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GUEST: Anand Gopal is the author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. He served as an Afghanistan correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor, and has reported on the Middle East and South Asia for Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and other publications.

US forces in Afghanistan bombed a hospital in Kunduz, run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), killing 22 aid workers including 10 patients, 3 of whom were children. MSF denounced the strike saying that they had given the hospital’s coordinates to all sides ahead of time to ensure it would be spared. Kunduz is the site of a major battle unfolding between the Taliban and US and Afghan forces. The US was likely acting on the word of the acting Governor of Kunduz, Hamdullah Danishi, who insisted that the hospital was being used by the Taliban as a base. But MSF has maintained that “Not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the MSF hospital compound prior to the US airstrike on Saturday morning.”
President Obama announced that a full investigation would be carried out, and US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter echoed him. A spokesperson for ISAF forces fighting on the ground told the Guardian newspaper, “The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.” But MSF has angrily denounced it as a war crime and said that “relying only on an internal investigation by a party to the conflict would be wholly insufficient.”

In fact the US has changed its story about the air strike three times in two days.