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Afghanistan to review US, Nato presence |
AFP/Kabul
Afghanistan will review regulations governing the presence of tens of thousands of foreign troops fighting a bloody Islamist insurgency, Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta said yesterday.
The review was demanded by parliament after US air strikes against Taliban insurgents killed civilians in the western province of Farah this month.
An interim administration in 2002 signed agreements with foreign troops regulating their activities in Afghanistan but times have changed, Spanta said.
“Today we have an elected government, an elected parliament, free media,” the minister told reporters. “This requires the agreements we had signed as a country then, with no government, seven years ago, to be reviewed.”
“It is our duty and responsibility to defend the rights and dignity of the Afghans. It is our duty and responsibility to know why Afghans are jailed. It is our responsibility to see whether our compatriots are tortured or not.”
For the government to do this “we must have new agreements with our allies,” the minister said.
Similar demands were made after the previous most deadly incident for civilians — caught up in the battle between insurgents and security forces — in the western province of Herat last August.
Afghan and foreign security forces have since signed an agreement committing the US and Nato-led deployments to measures to reduce harm to civilians.
There are roughly 70,000 international soldiers in Afghanistan, fighting Taliban and other extremists said to pose a threat to the region and the West, as well as helping the fragile Afghan government establish its authority.
The United States has committed 17,000 more US troops to Afghanistan this year, with 2,800 moving into place over recent weeks.
Human rights groups have cautioned that more troops could mean more civilian casualties.
“The issue of civilian casualties is a main source of concern for the people of Afghanistan as well as for the government,” Spanta said.
“Unfortunately we see that this still continues.”
Meanwhile, an Afghan government investigation concluded yesterday that US air strikes earlier this month killed 140 villagers, putting Kabul starkly at odds with the US military’s account.
The official death toll, announced by the Afghan Defence Ministry, makes the bombing the deadliest incident for civilians since US forces began fighting the Taliban in 2001, and is likely to worsen anger over the presence of foreign troops.
A copy of the government’s list of the names, ages and father’s names of each of the 140 dead was obtained by Reuters earlier this week. It shows that 93 of those killed were children — the youngest eight days old — and only 22 were adult males.
“No other news makes me as sad and sorrowful as incidents of civilian casualties during military operations,” the Defence Ministry statement quoted President Hamid Karzai as saying.
The Afghan government paid the relatives of victims the equivalent of about $2,000 for those who were killed and $1,000 for 25 others wounded, it said.
US aircraft bombed villages in the Bala Boluk district of Afghanistan’s western Farah province on May 3 after US Marines and Afghan security forces became involved in a firefight with Taliban militants. According to villagers, families were cowering in houses when the US aircraft bombed them.
The incident has prompted anger across Afghanistan toward Western troops, and caused Karzai to demand a halt to all air strikes, a plea that Washington has rebuffed.
The US military says it believes the death toll was lower than the official Afghan figure, but says it cannot provide a figure of its own because the dead were quickly buried.
It says the Taliban were to blame for deliberately putting villagers in harm’s way to create outrage over civilian deaths, and some names in the government’s list of victims may be fake.
According to the military’s version of events, many of the dead may have been fighters, and some civilians may have been killed by militants throwing grenades, rather than by air strikes.
Asked if the dispute over the death toll would cause further difficulties between the troops and their Afghan hosts, US military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said: “It’s something we will discuss.”
Julian said two US military investigations were now under way, one ordered by commanders in Afghanistan immediately after the incident and another ordered more recently by US Central Command, responsible for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
A US general had been sent from outside Afghanistan to head up the second investigation, Julian said. He was not able to say how long either investigation would take to issue findings.
Under new procedures instituted late last year to reduce the anger caused by civilian deaths, the military tries to co-ordinate its investigations into such incidents with Afghan authorities.
In several smaller cases in recent months the sides have quickly agreed in public about what happened, and US troops have admitted making mistakes and apologised.
But there were immediate signs in the Farah case that Afghan and US officials were not going to agree. |
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