In early December 2003, the Associated Press and the New York Times reported that a U.S. missile strike against a suspected Taliban commander went wrong and killed nine Afghan kids who were near the targeted compound (stories excerpted below).
In protest, I wrote a letter (see below) to my representatives in Congress, President Bush, and to several officials in the State and Defense departments.
The only response I received was a letter from Patricia Haslach, Director of the State Department’s Afghanistan office (see below). I then replied to Ms. Haslach (see below).
Associated Press Report, from SF Chronicle, 7 Dec 2003
8 or 9 Kids Dead in U.S. Air Strike
by Stephen Graham — AP
Kabul, Afghanistan — A U.S. air strike apparently killed nine children as well as the suspected militant who was targeted on Saturday in eastern Afghanistan, according to the U.S. military.
An American A-10 aircraft struck a site south of Ghazni, 100 miles southwest of the capital, Kabul, where a “known terrorist” was believed to be hiding at about 10:30 am Saturday, Army Maj. Christopher E. West told the AP.
“At the time we initiated the attack, we did not know there were children nearby,” he said.
Jawaid Khan, the Ghazni governor’s secretary, said that eight children and two men were killed. He said the intended target, who me identified as a former Taliban commander named Mullah Wazir, was not killed.
“The Americans wanted to bomb Mullah Wazir, but they bombed a different house,” Khan told the AP. …
West said U.S. troops collected “extensive intelligence over and extended period of time” and located the suspect …
West said the military was sending a team of investigators to the site to determine if U.S. forces were at fault.
“Following the attack, ground coalition forces searching the area found the bodies of both the intended target and those of nine children nearby,” he said… “We regret the loss of any innocent life, and we follow stringent rules of engagement to specifically avoid this type of incident while continuing to target terrorists who threaten the future of Afghanistan,” West said.
Another local official Ahmad Zia Massood said that Wazir had fired at U.S. helicopters on Friday.
Masood said it was unclear if the 10 victims were Wazir and his family or their neighbors. …
New York Times Report, from SF Chronicle, 8 Dec 2003
Americans Regret Killing 9 Afghan Kids in Air Strike
by Carlotta Gall
Hutala, Afghanistan — Their embroidered caps, shredded with shrapnel, lay beside a half-dozen small rubber galoshes and caked pools of blood. Seven boys and two girls died in this small village on Saturday morning in a U.S. air strike, and their bodies were still lying in the dust when U.S. soldiers arrived by helicopter to assess the results of the attack three hours later…
A 25-year-old Afghan man was also killed, the villagers said, while the intended target, a Taliban suspect who lived here and bragged about attacking foreign-aid workers, may have gotten away, contrary to official accounts that he, too, was among the dead. Some villagers said the suspect and his family, whose house was not scathed in the attack, had not been seen for weeks.
The attack has raised questions about the quality of U.S. military intelligence and the effectiveness of using air power to kill fugitive Taliban and al Qaeda members who are hiding in villages. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, said he was “profoundly shocked” at the deaths of the children and sent a delegation to investigate and to offer to help the families. … He said future military operations should be better coordinated with the Afghan government.
The U.S. military command expressed regret for the killings and sent officers to this village in a remote area of southern Ghazni province on Sunday to apologize. But that did little to erase the shock, grief, and anger over the dead children.
“As a human, what would you think? Everyone would be angry at this. We cannot afford this sort of thing, killing innocent Afghans,” said Khial Muhammed Hoseini, the deputy governor of the province.
Villagers said the dead boys, who were 8 to 12 years old, had been in front of a house, and the girls, 9 and 10, had been fetching water from a stream alongside it when two U.S. A-10 attack jets firing rockets and machine guns struck at 10:45 am.
“The boys were playing marbles,” said one villager, thrusting forward a gnarled hand with three chipped glass marbles that he said he had retrieved from the dust.
The rockets made 30 to 40 small craters in the ground around where the children had died. The 10th victim, an uncle of the two girls, rushed toward the stream after the first plane struck and was cut down beside them, said a woman who identified herself as the man’s mother and the dead girl’s grandmother.
