US tank enters ruined Afghan hospital putting 'war crime' evidence at risk

A US tank has forced its way into the shell of the Afghanistan hospital destroyed in an airstrike 11 days ago, prompting warnings that the US military may have destroyed evidence in a potential war crimes investigation. The 3 October attack on the Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz killed 10 patients and 12 staff members of the group.

In a statement on Thursday, the medical charity, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said they were informed after Thursday’s “intrusion” that the tank was carrying investigators from a US-Nato-Afghan team which is investigating the attack.

“Their unannounced and forced entry damaged property, destroyed potential evidence and caused stress and fear,” MSF said.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported intrusion, which came as new evidence emerged that US forces operating in the area at the time of the attack knew that the facility was a hospital.

US special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on the hospital days before the attack, because they believed a Pakistani operative was using it as his base, according to areport by the Associated Press citing an unnamed former intelligence official.

The analysts had mapped the area and drawn a circle around the hospital, the official was quoted as saying. The Pakistani man, described both as a Taliban suspect and as a worker for the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence directorate, was killed in the attack, the official told the AP. Of the nearly 200 patients and staff inside the hospital at the time of the attack, more than three dozen were wounded, said MSF, which has called the attack a violation of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime. The group has said some patients burned to death in their beds.

Several investigations of the attack are considering whether the separate American teams involved – special operations analysts, intelligence community officers, the military command that ordered the strike – knew the facility was a hospital, whether they gave warning of a strike and what was happening on the ground at the time.

It is unclear whether the analysts’ knowledge that the facility was a hospital was shared by the command that launched the attack. MSF said GPS coordinates identifying the hospital had been shared with US, coalition and Afghan military officers and civilian officials “as recently as Tuesday 29 September”.

Michael Newton, a West Point graduate and an expert on conduct of hostilities issues at Vanderbilt Law School, listed questions a Defense Department investigation would seek to answer.

“There’s somebody in some part of the force that knows that’s a prohibited target,” Newton said. “The question then is, what are the fire control measures over that place?

“If they were followed, were they adequate? If they weren’t followed, why weren’t they followed? And underneath that, there’s two things. Either, one – they were misapplied. Or, two, there was an exception.”

An example of an exception would be a case of self-defense, Newton said.

The Pentagon originally said the hospital was struck in the course of a firefight involving US troops. General John Campbell, the top US officer in Afghanistan,later said the strike on the hospital was a mistake.

The Pentagon declined further comment on Thursday, citing ongoing investigations.

The Defense Department, Nato and the Afghan government are conducting parallel investigations of the attack, while MSF has called for an inquiry by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, or IHFFC, a never-before-used investigative commission under the Geneva conventions.

“It is impossible to expect the parties involved in the conflict to carry out independent and impartial investigations of acts in which they themselves are implicated,” said MSF in the statement on Thursday. “The preservation of health facilities as neutral, protected spaces depends on [an independent investigation].”

US and Afghan consent is needed for the IHFFC investigation to proceed. MSFlaunched an online petition on Thursday calling on President Barack Obama to consent.

The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said on Thursday that he was “not aware” of the Associated Press report. He declined comment on who gave the order for the strike on the hospital or the motivation for the attack.

“All of those are questions that will be considered by the ongoing Defense Department investigation,” Earnest said. “The president’s expectation is that he will see a full accounting of these facts in context.”

Newton said the Pentagon investigation would be drawing on a wealth of evidence.

“There’s a limited time frame here, it’s a discrete incident, there would be radio logs or at least handwritten notes of radio traffic – I think they’ll absolutely get every relevant fact,” he said.

Newton said the White House silence on the issue of whether the attack could constitute a war crime was appropriate.

“People say, ‘Why won’t the president just call it a war crime, why won’t the secretary of defense just call it a war crime, let’s be honest, that’s what it was’,” said Newton. “The answer is, because in the US military it is a separate offense – unlawful command influence – if higher-level political officials or military officials prejudge a case and start talking about it in public.”

