A peculiar irony is found at the heart of the Amnesty International report on the 16 March strike on Kabul's Omid Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre, and it is worth naming before anything else. Afghanistan, under the Taliban, is a country that has gone out of its way to keep independent eyes out. The UN's own special rapporteur on human rights, Richard Bennett, had been barred from entering the country in 2024, with the Taliban administration accusing him of "spreading propaganda".
Women, who make up half the population and are often the only people local custom permits inside hospitals and shelters to treat other women, have been steadily pushed out of public institutions, UNAMA offices included. And yet, for all odd reasons, the official Afghan voices and UNAMA sourcing find their way into Amnesty Report's footnotes without much apparent difficulty. How is it that a country that closes its doors on the world's monitors seems able to get its version of events out, quoting them?
That contradiction alone should have made Amnesty's investigators more cautious than they appear to have been. But it is worth being fair about what strikes like this actually are before getting to what is wrong with how this one was reported. War, wherever it is fought, leaves scars on the people who never asked to be part of it.
Pakistan knows this better than most nations currently living through it. Its own western borders have absorbed years of strikes, raids and cross-border fire, with the dead count filed away under the benign heading of collateral damage, as though a word could soften what a family actually lost. Afghans know it too, arguably worse.
During the two decades of the American war against the Taliban, Afghan civilians were killed in numbers that rarely made headlines, dismissed in the same collateral-damage language whenever a wedding party or a farming family was caught in the wrong place. The International Criminal Court itself, in 2020, authorised an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by American forces and the CIA in Afghanistan - a rare moment when a body of that stature was willing to say plainly that even a superpower's conduct in war deserved scrutiny. That is precisely where this report falls short.
Those earlier findings, against the Taliban and against the Americans alike, were built on physical evidence, forensic detail and direct interv…
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