http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/international/asia/21CIVI.html
Flaws
in
By DEXTER FILKINS
ABUL,
On-site reviews of 11 locations where airstrikes killed as many as 400 civilians suggest that
American commanders have sometimes relied on mistaken information from local
Afghans. Also, the Americans' preference for airstrikes
instead of riskier ground operations has cut off a way of checking the accuracy
of the intelligence.
The reviews, over a six-month period,
found that the Pentagon's use of overwhelming force meant that even when truly
military targets were located, civilians were sometimes killed. The 11 sites
visited accounted for many of the principal places where Afghans and human
rights groups claim that civilians have been killed.
Pentagon officials say their strategy
has evolved in recent months away from airstrikes to
the use of ground forces to hunt down remaining fighters for the Taliban and Al
Qaeda. Since then, air power has been deployed in
mostly a supporting role; still, the effects have often been disastrous.
The American attack this month on
villages in Oruzgan Province, where airstrikes killed at least 54 civilians, has crystallized a
sense of anger here is undermining the good will the United States gained by
helping to dislodge the Taliban. That anger is threatening to frustrate
For the first time, Afghan leaders are
demanding a say in how air raids are conducted. They are even hinting that if
the mistakes continue, they may limit
"We have to be given a larger
role," said Dr. Abdullah, the Afghan foreign minister, in an interview.
"If things do not improve, well, I will certainly pray for the Americans
and wish them success, but I will no longer be able to take part in this."
The Pentagon often relies on information
from warlords and other Afghans whose loyalties are unclear in a country riven
by decades of war and tribal rivalries. That information may be incomplete or
inaccurate, and sometimes even deliberately misleading. As a result, the
Pentagon's critics say, the military has too often struck without a full
understanding of what it was attacking.
American military commanders insist they
take pains to ensure that civilians are spared, often verifying their targets
with several sources of information. In many of the cases cited here, they
insisted that they struck valid military targets. Often, despite evidence on
the ground, they denied that civilians were killed.
Indeed, the American commanders reject
the notion that they may be placing too much reliance on Afghan warlords for
information, or too much reliance on air power to carry out their strategy.
"We painstakingly assess the
potential for injuring civilians or damaging civilian facilities, and
positively identify targets before striking," said Col. Ray Shepherd, the
spokesman for the United States Central Command in
Nonetheless, American officials
acknowledged that the botched strike in Oruzgan has
strained relationships with
The war in
After 78 days of airstrikes
over
American commanders say they have not
kept track of civilian deaths in
Indeed, the extraordinary accuracy of
American airstrikes since they began in October has
produced few of the types of disasters that plagued past wars, when bombs aimed
at one target hit something else instead. In one of those cases here last
November, an American bomb aimed at a building that was thought to harbor a senior Taliban military commander, Jalaluddin Haqqani, hit a mosque.
A reporter visiting the mosque after the
strike found evidence to substantiate Afghans' claim that at least 65 civilians
died. American military officials acknowledged that the mosque had been struck
in error, but a senior American military official was not able to give the
precise number of dead.
Those kinds of incidents have been rare.
Instead, the evidence suggests that many civilians have been killed by airstrikes hitting precisely the target they were aimed at.
The civilians died, the evidence suggests, because they were were made targets by mistake, or because in eagerness to
kill Qaeda and Taliban fighters, Americans did not
carefully differentiate between civilians and military targets.
Field workers with Global Exchange, an
American organization that has sent survey teams into Afghan villages, say they
have compiled a list of 812 Afghan civilians who were killed by American airstrikes. They say they expect that number to grow as
their survey teams reach more remote villages.
Marla Ruzicka,
a Global Exchange field worker in
"Smart bombs are only as smart as
people on the ground," Ms. Ruzicka said.
"Before you bomb, you should be 100 percent certain of who you are
bombing."
The most recent errant strike, around
the
On July 1, during an operation to hunt
Taliban leaders, an American AC-130 gunship attacked four villages around the
hamlet of Kakrak. American soldiers later found
villagers gathering up the limbs of their neighbors.
Local officials counted 54 dead, most of them women and children, and at least
120 wounded.
American pilots fired on Kakrak after Special Operations forces on the ground
reported seeing antiaircraft guns firing, military officials said. According to
the villagers, there were two engagement parties that night, and some of the
men were firing their guns in celebration, an Afghan tradition. The Americans
said their planes had been fired on, but the villagers denied aiming at
anything.
American officials have acknowledged
that the raid killed innocents, and they have sent a team to the village to
investigate.