“What actually happened on the ground? That’s the unanswered question.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/us-tank-enters-ruined-afghan-hospital-putting-war-evidence-at-risk

The Indian child labour behind our patio stones

Best known for its gemstones and jewellery trade, Rajasthan is also home to a far less glittering industry. The Indian state’s sandstone sector employs millions of people , thousands of whom are child workers, some as young as five. According to a report released today, 38% of the children surveyed in Rajasthan’s Kota and Bundi districts work in sandstone quarries. Uneducated for the most part and often trapped by debt, the region’s child workers earn as little as £1 per day and are exposed to constant dust, fumes and gas at work.

The study, which surveyed 100 households in the heart of India’s sandstone industry, reveals that most children are employed making cobblestones or chiselling stones. Sandstone quarries produce the raw material for products such as paving slabs and bricks, cobblestones and roofing materials.

“While the research focused on Kota and Bundi regions of Rajasthan, we believe that these findings are representative of problems across the sector,” says Kate Goldman, director of partnerships and philanthropy at children’s charity Unicef UK, which commissioned the report.

Describing child labour as a “huge problem” in India’s sandstone industry, Unicef is calling on the sector to urgently formalise its practices and procedures, and offer meaningful guarantees against dangerous child labour.

The report lays out an ambitious set of recommendations, including stronger children protection measures from all levels of the government as well as a voluntary sustainability standard within the sandstone industry.

Chris Harrop, group marketing director at Marshalls, a UK importer of Indian sandstone and funder of the research, insists that action should be taken immediately.

Top of his list is to establish an agreed set of management steps that buyers can put in place if and when instances of child labour are found. He also says importers should establish a due diligence process to determine which quarries their sandstone is coming from and to ascertain the risk of child labour. “While we can do lots in our supply chain ... the quarries next door have incidences of child labour going on. We can see it every time we visit,” he says.

In reality, however, the influence of foreign buyers and their consumers is limited. The vast bulk of Indian sandstone is destined for the domestic market, with only about 5-7% exported, according to Harrop. Of this only about one-fifth ends up in the UK.

“All the problems are in India and there’s where the solutions can be found,” he says, adding that a living wage for adult workers would help to avoid the poverty trap that pushes children into work.

The issue is persuading India’s sandstone operators to listen. Domestically, the usual levers for action are either weak or non-existent. Government pressure, for instance, is constrained by jurisdictional and capacity problems, the report finds. One priority concern is responsibility for child safety, which currently falls between the state’s department for child protection and the Ministry of Mines.

Indian consumers have so far shown little awareness and almost zero willingness to mobilise around the issue, while civil society groups are under-resourced.

The Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a UK-based cross-sector group representing workers’ rights which has been working in the Indian sandstone sector for a number of years, insists that key players in the industry are now “stepping forward” to work with local NGOs and others to improve working conditions.

“ETI and our members will continue to support this locally-led work and other initiatives that are addressing child labour,” says Peter McAllister, director of the ETI, which counts Marshalls among its corporate participants.

Bimal Arora, chairperson of the Centre for Responsible Business, the New Delhi-based non-profit that carried out the on the ground research for the report, hopes that the findings will accelerate the pace of such initiatives. “The clear hope is that having documented [this issue] and brought it to light, there will be a need for a refocus in this particular sector,” he says.

A key imperative in his view is greater coordination between state agencies at a local, state and national level, led ideally by the Ministry of Mines. Stronger child protection measures at the state level are also required, as is capacity building for labour inspectors and education officers, he adds. As for the sandstone industry, Arora echoes ETI’s preference for a collaborative approach with civil society and government. He points to the success that dialogue processes have had in pushing forward increased standardisation in sectors such as electronics manufacturing and food processing in India.

Other recommendations in the report include the possibility of buyers helping jointly invest in better technologies for quarrying and ensuring that quarry owners provide adequate housing and healthcare facilities for their workers.

Welcome though such steps are, they won’t change the lot of children working in India’s sandstone quarries overnight. Any realistic chance of that happening will require quarry owners to start paying a living wage and government to start cracking down on those operators blatantly flouting the law.

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/oct/16/indian-child-labour-behind-patio-stones-sandstone-rajasthan

Josh Frydenberg puts 'strong moral case' for coal exports to prevent deaths

Energy minister says Australia’s coal exports to India can stop millions dying from burning toxic fuels, citing WHO figures that include deaths from coal stoves There is a “strong moral case” for Australia to export coal to countries such asIndia in order to help prevent millions of deaths, Josh Frydenberg, the federal resources and energy minister, has claimed.

