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More Bombing Casualties Alleged
U.N. Aide 'Concerned'; Rumsfeld Defends Airstrike Targeting
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 4, 2002; Page A18
Questions about civilian casualties from U.S. bombing raids in Afghanistan,
a recurring theme among human rights groups and others since the American
military assault began on Oct. 7, were raised again yesterday following
reports that dozens of civilians were killed during an air attack last
Friday.
The United Nations said it had an unconfirmed but reliable report that the
airstrike on the village of Niazi Kala, in Paktia province about 100 miles
south of Kabul, had left 52 civilians dead. A spokeswoman in Kabul said that
U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was "very concerned" and would raise the
issue with Afghanistan's interim government and with U.S. officials.
The Pentagon has responded sharply and defensively to similar reports in the
past, and yesterday was no exception. "The reality is that there were
multiple intelligence sources that qualified that target, and there were
multiple secondary explosions out of that target," Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld said.
Overall, Rumsfeld said, "if one were to take this activity in Afghanistan
and rank it as to the number of civilian deaths" and the care taken by U.S.
forces to avoid them, "I can't imagine there's been a conflict in history
where there has been less collateral damage, less unintended consequences."
Reports of the Friday attack were the most recent in a series of allegations
of large numbers of civilians killed by errant U.S. bombs or by attacks on
targets chosen through questionable intelligence. Rumsfeld said yesterday
that "there's never been a conflict where there have not been civilian
deaths," and the Pentagon has acknowledged and regretted several instances
of inadvertent "collateral damage," including some deaths.
But in most cases, especially when large numbers of casualties have been
involved, defense officials have categorically rejected the allegations.
When U.S. television reports showed Afghans digging dozens of bodies,
including those of children, from the bombed rubble of their village near
the mountain caves of Tora Bora early last month, for example, the Pentagon
said that the ostensibly innocent victims were al Qaeda relatives or had
been knowingly sheltering terrorists.
Following an incident on Dec. 20, when local residents in Paktia province
said that as many as 60 people were killed when U.S. aircraft bombed a
convoy carrying tribal elders on their way to Kabul to attend the
swearing-in of Afghanistan's interim government, the Pentagon said it had
absolute intelligence that it was an al Qaeda convoy. At least two
surface-to-air missiles had been fired at aircraft from the vehicles,
officials said.
Provincial leaders asked the leader of the interim government, Hamid Karzai,
to demand an end to all U.S. air attacks in Paktia, the same place last
Friday's attack occurred.
There is little doubt that many of the allegations of civilian casualties,
particularly during the early days of the campaign when the then-ruling
Taliban reported whole villages slaughtered from the air, have been
exaggerations with little basis in fact. Widely disseminated in the Islamic
world, they have been cited by some Arab leaders and militant Muslim clerics
as indications of U.S. callousness. University of New Hampshire professor
Marc Herold, using international media reports, has estimated the total at
more than 4,000.
Many with long experience in such assessments are skeptical of any firm
accounting. But they are equally skeptical of the Pentagon's virtually
routine denials, no matter what the source.
"Nobody really knows at this stage what we're really facing," said Darcy
Christen, a spokesman for the Geneva-based International Committee of the
Red Cross. With security still a major concern on the ground in much of
Afghanistan, "nobody has accurate information. . . . I would be cautious as
a humanitarian actor to make statements" such as Rumsfeld's historical
ranking of Afghan civilian casualties, Christen said, although "I can
understand why a political actor or military actor" would make them.
To the extent it has been able to count, he said, the ICRC knows only that
it has buried "hundreds" of bodies around each of several major battle
zones, including Mazar-e Sharif and Kandahar, although it is sometimes
difficult to differentiate between civilians and combatants. "Unfortunately,
I fear that there have been quite a few civilian casualties from all sides,"
Christen said.
When and if any kind of accurate accounting becomes possible, there is some
basis for comparison. NATO aircraft flew more than 38,000 combat sorties
over the former Yugoslavia during the 78-day Kosovo air campaign in 1999,
many more than during the nearly three months of the Afghan war.
According to an after-the-fact accounting done on the ground by Human Rights
Watch, about 500 civilians died in 90 NATO bombing incidents in Yugoslavia,
a figure far higher than NATO acknowledged at the time. Nearly a year after
that operation ended, NATO reported that "the actual toll in human lives
will never be precisely known," but it noted that the Human Rights Watch
estimate was "far lower" than the thousands of deaths claimed by the
Yugoslavs.
The Pentagon has not kept an accounting of civilian casualties from U.S.
airstrikes in Afghanistan since Operation Enduring Freedom began, the U.S.
Central Command said yesterday.
U.S. troops have had little opportunity to check out claims of civilian
deaths on the ground, many of which are reported in remote areas. Assurances
that no mistake has been made generally rely on technical observation from
the air, or the confidence Rumsfeld expressed yesterday in U.S. precision
weapons, intelligence and good intentions.
On Tuesday, Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem announced the attack that took
place last Friday, telling reporters at the Pentagon that "we hit a compound
where pro-Taliban forces were at," based on "good intelligence."
By the time Stufflebeem spoke, reports had already begun to circulate that a
large number of civilians had been killed in the attack. In an interview
Tuesday with the New York Times, Pacha Khan Zadran, a local warlord in
southern Afghanistan, denied accusations by other local leaders that he
supplied the Americans with intelligence for the air attacks Dec. 20 and
last Friday as a way of eliminating regional rivals. In the case of the
attack on Niazi Kala last Friday, he said, the Americans were right to bomb
there since villagers had discovered Taliban weapons in the nearby town of
Gardez and taken them to their houses. "They were not al Qaeda people,"
Zadran told the Times, "but maybe they were supporting them."
In Kabul yesterday, U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said officials had
received an unconfirmed but reliable report that 52 civilians were killed in
the attack, including women and children who were running away from the
village after the initial strike. Bunker declined to identify the report's
source.
After Rumsfeld's comments at yesterday's briefing, a Pentagon official
acknowledged some civilians could have been killed by large secondary
explosions resulting from bombs hitting what he described as a cache of arms
during the airstrike. But overall, he said, there was no substance to the
allegations. "All they're doing is reporting the claims of the villagers,"
the official said of the U.N. statement.
Correspondent Kevin Sullivan in Kabul and staff writer Steve Vogel in
Washington contributed to this report.
� 2002 The Washington Post Company
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