Médecins Sans Frontières faces an onerous responsibility of mitigating the risks its medical crews are confronted by while they help innocents caught in the middle of conflict zones. It and similar organisations undertake this delicate balancing act in the knowledge that if they get it wrong, their own people will die.
But in terms of the US gunship attack on the MSF hospital based in the northern Afghanistan town of Kunduz last month, one wonders what more it could have done. The US military had been advised of the hospital’s location and had put it on a list of buildings not to attack. When it was targeted in the mistaken belief it was a Taliban stronghold, MSF immediately contacted the US forces to alert them, but the strike was not called off for another 17 minutes. By then, 30 people – mostly medical staff and patients – were dead.
The US military has released the results of its internal investigation, which listed a litany of mistakes mostly attributed to “avoidable human error”. Several service members had been suspended from duty but neither the severity of the punishment nor the number and identity of those involved has been released. MSF has rejected the military probe as inadequate and self-serving, calling instead for an independent investigation.
On one hand, nobody should harbour illusions that warfare will ever be precise and mistake-free. Nor is the level of transparency provided by the US – even if deemed deficient by MSF – likely to have been the case if it had involved the military of a more authoritarian regime. The possible involvement of the Russian military in the loss of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over Ukraine, for example, will never face the scrutiny the Kunduz attack has undergone.
Notwithstanding this, MSF’s call for an independent investigation deserves support. The US military has a clear interest in protecting its own and its analysis of similar previous incidents failed to lead to systems that prevented this tragedy. A truly impartial assessment could lead to changes that will allow humanitarian groups in harm’s way being safer as they go about their work.
