TO THE German commander, it seemed to be a fortuitous target: More than 100 Taliban insurgents were gathering around two hijacked fuel tankers that had become stuck in the mud near this small farming village.
The grainy live video transmitted from an American F-15E fighter jet circling overhead, which was projected on a screen in a German tactical operations centre four miles away, showed numerous black dots around the trucks – each of them a thermal image of a human – but without enough detail to confirm whether they were carrying weapons.
An Afghan informant was on the phone with an intelligence officer at the centre, however, insisting that everybody at the site was an insurgent, according to an account that German officers provided to Nato officials.
Based largely on that informant’s assessment, the commander ordered a 500-pound, satellite-guided bomb to be dropped on each truck early on Friday. The vehicles exploded in a fireball that lit up the night sky for miles, incinerating many of those standing nearby.
A Nato fact-finding team estimated on Saturday that about 125 people were killed in the bombing, at least two dozen of whom – but perhaps many more – were not insurgents. To the team, which is trying to sort out this complicated incident, mindful that the fallout could further sap public support in Afghanistan for Nato’s security mission, the target appeared to be far less clear-cut than it had to the Germans.
One survivor, convalescing from abdominal wounds at a hospital in the nearby city of Kunduz, said he went to the site because he thought he could get free fuel. Another patient, a 14-year-old boy with shrapnel in his left leg, said he went to gawk, against his father’s advice. In Kabul, the Afghan capital, relatives of two severely-burned survivors being treated at an intensive-care unit said Taliban fighters forced dozens of villagers to assist in moving the bogged-down tankers.
“They came to everyone’s house asking for help,” said Mirajuddin, a shopkeeper who lost six of his cousins in the bombing – none of whom, he said, were insurgents.
“They started beating people and pointing guns. They said, ‘Bring your tractors and help us.’ What could we do?” None of the survivors and the relatives dispute that some Taliban fighters were at the scene. But just how many remains unclear, as does the number of civilians. And because many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition, and others were buried in the hours after the explosion, it may be impossible to ever ascertain specific figures.
The decision to bomb the tankers based largely on a single human intelligence source appears to violate the spirit of a tactical directive aimed at reducing civilian casualties that was recently issued by Gen Stanley McChrystal, the new US commander in charge of the overall Nato mission in Afghanistan.
The directive states that Nato forces cannot bomb residential buildings based on a sole source of information and that troops must establish a “pattern of life” to ensure that there are no civilians in the target area. Although the directive does not apply to air strikes in the open, Nato officials said it is Gen McChrystal’s intent for those standards to apply to all uses of air power, except when troops are in imminent danger.
Gen McChrystal’s advisers allowed a Washington Post reporter to travel with a Nato fact-finding team and attend its closed-door meetings with German troops and Afghan officials. Portions of this account are based on those discussions.
The incident has generated intense disquiet among Afghans, many of whom say military operations since the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001 have resulted in an unacceptably high number of civilian casualties. Local media reports have been filled with people alleging – some with little proof – that scores of civilians were killed in the air strike.
Aware that another mass civilian casualty incident could further diminish public support for the multinational mission to combat the Taliban, Gen McChrystal sought to handle this case differently from his predecessors. The morning after the bombing, as Afghan television and radio stations began airing the first reports about it, he dispatched the team of senior officers to the area.
His headquarters had only a six-line situation report from the Germans. The team’s assignment was to figure out what had occurred and to help him communicate a forthright message to the Afghan public with the hope that owning up to a potential mistake quickly could help defuse tensions.
When the seven team members arrived in the northern city of Kunduz on Friday afternoon, their first order of business was to head to the bombing site. It was just four miles south of the airport where they landed.
But the German commander, Col Georg Klein, urged them not to go. Residents were angry, he said, and German forces had been attacked a few hours earlier. “There’s a likelihood we’ll be shot at,” he said.
Col Klein also deemed a visit to the hospital to be too dangerous. Instead, the officers travelled to the nearby headquarters of the Kunduz province reconstruction team, home to about 1,000 German troops responsible for security and rebuilding operations in the area. There the team members had a series of briefings from Col Klein and his subordinates.
Without a chance to talk to survivors, they would not be able to determine that day whether the German claims that no civilians were killed were accurate. The consequence was that Nato would have to continue issuing tentative statements promising a thorough investigation, while plenty of Afghans were taking to the airwaves to describe what had occurred. – ( LA Times-Washington Post service)
* German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called yesterday for a UN conference on Afghanistan by the end of the year.