Tony Abbott wrong on coal being ‘good for humanity’, Oxfam report finds

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In language reminiscent of deposed prime minister Tony Abbott, Frydenberg said environmentalists opposed to Adani’s huge Carmichael mine in Queensland, which was approved by the government last week, didn’t grasp the moral virtue of coal exports.

“There is a strong moral case here,” he told ABC’s Insiders program. “Over a billion people don’t have access to electricity. That means that more 2 billion people today are using wood and dung for their cooking.

“The World Health Organisation said this leads to 4.3 million premature deaths. That’s more people dying through this sort of inefficient energy than malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids combined, so there’s a strong moral case that the green activists sometimes don’t comprehend.”

As Frydenberg stated, an estimated 4.3 million people died in 2012 due to the burning of toxic substances, according to the World Health Organisation. However, WHO said these deaths were caused by “coal, wood and biomass stoves.” Frydenberg failed to mention coal as one of the fuels causing these deaths.

In addition, WHO said an estimated 3.7 million people died worldwide in 2012 from outdoor air pollution caused by emissions from “transport, energy, waste management and industry.” In China alone, about 4,000 people die each day due to air pollution. Coal is used in about 40% of the world’s energy production.

The Carmichael mine will extract and export up to 60m tonnes of coal a year via a new rail facility to Abbot Point port, where it will be shipped overseas, primarily to India, via the Great Barrier Reef. The emissions from this coal, when burned, will create an estimated 128m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

Frydenberg said the project was important because it would “create thousands of jobs, it will see billions of dollars invested into those regional economies, but most importantly of all, it will lift hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty, not just in India but right across the world”.

 Coal is not the answer to India's energy poverty, whatever Tony Abbott says

EAS Sarma

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“In India they produce their own coal but they can’t meet the market because they have so many people – over 100 million in India – who don’t have access to electricity.

“There’s a clear increase in demand for coal and indeed energy across the world. In fact energy demand will increase by a third between now and 2040 and the International Energy Agency says 75% of that demand will be met by fossil fuels.”

According to the IEA, coal demand will rise by 15% by 2040 but its growth will come to a “near halt in the 2020s” due to international action on climate change. India has already indicated it will phase out coal imports within three years, although this may prove unrealistic.

Without large cuts to fossil fuel use, the world’s average temperature will exceed the internationally-agreed limit of 2C warming on pre-industrial times by 2040, the IEA said, leading to major impacts upon human health, agriculture and species extinctions.

Frydenberg said the government was still keen to curb “vexatious litigation” from green groups opposed to mining projects over their impact upon the climate, water supplies and threatened species. However, the energy minister said he accepted the Senate was opposed to the idea.

It also appears unlikely that the Carmichael mine will get a slice of the government’s $5bn plan of loans to develop northern Australia, with Frydenberg telling Insiders “this wouldn’t be a priority project for us.” More than a dozen domestic and international banks have already ruled out funding the project.

Al Gore: Coal industry campaign on energy poverty is extremely misleading

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Greens senator Larissa Waters said renewable energy was a much better option for developing countries than coal.

“Claiming there’s a moral case for coal exports confirms yet again how out of touch the Coalition is with the rest of the world,” she said.

“Burning coal causes local health impacts, with millions of premature deaths from air pollution a year, and pollutes local water supplies.

“There’s a strong moral case for Australia to help develop the renewable energy technology that will safely provide people in developing countries with power.”

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/oct/18/josh-frydenberg-puts-strong-moral-case-for-coal-exports-to-prevent-deaths

Afghans and experts in US praise plan to keep troops in Afghanistan

Those with ties to the country welcome Obama’s decision in a year that has seen Taliban attempts to take over Afghan cities, including Kunduz last month To Nilufar Shuja, Barack Obama’s announcement this week to keep some US troops in Afghanistan was a fulfillment of moral responsibility.

“It would have been devastating if the troops had left as planned,” said Shuja, an Afghan American media and business consultant who returned to northern California in June after almost two years of living in Kabul. “The country is not ready to defend itself.

“Lots of things haven’t been done right and many on all sides are to blame, but as both an Afghan and an American who has spent a lot of time living in both places, I appreciate Obama’s sense of responsibility toward ensuring that Afghanistan is not prematurely abandoned.”

