Just as some refuse to mention Israel when condemning killings in Gaza, this civilian atrocity is being greeted with bland statements and obfuscation.
I began the morning of 18 March with a visit to a drug rehabilitation centre that had come under Pakistani military attack less than 48 hours prior. It was a cold and wet morning. The overcast clouds were a particularly drab shade of grey that reflected the anger, sadness, and pain of a country once again gripped by tragedy. Distraught families were making their way along the rain-soaked, muddy road to see if their sons, brothers, and nephews were among the 400 men the Afghan authorities said were killed while trying to kick addictions to everything from heroin to crystal meth to the ecstasy-like party pills that have become the drug of choice among the nation’s youth.
As rain continued to fall, a mother trudged through the mud carrying her baby son. The playful yellow onesie she had wrapped him up in brought to mind a mix between Pikachu and a cartoon duckling. Her daughter, whose hair was pulled up in a playful top knot, struggled to keep up with the harried mother.
They were walking towards pieces of paper stuck to wood boards.
“What are these,” she asked. “The names of the injured survivors,” a young man replied. She asked for help finding her son’s name. He scanned the sheets. When he finally located her son’s name, the mother’s demeanour changed. Even covered in her black and purple niqab, it was clear she had gone from frantic confusion to distraught and dismayed.
“This is good. It means he’s still alive,” he said, but it was clear that the mother was not reassured. She now needed to find out which hospital he might be in.
As she headed towards the entrance gate, I noticed the name of the facility. I had been here before. Exactly 10 years ago. I had visited to write about its just opened doors, including for a Pakistani media outlet.
Standing there in the cold 10 years later, I was taken by the fact that a facility that was meant to be a symbol of hope and new beginnings for the nation’s three million drug addicts had been transformed into a war crime. Two nights before, it was bombs that rained down on the 1,000-bed treatment centre.
It is now yet another reminder of the violence and destruction of yet another conflict in Afghanistan. A reminder that came less than a month after the United Nations said it had received credible reports that Pakistani airstrikes led to the deaths of at least 13 civilians in Nangarhar province.
Numerous condemnations of the attack referred to the need to protect “civilians and civilian objects” and to uphold “international humanitarian law”. But this is the worst part about it: The strike on the Ibn Sina Drug Addiction Treatment Hospital was not an isolated act. It is yet another entry in a long list of clearly civilian facilities that have come under attack in Afghanistan over the last decade – incidents I have documented for various international media outlets.
In 2015, I wrote about the evening when a United States AC-130 gunship fired 211 shells at an MSF-run clinic in the northern province of Kunduz. That “relentless and brutal” attack killed at least 42 people. The Obama administration would eventually blame it on the then Western-backed (and funded) Afghan National Security Forces. In 2016, I was among a group of journalists standing in the middle of a West Kabul road when it became clear that the Taliban, then an armed opposition group, had attacked workers of Afghanistan’s largest private TV station. Seven TOLO TV workers were killed. In 2018, supporters of the government of former president Ashraf Ghani sought to harass and intimidate me and other Afghan reporters for writing about an Afghan Air Force strike on a religious seminary in Kunduz that killed 30 children
It’s not just Afghanistan, though.
On 1 March, a US bombing destroyed a girl’s primary school in central Iran: At least 100 schoolgirls were killed during the first week of Ramadan. For nearly three years now, Israel has been accused of bombardments and raids in and around medical facilities in Gaza, leading the UN to warn that the healthcare system in Gaza was on the brink of collapse.
This has not gone unnoticed by Afghans, who are starting to accuse Pakistan of copying the tactics of Israel in its own attacks on Afghanistan. Islamabad is attacking its direct neighbour while sitting on Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace and while calling for de-escalation in the latest conflict in the Middle East.
Though the world was quick to condemn the strike on the rehab centre, the wording of those statements seems strangely and unsettlingly familiar.
Everywhere from Save The Children, to Norway’s Foreign Ministry, to the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) released statements about the awful civilian casualties. Yet all of them failed to mention that they were the result of Pakistani military airstrikes.
Norway’s for example, simply said Oslo, “strongly regrets casualties at a drug-rehabilitation center in Kabul”. The secretary-general of the IFRC called it a “recent incident” and mentioned none of the specifics. Not that it was an airstrike. Not the death toll. And not the country who carried out the attack.
When headlines and statements about the actions of the US and Israel obscure the truth of what has happened or who is to blame, tens of thousands of people rush to correct the record and ridicule the journalistic malpractice. Afghans lack both the numbers and the media attention to push back so effectively.
Norway’s statement is particularly odd given the fact that the head of the Afghanistan office for the Norwegian Refugee Council told The New York Times that, “The numbers are in the hundreds,” after visiting the site. He also said he had seen no military facilities in the immediate vicinity, as Pakistan has argued.
The wordplay and obfuscation around Pakistan’s illegal actions is now mimicking those employed around the actions of the United States and Israel in Iran and Gaza.
The difference is that when headlines and statements about the actions of the US and Israel obscure the truth of what has happened or who is to blame, tens of thousands of people rush to correct the record and ridicule the journalistic malpractice. Afghans lack both the numbers and the media attention to push back so effectively.
These vague, toothless statements that fail to hold the aggressor to account, make you question the validity of such comments. Maybe it would have been better for them all to say nothing.
By the evening of 18 March, when the mud had been washed off my clothes and my friends and I had broken our fast, Pakistan made its own announcement – at the behest of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye – they would pause attacks on Afghanistan during the Eid al-Fitr holiday. Federal Minister for Information and Broadcast Ataullah Tarar said Pakistan “offers this gesture in good faith and in keeping with the Islamic norms”.
But that’s of little solace to the Afghan people.
On the one hand, they can now observe their holiday without fear of Pakistani jets flying overhead – even, as they have been, over residential and commercial areas of Kabul and Kandahar. But on the other, the offer came cruelly late for the scores of innocent people killed at the Ibn Sina Drug Addiction Treatment Hospital: They were about to be released for the holiday when the Pakistani strike came.