…
As some men showed journalists and a govenment delegation around the scene of the killings, they wondered aloud how the Americans could attack so indiscriminately when searching for just one man who, they said, was not even in the village.
“They bombed this place and said we were giving sanctuary to the Taliban and al Qaeda, but there are no Taliban or al Qaeda here. We all support the government,” said Abdul Majid Farooqi, the school principle and local mullah.
U.S. officials have said that the intended target was a man named Mullah Wazir, a Taliban member believed to have been behind several attacks on aid workers in the region…
Villagers said Wazir had left the village two weeks ago with his family after a U.S. air strike on a nearby field.
U.S. soldiers pointed out the house where the family had been living, which they said had been searched but was otherwise untouched by the bombardment.
The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the Afghan interior minister, Ahmed Ali Jalali, both said Sunday that Wazir had been killed.
Yet on the ground in the village, residents contradicted that assertion. U.S. military spokesman, Capt. Jorge Cordeiro confirmed that the soldiers had found nine dead children and one dead adult who could have been the target, he said. But he said that the soldiers had not talked to villagers or identified the dead man.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in U.S. air strikes in the two years since the U.S. began its military campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Saturday attack is at least the third this year in which civilians have been killed or wounded. Eleven members of one family were killed in April in … eastern Afghanistan when U.D. forces called in air strikes on militants escaping toward the Pakistani border.
Eight people, including women and children, were killed in a village in the northern province of Nuristan on Oct 30 when U.S. planes bombed their village at night. The U.S. military acknowledged the April bombing but has not confirmed responsibility for the Nurstan bombing.
Letter to U.S. Govt Officials (including Secretary of State Colin Powell)
10 December 2003
Colin Powell
Secretary of State
U.S. State Department
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520
Secretary Powell,
Saturday, December 6, a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan missed the Taliban leader it was aimed at, instead killing nine young Afghan children and a man who tried to rescue them.
This is simply too much. We cannot continue to make these kind of errors. Those responsible for it must – must – pay a heavy cost. More importantly, the rules of engagement must be changed so that this error cannot be repeated.
Those children were not terrorists. The boys were playing marbles. The girls were fetching water. The man ran to protect the children from the missiles exploding all around them. Perhaps he was the father of one or more of them.
The children and the man should not be swept into the anonymous bin of “regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage”.
First, their deaths were avoidable. If U.S. forces were trying to remove a suspected Taliban leader, they should have sent Special Forces to confirm his presence, and ground troops to capture him. Air strikes are never precise, despite the buzzwords the Pentagon uses. Lowering the risk to U.S. troops by relying on air strikes, greatly raising the likelihood of accidental civilian deaths, is an unacceptable trade-off.
Second, those nine children and that man had names. U.S citizens should learn who they were. Tell us who they were. We have a right to know, since our taxes and our armed forces killed them.
I am no revolutionary; I’m a software consultant. But I will not support such gross negligence, such malfeasance. You should not either.
Sincerely,
Jeff Johnson
Reply from State Department, 9 Jan 2004
Dear Mr. Johnson,
Thank you for your letter dated December 10 expressing concerns regarding the U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan of December 6. Secretary Powell has directed me to reply on his behalf.
We too were saddened by the terrible tragedy of the deaths of nine Afghan children, in an operation that also killed a Taliban operative hiding in the same village. The U.S. and Coalition forces do their utmost to avoid civilian casualties in their military operations, but as you note, no operation can be guaranteed of 100% surgical success. Our forces will continue to exercise the highest level of care to avoid civilian casualties.
The children will not be “swept into an anonymous bin.” Afghanistan’s success is critical to our own success in the region and in the struggle against terrorism, and we will not walk away from our responsibilities and commitments to the Afghan people.
I hope this letter responds to your concerns in the matter.
