his successor with no means to blunt the threat of another terrorist attack. He agreed to a change in the plan.
“I don’t like handing this perpetual war in Afghanistan to my successor,” he said. “I also don’t feel that it would be responsible to hand to my successor a growing or just constant and steady terrorist threat, where we remove the best means we have to deal with that threat.”
TWO DAYS LATER, President Obama summoned journalists to the Roosevelt Room in the White House. He stepped to the podium and announced that the United States would keep force levels steady that year and would retain a presence of at least fifty-five hundred troops at the start of 2017. It was a major concession. After President Obama had campaigned on a pledge to end forever wars, the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq would still be going after his last term in office.
He framed the decision as a continuation of support for the Afghan government rather than an extension of a war he had promised to end. He talked up Afghanistan’s leaders, President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah, sidestepping the issue of the shaky, divided government that had been formed at the behest of Secretary of State John Kerry after a disputed presidential election a year earlier had almost tipped the country into civil war.
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