Other Afghans with ties to the United States share Shuja’s support for Obama’s decision.

“The presence of US troops will have a lot of positive psychological impact on the Afghan people and the government because the Taliban and other terrorists will not have the feeling that they can rule Afghanistan again. They’ll know that international troops are in Afghanistan,” said Ali Mohammad, a Kabul-based Afghan political analyst.

On Thursday, Obama said he will keep almost 10,000 US troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016 and afterward 5,500 troops will remain at small US bases in the country.

“To the Afghan people, who have suffered so much – Americans’ commitment to you and to a secure, stable and unified Afghanistan, that remains firm … And as you defend and build your country, today is a reminder that the United States keeps our commitments,” Obama said.

The troop numbers are smaller than in previous years, and a great deal will be determined by the next US president, elected in late 2016.

Critics in the US have decried Obama’s announcement as a betrayal of his promise to end the war, and a potential signal of perpetual war.

But to some with ties to Afghanistan, Obama’s statement quells fears that the US would abruptly depart the country, as it did in Iraq in 2011, and leave behind an ill-equipped government and security forces.

Shuja and others say 2015 so far has been a year of panic in Afghanistan with the Taliban’s brazen attempt to take over cities such as Kunduz in late September. Thousands of people, especially young Afghan men, are trying to flee the growing conflict, which has devastated the economy and job prospects. As of August, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 950,000 Afghans are internally displaced because of the fighting in the country.

“The Taliban’s attack on Kunduz shows how all of the progress of the last 13 years can be washed away in an instant,” said Sher Jan Ahmadzai, the coordinator for education and outreach programs at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s center for Afghanistan studies. “Obama’s message is a morale booster for the Afghan security forces.”

Ahmadzai said he is encouraged to learn of Obama’s continued efforts to train the Afghan security forces, especially since recent battles with the Taliban have exhibited their structural deficits. According to a June US Department of Defense Report on Enhancing Security and Stability in Afghanistan, “the AAF [Afghan air force] continues to struggle with a shortage of pilots and aircrews, as well as the maintenance of air platforms”.

Barnett Rubin, a leading expert on Afghan affairs and a former senior adviser to the US government’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the Afghan armed forces have many gaps, but the biggest gaps are not technical military ones.

“A weak and divided government cannot have strong armed forces. As long as political conflict paralyzes the government and keeps institutions from working according to the constitution, the ANSDF [Afghan national security and defense forces] will not be strong,” said Rubin.

Not everyone is convinced that the US’s narrow mission to train Afghan security forces and fight the Taliban and al-Qaida will be enough to grow the economy and attract desperately needed investment to create jobs.

Dost, 18, from Kabul, who didn’t want to give his last name, said that he is planning to pay human smugglers $10,000 to take him to Germany or Sweden.

“I didn’t study and work hard for the last 10 years to now sit around and do nothing. There is no security and not enough jobs for us here,” said Dost, who studied English and computers while attending public school in Kabul beginning in 2002.

Shuja said the generation of Afghans that Dost represents have had the hardest adjustment to the US and Nato troop drawdown.

“It was their generation that benefited the most from the US presence, so of course it’s natural for them to be affected the most by their withdrawal,” she said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/18/afghanistan-experts-obama-troop-levels

Bangladeshi pastor survives knife attack amid rise in Islamist violence

A Bangladeshi pastor has survived an attempt on his life by three men who came to his home pretending to want to learn about Christianity, police and the victim said.

The incident follows the fatal attacks on two foreigners last week in the predominantly Muslim country that is grappling with violence claimed by hardline Islamist groups.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for last week’s attacks, one on a Japanese agricultural worker and another on an Italian aid worker. The Isis claim has been disputed by Bangladesh’s government, which blamed the opposition for trying to destabilise the country.

In the latest attack, the pastor, Luke Sarker, 52, suffered minor injuries on Monday when three men aged 25-30 attacked him with a knife at his home in the north-western district of Pabna, said the area’s senior police official, Siddikur Rahman.

Sarker, the pastor of Faith Bible church, said by phone that the men who attacked him had called him about two weeks ago saying they wanted to visit him to learn about Christianity. After they arrived at his home on Monday, they attacked him with a knife and tried to slit his throat, Sarker said. But as he shouted, his wife came to his rescue and the men fled. Police later recovered a motorbike from outside his home.