Sincerely,
Patricia Haslach
Director, Office of Afghanistan
Bureau of South Asian Affairs
Letter to Patricia Haslach, responding to her letter
20 January 2004
Patricia Haslach
Director, Office of Afghanistan
U.S. State Department
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20520
Ms. Haslach,
My sincere thanks to you for taking the time to read and respond to my Dec. 10 letter regarding the accidental killing of nine Afghan children by a U.S. air strike on Dec. 6, 2003.
You ended your letter by saying “I hope this letter responds to your concerns in the matter.”
If I may, I’d like to provide some feedback regarding three ways in which your letter does not address the concerns I expressed in mine.
First, your letter said that the operation that killed the children “also killed a Taliban operative hiding in the same village.” According to the articles I read prior to writing my letter, the Taliban operative was not killed:
- A U.S. air strike apparently killed nine children as well as the suspected militant who was targeted on Saturday in eastern Afghanistan, according to the U.S. military. … Jawaid Khan, the Ghazni governor’s secretary, said that eight children and two men were killed. He said the intended target, whom he identified as a former Taliban commander named Mullah, Wazir, was not killed. “The Americans wanted to bomb Mullah Wazir, but they bombed a different house,” Khan told the AP. – Associated Press, in San Francisco Chronicle, 12/7/03
- Seven boys and two girls died in this small village on Saturday morning in a U.S. air strike… A 25-year-old Afghan man was also killed, the villagers said, while the intended target, a Taliban suspect who lived here and bragged about attacking foreign-aid workers, may have gotten away, contrary to official accounts that he, too, was among the dead. Some villagers said that the suspect and his family, whose house was not scathed in the attack, had not been seen for weeks. – New York Times, in San Francisco Chronicle, 12/8/03
Perhaps the discrepancy between your account of the incident and those I read can be attributed to confusion following the incident about what happened. However, six weeks have passed since the incident, allowing time for investigations to take place and for the facts to emerge. If the Taliban operative was indeed killed in the air strike, why does an Associated Press story dated 20 January 2004 (reporting yet another accidental killing of Afghan children by a U.S. air strike; copy attached) continue to assert that the intended target of the Dec. 6 attack was not killed?
- A U.S. air strike in southern Afghanistan killed 11 villagers, including four children, Afghan officials said Monday [Jan. 19]. … On Dec. 5, six children died when a wall fell on them during a nighttime assault on a complex in eastern Paktia province, where the U.S. military had seized hidden weapons caches. The next day, nine children were found dead in a field after an attack by an A-10 ground-attack warplane on a village in neighboring Ghanzi province. Both attacks were aimed at wanted militants, but neither target was killed or detained. – Associated Press, in San Francisco Chronicle, 1/20/04
The second way in which your letter does not address my concerns is that you say “no operation can be guaranteed of 100% surgical success”, as if that somehow eliminates responsibility for the children’s deaths. If the target was destroyed, the U.S. government considers the attack “successful”, even if civilian deaths, as in this incident, outnumbered target deaths by a factor of nine (assuming that the Dec. 6 target was actually killed, which is in doubt). In my judgment, such incidents are not successes, but rather massive failures that should provide a strong impetus to change the rules of engagement.
You said “The United States and Coalition forces do their utmost to avoid civilian casualties…” but in this case our forces did not do their utmost. Their utmost would have been to capture or kill the target using ground forces, who can see better what they are shooting at than a jet pilot flying at 400 mph* can. My point is that air strikes should not be used for this type of mission. The potential for error and civilian casualties is too high.
The final way in which your letter does not address my concerns is that you wrote: “The children will not be swept into an anonymous bin”, followed not by the names of the children, but rather by some boilerplate about Afghanistan’s success being critical to our own. What about the children? What success might they have achieved? We will never know the answers to that question, but we could at least find out who they were. From the ending of your letter, it seems that the U.S. government, which killed the children, does not care enough to find out and tell us who they were. In other words, they WILL be swept into an anonymous bin.
Thank you again for taking the time to answer my previous letter.
Sincerely,
Jeff Johnson
* the A-10 ground-attack plane’s normal flying speed
