KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai on Thursday sought to calm the fears of Afghans rattled by recent violence that has killed scores of civilians across the nation.
In a biweekly address on Afghan radio, Karzai boasted of his government’s efforts to seek peace with insurgents and criticized the U.S.-led NATO coalition.
He claimed that 150 civilians had been killed in recent days by militants as well as international troops who, he said, were employing an “unsuccessful” war strategy.
Afghan tribal leaders claim that more than 50 civilians were killed in recent coalition operations in Kunar province in northeast Afghanistan. NATO has contested the allegation, saying that video of operations Feb. 17 - the main event of a more than three-day operation - showed troops targeting and killing dozens ofinsurgents, not civilians.
The assessment-team members had not yet fully briefed coalition leaders, but “their preliminary findings have not produced any additional information that would cause us to revise our earlierassessment,” NATO spokesman Lt. Col. John Dorrian said Thursday night.
In his speech, Karzai struck a nationalistic tone that included some sharp jabs at NATO.
“In the past years, we have continually tried to prevent civilian casualties, but the Kunar incident shows this has not been achieved,” Karzai said. “The civilian casualties by NATO are continuing.”
On Thursday, NATO said it was investigating allegations that civilians, not armed insurgents, were killed in a coalition airstrike in the Alasay district of Kapisa province. Mohammad Sharif Hakim Zada, deputy governor of Kapisa, said the civilians were hunting before dawn when they were killed.
A recent U.N. report documented 2,412 conflict-related civilian casualties in the first 10 months of 2010. More than three-quarters of them were caused by militant activity, a 25 percent increase from the same period in 2009, the report said. At the same time, civilian casualties attributed to pro-government forces, including those from the NATO coalition, decreased.
Meanwhile, the top U.S. commander in the country isordering an investigation into charges that an army unit trained in psychological operations was told to manipulate American senators to get more money and troops for the war.
A senator who was purportedly targeted said Thursday that he’s confident there will be a review of the facts, but played down the idea that he was manipulated.
The staff of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, head of the effort to train Afghan security forces, ordered the information operations unit to compile profiles, voting records and other information on visiting lawmakers for leverage in a campaign to get more assistance, said a story posted Thursday on Rolling Stone’s website. It says the campaign also targeted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, and others.
Caldwell’s office denied that the command used the information operations cell to influence visitors. But a news statement from Kabul said that the commander of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, would order a probe “based on the information” in the article.
The military cell devotedto what is known as “information operations” believed its mission on arriving in Afghanistan in November 2009 was to assess the effects of U.S. propaganda on the Taliban and local Afghan population, Rolling Stone said, quoting Lt. Col. Michael Holmes, whom it identified as the leader of the five-man team.
Holmes said they resisted the order to compile information on visiting congressional delegations and to think of what information “to plant inside their heads.” He said they were subjected to retaliation for resisting.
Those singled out in the campaign included Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Jack Reed, D-R.I., Al Franken, D-Minn., and Carl Levin, D-Mich.; Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., of the House Appropriations Committee; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister; and a host of influential think-tank analysts, the story said, without identifying the international figures by name.
Information for this article was contributed by Pauline Jelinek and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/25/2011