August 30, 2008
Joint Inquiry on Deaths of Afghans Is Proposed
By CARLOTTA GALL
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The American commander of the NATO force in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, expressed regret on Friday at the loss of civilian life in the airstrikes last week in western Afghanistan. He offered to conduct a joint investigation with the Afghan government and the United Nations to resolve broad discrepancies in accounts of what had happened.
The general said he did not agree with the United Nations and Afghan government reports that as many as 90 civilians had been killed in the bombardment. But he raised the military's tally of all those killed, including militants, to up to 40, in an interview at his Kabul headquarters.
His overall estimate was slightly higher than that of an official Pentagon review released this week, which repeats the military's earlier assessment that 5 civilians and 25 militants were killed in the raid on the night of Aug. 21 and into the early morning of Aug. 22. But General McKiernan also contended that only 5 civilians had been killed.
If the Afghan and United Nations reports prove to be accurate, the raid by American and Afghan special operations forces on the village of Azizabad may have been the deadliest for civilians of any carried out by United States forces in Afghanistan since 2001. It has also exposed a wide gulf between the American military and the United Nations and Afghan government.
General McKiernan said he was not informed before the United Nations special representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, issued his statement that a human rights team had found convincing evidence that 90 people, including 60 children, had been killed in the airstrikes on the village.
"I am very disappointed in the United Nations because they have not talked to this headquarters before they made that release," the general said.
"I share his concern about civilian casualties," he said of Mr. Eide. "But what I believe is that we have to work together to find out what the facts are before we make public announcements."
There has since been a meeting between his headquarters and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, but Mr. Eide and General McKiernan have still not met or discussed the issue by telephone. The general said he expected to meet Mr. Eide in the course of normal business in the next day or two.
"I am going to make an offer to the government and the United Nations to participate in a joint investigation with the coalition to continue to look at the facts surrounding these allegations and to make sure that we have come as close as we can to everybody knowing the truth of what happened in Azizabad," he said.
Mr. Eide, a Norwegian diplomat, was appointed in March to the post in Afghanistan with the support of the Bush administration. He was given broader powers to better coordinate the international effort in Afghanistan, in particular civil-military affairs and reconstruction and assistance. His mandate includes monitoring and speaking out on human rights.
A United Nations spokesman in Kabul, Dan McNorton, said the organization would welcome a joint investigation if it proved to be broad enough to include all the evidence available. He said that the United Nations would not make any further comments about its findings in Azizabad, but that it continued to stand by its original statement.
General McKiernan, as commander of the NATO force, the International Security Assistance Force, was technically not in command of the operation, which was conducted by Special Operations forces that are under a separate United States coalition command. Yet as the most senior American commander in Afghanistan, in charge of troops in the western region, he said he felt the need to address the issue.
"This was a legitimate insurgent target," he said. "We regret the loss of civilian life, but the numbers that we find on this target area are nowhere near the number reported in the media, and that we believe there was a very deliberate information operation orchestrated by the insurgency, by the Taliban."
He added that he thought that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, had been given bad information. Mr. Karzai dismissed the Afghan corps commander of the western region and the special forces battalion commander after a government delegation, the Ministry of Interior and the Afghan intelligence service all reported findings of high civilian casualties. A senior Afghan Army official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also contended that a high number of civilians had been killed.
General McKiernan said the American forces went through the village and the bombed compounds after dawn on Aug. 22 and found 30 to 35 bodies of men of military age, and 5 dead women and children. They also found a wounded woman and child and took them to Herat for medical treatment.
He said he found it hard to believe the figure of 90 civilians killed because it was so much higher than what the American forces had found. He said he had not heard of one report that 53 bodies had been collected in the village mosque that day. The American forces reported finding 16 to 18 fresh graves in the village on a subsequent visit, he said.
He said the operation killed its target, Mullah Sadiq, a commander with connections to the Taliban who was suspected of being behind roadside bombings.