More Bombing Casualties Alleged

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.