I have read too many apologies in the comments for the shameful behavior of the United States Military shelling of the Médecins Sans Frontière compound in Kunduz.
We are guilty. All of us. Especially those in the direct chain of command who should be arrested, convicted, and locked up for murder. Don't believe in the Death Penalty.
I know people who work with MSF and they are no cowards. If Brussels was not pulling them out, they'd stay.
Are you proud of this?
I understand MSF because, frankly, there is no hospital any more.
The New York Times
Doctors Without Borders said Sunday that it was withdrawing from Kunduz, a day after its hospital there was hit by what appeared to be an American airstrike, leaving the remaining residents in the embattled northern Afghan city even more vulnerable.
The aid organization also raised the death toll in Saturday’s airstrike on the hospital, saying that three more patients had died, raising the total fatalities to 22 — 10 patients and 12 staff members. The charity has said that at least three of the dead patients were children, and that 37 people were wounded in the attack.
“No medical activities are possible now in the MSF hospital in Kunduz, at a time when the medical needs are immense,” said Tim Shenk, a spokesman for the organization in New York.
The Guardian
MSF says 22 people were killed by the bombing, which Afghan officials now claim was in retaliation for fire from Taliban fighters hiding in the hospital. The president, Barack Obama, announced on Sunday he was launching a full investigation into the circumstances.
In a robust rejection of the allegation that Taliban fighters were sheltering in the hospital grounds, the MSF general director, Christopher Stokes, said: “Not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the MSF hospital compound prior to the US airstrike on Saturday morning.
“The hospital was full of MSF staff, patients and their caretakers. It is 12 MSF staff members and 10 patients, including three children, who were killed in the attack.”
Stokes reiterated that the main hospital building was “repeatedly and very precisely hit during each aerial raid, while the rest of the compound was left mostly untouched”.
Huffington Post
Last week, the Taliban began the process of retaking Afghanistan, starting with the northern city of Kunduz. The U.S. and Afghan governments have since been battling to recapture it -- a fight that included the U.S. bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital that killed at least 12 medical staff, along with at least seven patients, on Saturday.
The Taliban has since charged that Afghan intelligence purposely gave the U.S. the hospital's coordinates. Even the possibility that such an accusation is true -- and the duration of the sustained attack suggests that something unusual happened -- points toward the reason that Afghanistan is headed back toward Taliban control: The government is thoroughly corrupt, and the U.S. has been unwilling to take measures to address the situation. While a handful of civilian and military leaders identified corruption as an existential threat to the country, the problem remains unsolved.
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Reporting from the region makes it clear that the Afghan government lost the population as a result of its corruption. The way it erodes public support is intuitive: Imagine that you are an Afghan civilian generally opposed to the extremism of the Taliban. Yet for nearly everything you need to do -- travel to and from work, transport merchandise, enroll in school, open a business -- you get shaken down, often by somebody of a different ethnicity. The Taliban, with all its piety, at least might not be corrupt, you start to think.
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Like the Islamic State's capture of large parts of Iraq, the Taliban successes in and around Kunduz are the almost inevitable consequence of corrupt and abusive governance. This is not a recent phenomenon. Back in the spring of 2009, when I first looked closely at Kunduz, the governor was famous for his land grabs. In an arid place like Afghanistan, almost entirely dependent on high-end agriculture, fruit growing and such, land is incredibly precious. Stealing someone's land is worse than murdering them. The German military had responsibility for the province, and the intelligence chief's assessment was "everyone around him is corrupt." That was six and a half years ago, and nothing changed in the interim. Years of built-up grievances and no avenue of recourse drive people to extremes. We've been seeing that in the U.S. lately; we shouldn't be surprised to see it -- even if in different forms -- in Afghanistan.