How Can America Respond to a Double Standard in War?
There remain many unanswered questions about the Kunduz strike, including how and when the U.S. forces involved in the strike actually learned about the hospital and how they reacted after learning. But in the meantime, it is interesting to compare how both MSF and the international community has responded to this strike, versus other strikes against MSF aid workers. It reveals a troubling double standard about American conduct that policymakers need to learn how to manage.
The closest analogy to the Kunduz strike happened just this week, when the Saudi air force destroyed an MSF hospital in Saada, Yemen. Unlike in Afghanistan, MSF has not called the strike a war crime and the UN has not led the charge to investigate the strike with an independent team (UPDATE: while MSF still does not refer to the strike as a war crime, after I wrote this the Yemen country director did so in a statement to Reuters; however, since many falsely believe the Saudis to be acting on behalf of American interests, the larger point here still applies I think). Saudi officials have admitted to Vice News that they targeted the hospital deliberately, and have accused MSF of not submitting sufficient notification of the hospital's location to their military. And yet, MSF remains mute about the strike, criticizing it (no one wants to lose a hospital) but not using the same heightened language. And no one has called for a war crimes probe.
The two strikes are similar in a lot of ways: both involve humanitarian workers providing medical care in areas controlled by insurgents (at the time, Kunduz was occupied by the Taliban and Saada is a stronghold of the Houthi insurgency). In both cases, MSF had at some point registered the hospital's location with the attacking forces, and the attacking forces both believed the hospital had either been overrun or used as a base for engaging in combat. Both strikes could, conceivably, be war crimes if investigations reveal the violated the Law of Armed Conflict governing medical facilities.
Other attacks on MSF workers reveal the same troubling tendency to only call incidents involving Americans a war crime. In August of this year, two MSF doctors in South Sudan were killed during a battle between government forces and rebels in the town of Leer. Despite photographic evidence that the hospital was the site of violence, including defamatory graffiti on its walls, MSF has not called the incident a war crime and it has not called for any party to the conflict to be investigated for war crimes (more than 30 aid workers have died in South Sudan).
The pattern repeats elsewhere: in 2014, in the Central Africa Republic three MSF workers were killed in the capital, Bangui. The attack by the mostly-Muslim Seleka rebels targeted the MSF clinic and killed more than a dozen other civilians. MSF did not call the attack a war crime, and UN did not issue a demand for a full investigation into the incident to see if any war crimes were committed. In 2008, a bomb blast at an MSF hospital in Kismayo, Somalia, killed four volunteers. Same pattern: no media campaign to call it a war crime, no UN demand for an independent investigation, no media campaign against the bombers.
http://www.fpri.org/geopoliticus/2015/10/how-can-america-respond-double-standard-war
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