Rahman said police had no clues yet about the identities of the three men but suspect they could be members of a fundamentalist group.

Meanwhile, police said they questioned four people on Monday in connection with Saturday’s attack on Japanese agricultural worker Kunio Hoshi, who was killed by unidentified people in northern Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has been struggling in recent months with a rise in violence claimed by hardline Islamic groups, banning several organisations that have been blamed for killing four secular bloggers this year.

Islamic State issued a statement claiming responsibility for Saturday’s attack, according to the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi postings online. The report could not be independently confirmed. Isis also claimed responsibility for the 28 September killing of Italian aid worker Cesare Tavella in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

The Bangladeshi home minister, Asaduzzaman Khan, denied those claims. The government has blamed the country’s main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party and its key ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, for the attacks, accusing the groups of trying to destabilise the country. A spokesman for the BNP denied the charges.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/06/bangladeshi-pastor-survives-knife-attack-rise-islamist-violence

The sneezing monkey with an upturned face, and other other weird species

Hundreds of new(ish) species have been discovered in the eastern Himalayas in recent years, including the ‘walking’ fish and a tissue-wielding, snub-nosed primate

Name: The sneezing monkey.

Age: Depends what you mean.

Please don’t be difficult. OK. Biologically about 7m years; scientifically five years; in environmental PR terms, a few hours.

I have no idea what you are on about. The Myanmar snub-nosed monkey (AKA Rhinopithecus strykeri or “Snubby”) is a species of monkey first identified five years ago. It lives in the northernmost part of Myanmar, in the eastern Himalayas, and there are only about 400 left because of hunting and habitat destruction.

A familiar tale. Where does the sneezing come in? Locals have told scientists the monkeys are easy to find because, owing to their upturned noses, water gets into their nostrils when it rains and they start sneezing. On rainy days, they sit with their heads tucked between their legs to stop the water getting up their noses.

You’re making this up to avoid having to write about the Tory conference. It’s all absolutely true. Locals call it mey nwoah, “the monkey with an upturned face”, and provide it with a regular supply of tissues. OK, that bit’s made up.

Why is Snubby in the news now? Because the World Wide Fund for Nature has revealed that the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey is one of more than 200 new species discovered in the eastern Himalayas in recent years. As well as the sneezing monkey, they are very excited about a walking fish.

Who wouldn’t be? How far can it walk? Well, perhaps “walk” is a bit of journalistic licence on the part of WWF – all for a good cause, you understand. It can wriggle about a quarter of a mile between pools of water.

So a wriggling fish? Yes, I admit it doesn’t sound quite so interesting. But the monkey definitely sneezes.

What’s the good cause? Keeping threatened species alive, of course. “These discoveries show there is still a huge amount to learn about the species that share our world,” says WWF’s Heather Sohl. “It’s a stark reminder that if we don’t act now to protect these fragile ecosystems, untold natural riches could be lost for ever.”

Not to be confused with: The blob fish, dumbo octopus, star-nosed mole, aye-ayeand axolotl – chart-toppers among the world’s weird species.

What about humans – the weirdist species of all? Good point.

Do say: “Bless you.”

Don’t say: “Aren’t there snub-nosed monkeys in China and Vietnam? Do they sneeze too?”

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2015/oct/05/sneezing-monkey-walking-fish-200-new-species-himalayas

Muslim groups sue Myanmar president for Rohingya 'genocide'

A coalition of Muslim groups has filed suit in New York against President Thein Sein of Myanmar and other government officials for alleged crimes against theRohingya minority that they say amount to genocide.

The suit comes a month ahead of critical elections, seen as a test of the nation’s nascent democracy.

A spokesman for the president dismissed the civil suit on Monday. “Myanmar is not a vassal to America. There’s no reason why Myanmar would go and face the lawsuit of a federal court in America,” he said.

The complaint, filed on Thursday, asks Judge Debra Freeman to issue summonses to Thein Sein, foreign minister Wunna Maung Lwin and other officials under the US Alien Tort statute, which has been used in the past by foreign citizens seeking damages from human rights violations committed outside the United States.

The suit alleges the Rohingya “are primary targets of hate crimes and discrimination amounting to genocide fueled by extremist nationalist Buddhist monks and Thein Sein government”.

