NATO on the hot seat for killing civilians

The NATO mission in Afghanistan is again facing criticism for killing civilians. In the latest mishap, three Afghani children were killed when a NATO patrol fired on a group of insurgents, but accidentally hit a nearby house.

This incident comes less than two weeks after the Afghani government accused NATO forces of killing up to 90 civilians. Last night 60 Minutes just happened to run a story on this earlier event, visiting the small village east of the capital, Kabul, that was the site of the attack and talking to the locals.

They claim that a group of insurgents, a group unknown to the villagers, fired a mortar in the direction of a nearby NATO outpost. The NATO outpost responded with mortar fire directed at the village, and by calling in an air strike from the U.S. Air Force. Aircraft dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on the small village of mud and brick walled houses, killing dozens in the process, even wiping out entire families.

60 Minutes also talked with officials from the U.S. military about the incident. The military does say that a battle happened, and that unfortunately some civilians were killed, though the military claims only five casualties were civilians, with 25 others being militant fighters. The U.S./NATO position is that casualty claims made by Afghanis are unreliable because Taliban insurgents, and villagers who support them, will regularly inflate casualty claims among civilians to try to undermine NATO's efforts in the country by painting them as gun-happy killers to turn the population at-large against them.

I have no way of knowing whether the villagers 60 Minutes talked to support the Taliban, the government of President Hamid Karzai, or neither. But I can say that their anger over the civilians killed in their village seemed both honest and deep. One older man went so far as to say that the Americans treated them worse than the Soviets ever did. The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan for nine years during the 1980s in an occupation noted for its brutality; so to say that the Americans are now acting worse than the Soviets is quite a claim. Meanwhile, President Karzai has recently called the US/NATO forces out several times for the increasing number of civilian deaths in his country.

All in all the war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban, which looked like it was defeated a couple of years ago is back with a vengeance. Their forces are said to be operating near the outskirts of Kabul (which has been the seat of Western power in the country since their overthrow), and Taliban forces are operating in larger groups, rather than in the hit-and-run strikes they have preferred in the past. Last month a well coordinated, daylong Taliban attack left 10 French troops dead and another 21 wounded.