Four months after Pakistan’s March 16 strike in Kabul, Amnesty International has called for an investigation into what it describes as a possible war crime: the bombing of the Omid Drug Rehabilitation Centre, a purported 2,000-bed facility where, according to figures cited from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, at least 269 civilians were killed and 122 wounded.
These are horrifying numbers. They demand answers. They do not, however, relieve Amnesty of the responsibility to examine the full chain of events rather than beginning its moral inquiry only at the moment Pakistan’s missiles struck.
Islamabad has categorically rejected the allegation that it intentionally targeted a hospital or rehabilitation centre. Its position is that precision-guided munitions were directed at a military drone workshop and weapons-storage facility, selected on the basis of confirmed intelligence. Pakistani officials further maintain that secondary detonations supported the assessment that ammunition or explosive material was present.
An advocacy organisation’s report is not a judicial determination as it does not possess the intelligence, surveillance record, targeting deliberations or classified threat assessment upon which the operation was based.
Amnesty disputes this account. It also argues that Pakistan has not publicly produced sufficient evidence to establish that the site constituted a legitimate military objective.
That is a serious challenge, and Pakistan should release as much declassified material as operational security permits. But an advocacy organisation’s conclusion is not a judicial determination, as it does not possess the intelligence, surveillance record, targeting deliberations or classified threat assessment upon which the operation was based.
Nor can post-strike imagery alone conclusively establish how every part of a sprawling compound was being used before the attack. The apparent absence of weapons in selected photographs is relevant, but it is not necessarily decisive.
There are other questions. If a fully operational 2,000-bed complex housed thousands of patients, attendants, doctors, nurses and visitors, where is the corresponding volume of contemporaneous footage, eyewitness testimony and hospital documentation?
More importantly, who can independently verify conditions inside Taliban-ruled Afghanistan? The authorities in Kabul have restricted access to international monitors and barred UN Special Rapporteur Richard Bennett from entering the country. An investigation dependent on material emerging from a tightly controlled information environment must acknowledge that limitation prominently.
Yet the greatest omission remains the violence that preceded Pakistan’s action. For years, Islamabad has demanded verifiable measures against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and associated networks operating from Afghan territory. These groups have trained fighters, moved weapons and dispatched suicide bombers into Pakistan, killing soldiers, police officers, teachers, worshippers and children. Kabul’s denials have not stopped the funerals.
An impartial inquiry should examine the civilian casualties, Pakistan’s targeting process and whether precautions required by international law were taken. It must also investigate whether military assets were placed inside or near a civilian-labelled complex and whether Taliban authorities permitted infrastructure supporting anti-Pakistan terrorism to operate from Afghan soil. Human rights do not begin when Pakistan responds. The right to life belongs to Afghans killed in military action, but it also belongs to Pakistanis murdered by terrorists sheltered across the border. Scrutiny that examines only the response while ignoring the aggression that produced it is not justice. It is selective outrage wearing the robes of principle.
The writer is a freelance columnist