“Since 1962, the Burman Buddhist supremacist government of Myanmar has ruled with an exclusionary, authoritarian ideology,” it says, adding that Rohingyas are excluded from obtaining citizenship in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and are “brutally persecuted because of their faith and ethnicity”.

This treatment has led large numbers to flee the country, causing a regional migrant crisis.

The plaintiffs include the Burma Task Force, a coalition of 19 Muslim groups, and a member of the Rohingya community who fled Myanmar for the United States.

They claim in the suit that they and relatives “were subjected to genocide, torture, arbitrary detention, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the officials.”

Gurpatwant Pannun, a lawyer whose firm filed the complaint, said the summonses were yet to be delivered. Once they were, Pannun said, the president would have 21 days to respond.

Pannun told AFP they believed Sein should be declared responsible for genocide.

“Once it is declared genocide it becomes [the responsibility of] the US administration to prosecute those who are responsible for genocide because there is a convention that the US has signed,” Pannun said.

Myanmar, which emerged in 2011 from half a century of military rule, is due to hold highly anticipated elections next month.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/06/muslim-groups-sue-myanmar-president-for-rohingya-genocide

Doctors Without Borders airstrike: US alters story for fourth time in four days

US special operations forces – not their Afghan allies – called in the deadly airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, the US commander has conceded.

Shortly before General John Campbell, the commander of the US and Nato war in Afghanistan, testified to a Senate panel, the president of Doctors Without Borders – also known as Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) – said the US and Afghanistanhad made an “admission of a war crime”.

Shifting the US account of the Saturday morning airstrike for the fourth time in as many days, Campbell reiterated that Afghan forces had requested US air cover after being engaged in a “tenacious fight” to retake the northern city of Kunduz from the Taliban. But, modifying the account he gave at a press conference on Monday, Campbell said those Afghan forces had not directly communicated with the US pilots of an AC-130 gunship overhead.

“Even though the Afghans request that support, it still has to go through a rigorous US procedure to enable fires to go on the ground. We had a special operations unit that was in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires,” Campbell told the Senate armed services committee on Tuesday morning.

The airstrike on the hospital is among the worst and most visible cases of civilian deaths caused by US forces during the 14-year Afghanistan war that Barack Obama has declared all but over. It killed 12 MSF staff and 10 patients, who had sought medical treatment after the Taliban overran Kunduz last weekend. Three children died in the airstrike that came in multiple waves and burned patients alive in their beds.

On Tuesday, MSF denounced Campbell’s press conference as an attempt to shift blame to the Afghans.

“The US military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition,” said its director general, Christopher Stokes.

Campbell did not explain whether the procedures to launch the airstrike took into account the GPS coordinates of the MSF field hospital, which its president, Joanne Liu, said were “regularly shared” with US, coalition and Afghan military officers and civilian officials, “as recently as Tuesday 29 September”.

AC-130 gunships, which fly low, typically rely on a pilot visually identifying a target.

It is also unclear where the US special operations forces were relative to the fighting, but Campbell has said that US units were “not directly engaged in the fighting”.

Campbell instead said the hospital was “mistakenly struck” by US forces.

“We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility,” Campbell told US lawmakers, declaring that he wanted an investigation by his command to “take its course” instead of providing further detail.

But Jason Cone, Doctors Without Borders’ US executive director, said Campbell’s shifting story underscored the need for an independent inquiry.

“Today’s statement from General Campbell is just the latest in a long list of confusing accounts from the US military about what happened in Kunduz on Saturday,” Cone said.

“They are now back to talking about a ‘mistake’. A mistake that lasted for more than an hour, despite the fact that the location of the hospital was well known to them and that they were informed during the airstrike that it was a hospital being hit. All this confusion just underlines once again the crucial need for an independent investigation into how a major hospital, full of patients and MSF staff, could be repeatedly bombed.” 

Campbell suggested but did not say that the Afghans were taking fire from the Taliban from within the hospital grounds, a claim the Afghan government has explicitly made. MSF unequivocally denies that the hospital was a source of fire. It has also noted the precision of the strike that hit only the main hospital building and not its adjuncts.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame, said that according to international humanitarian law, the critical question for determining if US forces committed a war crime was whether they had notified the hospital ahead of the strike if they understood the Taliban to be firing from the hospital.