But the larger issue for Afghans is what
the Americans were doing there in the first place, and why they attacked the
villages with such ferocity. As in past cases, they say the Americans relied on
bad information, from an Afghan intelligence official from another tribe, and
that they fired their guns before they were sure whom they were shooting at.
"The Americans are not from here
and they don't know our traditions or our enemies and who has enemies,"
said Jan Muhammad, the governor of
The American military says that Special
Operations forces operated in the area for some weeks, taking heavy fire from
parts of the province including the area near Kakrak,
and that that is what led them to Kakrak.
The raid on July 1 was the sixth since
January that the
In Kakrak,
five men were arrested. Among the homes hit there was that of Abdul Malik, who fought with Hamid Karzai, now
"Every time they say that they will
coordinate more," Mr. Muhammad said, referring to American commanders.
"They killed my people in Oruzgan, and they said
they would not make a mistake again and that they would contact us first. Then
they did it again."
What angered Afghans like Mr. Muhammad,
and Westerners working in the area, is what they described as a trigger-happy
American approach. No Americans entered the village before the planes opened
fire. Once called in, the American AC-130 gunship, which employs machine guns
and heavy cannons, strafed four villages.
"Two questions remain: why they
attacked with such force, and what precautionary moves do they take to
differentiate between civilians and Al Qaeda and
Taliban," said a Western aid official working in southern
The pattern of striking with maximum
force on questionable targets began months before, when American planes
attacked an ammunition dump in the
Local Afghans said Taliban leaders had
moved a large store of ammunition to Niazi Qala, fearing that the American planes would find it if
they left it stored in a fort in Gardez, the
provincial capital.
The American planes found it anyway,
striking Niazi Qala on the
night of Dec. 29.
A reporter visiting the village a month
after the attack found no sign, apart from remnants of the ammunition depot, of
Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Seven months later, with summer in full
bloom, the town stood lifeless. Six survivors from Niazi
Qala live in a nearby village, among them, Ahmed Gul, a 13-year-old boy with an ill-fitting plastic eye, and
his 12-year-old cousin, Lal Muhammad, his torso crisscrossed with scars.
"All the Americans had to do was
come here, and they could have seen for themselves that there were no Taliban
among us," said Janat Gul,
one of the survivors.
An American military official
interviewed about Niazi Qala
did not deny that civilians were killed there, but he insisted that the village
had been a base for Taliban and Qaeda fighters.
"This compound was in use by Taliban and Al Qaeda
senior leadership," he said. The official did not name who those senior
officials might have been.
Hajji Saifullah,
the leader of the Gardez ruling council, said the
Americans had relied on faulty intelligence provided by a local warlord, Padsha Khan Zadran.
Mr. Zadran,
who was then vying to become governor of the area, told the Americans to strike
the town in order to eliminate a village that had refused to support him, Mr. Saifullah said.
"The Americans got it completely
wrong," Mr. Saifullah said in an interview.
"Those people were not Al Qaeda. The Americans
are listening to the wrong people."
One of the most deadly of the
questionable American raids came when Mr. Zadran
apparently used his influence with the Americans to call in a strike on his
political foes.
On Dec. 20, according to rival Afghan
commanders in Gardez, Mr. Zadran
ordered fighters at a checkpoint south of the city to halt a convoy of tribal
elders from Khost who were heading to
A few hours later, the convoy of elders
was hit by a succession of American attacks, which killed most of the
occupants. The survivors scrambled up a hill, toward the villages of Asmani and Pokharai, and the
American planes, circling back, struck both villages, destroying about 20
homes.
Rival warlords in Gardez
say Mr. Zadran used his satellite phone to tell the
Americans that the convoy was filled with Qaeda
fighters.
The Afghans insist, however, that the
elders in the convoy supported Mr. Karzai's
government.
A few weeks after the strike, two men
from a nearby village who were found sifting through the rubble of Asmani for their relatives' belongings said they had buried
42 villagers after the strike.
The men were adamant that there had
never been any Qaeda or Taliban fugitives there.
"I swear it, I collected all the
bodies, and every one was a villager, somebody I knew," said Hajji Khial Khan, one of the men.
A senior American military commander
said that both the convoy and the villages were valid military targets filled
with enemy forces, and that several senior Taliban leaders were killed or
wounded.
At Asmani, Akal Khan Kharakhel, one of the
men rummaging through the ruins, was asked what lesson the Americans might draw
from what happened. He did not hesitate.
"The Americans' big mistake,"
he said, "was to give satellite telephones to a man who has only one
interest, and not the same one as the Americans."
John F. Burns and Carlotta Gall
contributed reporting to this article from
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