American officials are pushing for a formal agreement with the Afghan government to conduct joint investigations for all airstrikes involving civilian casualties to avoid discrepancies that enemy fighters could capitalize on, the senior U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan said.
The proposal follows wildly varying estimates about the number of civilian deaths earlier this month in an attack in Farah province in western Afghanistan.
A preliminary American report from an investigation into the attack put the number of civilian casualties as high as 30. Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission concluded that 97 civilians died in the attack, including 65 children and 21 women, while earlier Afghan government estimates rose as high as 140 civilian casualties. Afghan President Hamid Karzai says these attacks boost support for the insurgents.
Col. Greg Julian said U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan have asked U.S. Central Command to declassify weapon-sight video and intelligence from the Farah incident and plan to present more evidence from the U.S. probe at a future news conference. The evidence will show the Taliban had a deliberate plan to create civilian deaths and then blame them on the Americans, Julian said.
"We’re going to lay out a lot of details that will expose the Taliban for this," he said.
American and Afghan leaders informally agreed to work together eight months ago in order to avoid divergent conclusions, Julian said. They’ve since done multiple joint investigations with the understanding that results would not be released until the parties reached a consensus about the conclusions.
That same process initially went into effect after the Farah strike. American leaders contacted their Afghan counterparts and had them on the scene by 11 a.m. a day after the battle concluded, Julian said.
However, the Afghan government decided to conduct its own investigation. Julian said it was unclear why the Afghans deviated from the informal agreement.
Other groups, including the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, are doing their own reports, too.
The fallout from those wildly varying reports has Afghan leaders like Karzai calling for an end to American airstrikes, although U.S. officials said they will not stop carrying out strikes.
In Julian’s telling, echoed by other American officials in recent weeks, the Farah attack showcased a new Taliban tactic deliberately designed to create an outcry that would take American airstrikes off the table. U.S. forces have long claimed that enemy fighters use "human shields" to prevent soldiers from returning fire.
But this time, the insurgents actually wanted the Americans to attack so civilians would die, Julian said. The enemy fighters even had plans to kill the civilians themselves if the airstrikes didn’t kill enough, allegedly by using grenades to make it look like bombs killed them, Julian said.
"This one’s far different from any other that I’ve been involved in," he said.
A Human Rights Watch report stated that interviews with villagers who survived the attack do not suggest that the insurgents used a human shield approach.
The clearest difference in the various versions of the incident is the number of civilian dead. Julian said the press conference will support American claims for the lower estimates.
The physical evidence doesn’t support the higher numbers, he said. Afghans took investigators to three burial sites. One site had four new graves. Another had 22. The third was a mass grave that residents variously said contained between 19 and 69 bodies.
The area around the grave did not show any excess dirt, leading those who saw it to speculate that it only contained one layer of bodies, too little room to support the larger claims.
"We’re surprised that the exaggerated numbers were accepted so easily," Julian said.
He also said residents may be encouraged to exaggerate because of fears of Taliban repercussions and because of payments made to the families whose relatives die in airstrikes.
Julian did not have a date for when the military would release its final conclusions. The investigation team must first present its finding to Central Command, the regional command responsible for Afghanistan.