“Any serious violation of the law of armed conflict, such as attacking a hospital that is immune from intentional attack, is a war crime. Hospitals are immune from attack during an armed conflict unless being used by one party to harm the other and then only after a warning that it will be attacked,” O’Connell said.

The US account has now shifted four times in four days. On Saturday, the US military said it did not know for certain that it had struck the hospital but that US forces were taking fire in Kunduz.

On Sunday, it said that the strike took place in the “vicinity” of the hospital and suggested it had been accidentally struck. On Monday, Campbell said that the Afghans requested the strike and said US forces in the area were not “threatened”.

On Tuesday, he clarified that US forces called in the airstrike themselves at Afghan request.

Meanwhile, the defense secretary, Ashton Carter, said in a statement on Tuesday, that the Department of Defense “deeply regrets the loss of innocent lives that resulted from this tragic event”.

Doctors Without Borders has demanded an independent inquiry, rejecting the three current investigations – by the US, Nato and the Afghans – as compromised by their partiality. 

“This attack cannot be brushed aside as a mere mistake or an inevitable consequence of war. Statements from the Afghanistan government have claimed that Taliban forces were using the hospital to fire on coalition forces. These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital, which amounts to an admission of a war crime,” Liu said on Tuesday.

In the past, the US has upbraided both allies and adversaries over the indiscriminate use of aerial strikes.

On Thursday, the US defense secretary said Russia was pouring “gasoline on the fire” of the Syrian civil war after it launched a campaign of airstrikes against opponents of Moscow’s ally Bashar al-Assad.

A day later, the National Security Council spokesman, Ned Price, said the White House was “deeply concerned” that its Saudi ally in the Yemen conflict had bombed a wedding party, something the US itself did in Yemen in 2013.

When Israel shelled a UN school in Gaza housing thousands of displaced Palestinians in August 2014, a State Department spokesman said the US was “appalled” by the “disgraceful” attack.

Addressing Tuesday’s committee hearing, Campbell confirmed that he has recommended to Obama that the US retain thousands of troops in Afghanistan beyond Obama’s presidency – reversing a plan to reduce the force to one focused on protecting the US embassy in Kabul.

He argued for “strategic patience” in the longest war in US history, which has now stretched five years longer than the failed Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/06/doctors-without-borders-airstrike-afghanistan-us-account-changes-again

India, US reiterate threat posed by LeT, Dawood company

Even as recognising the threat posed by South Asian terror groups including Pakistan based Lashkar-e-Taiba and D company, India and the US decided to step up their counter-terrorism efforts, they reached five other key agreements.

An India-US Joint Declaration on Combating Terrorism issued at the end of the first India-US Strategic and Commercial Dialogue on Tuesday renewed a call to Pakistan to bring perpetrators of 2008 Mumbai terror attacks to justice.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and US Secretary of State John Kerry, who led the dialogue, “reiterated the threat posed by entities such as Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, Lashkar-e-Taeba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, D Company, and the Haqqani Network, and other regional groups that seek to undermine stability in South Asia.”

The dialogue set the stage for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third summit with President Barack Obama at the United Nations next week.

Other key outcomes listed by Swaraj and Kerry at a joint press conference after the dialogue included setting up a new mechanism of dialogue between India’s Foreign Secretary and US Deputy Secretary of State on regional and global issues.

The two countries also decided to elevate the secretary-level trilateral with Japan to ministerial-level.

Kerry and Swaraj would meet their Japanese counterpart in New York next week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session.

Kerry also announced that India and the US have also signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation in the field of climate change and renewable energy.

They also decided to launch a Fulbright Climate Fellowship programme.

In another important outcome, India and the US decided to train troops in six African countries before they are deployed on a UN Peacekeeping mission. Kerry described this as a milestone.

The Indian side also welcomed US reiteration of support for India’s membership of the four major multilateral export control regimes including the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

The two countries reaffirmed their commitment to a secure and stable Afghanistan and agreed to launch an Ocean Dialogue.

Both Swaraj and Kerry described the meeting as “meaningful and productive”.

“A main take-away from our discussions includes our shared view that we need to keep the big picture, the strategic framework of relationship in mind, especially when it comes to our strategic security and political interests, regionally as also internationally, as also when we deal with trans-sectional issues,” Swaraj said.