UPDATED Afghanistan: At Least 45 Civilians Killed in Rocket Attack

UPDATE 27 July: From Reuters....

*Afghan government and NATO officials on Tuesday disputed each others' accounts of reports that over 50 civilians were killed after being caught up in fighting between foreign forces and Taliban insurgents.

Government spokesman Siamak Herawi said 52 people, many women and children, were killed by a NATO-rocket attack on Friday in Sangin, Helmand province, but the NATO-led force said a preliminary investigation had not yet revealed any civilian casualties....

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Herawi said information that 52 civilians had been killed came from the country's intelligence service in the district.

Karzai strongly condemned the attack and asked NATO troops to prioritize the protection of civilians in their military campaign, his office said in a statement citing the same casualty figures for the attack.

ISAF, however, insisted that a joint investigation with the Afghan government had so far found no evidence of civilian deaths, while a provincial official suggested local residents could even have made it up....

An ISAF spokeswoman said the team was still in the area, trying to establish the truth.



"We take any civilian casualty very seriously but there was no report of operational activity in Rigi," said Lt. Cmdr. Katie Kendrick.*

Amidst the chatter over the Wikileaks "War Diary" of 91,000 documents on the military intervention in Afghanistan, Al Jazeera reports that a rocket attack on an Afghan village last Friday killed at least 45 civilians, including women and children.

Waheed Omar, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said an investigation was underway to determine who was responsible for the attack in Sangin district in the southern province of Helmand.

According to witnesses, helicopter gunships fired on villagers who had been told by fighters to leave their homes, as a firefight with the International Security Assistance Force loomed.

According to witness accounts, men, women and children fled to Regey village and were fired on from helicopter gunships as they took cover.

Abdul Ghafar, 45, who said he lost "two daughters and one son and two sisters" in the attack, claimed that the gunship fired on areas of shelter: "Helicopters started firing on the compound killing almost everyone inside. We rushed to the house and there were eight children wounded and around 40 to 50 others killed.".

The BBC said it sent an Afghan reporter to Regey to interview residents, who described the attack and said they had buried 39 people.

Colonel Wayne Shanks, an ISAF spokesman, said the location of the reported deaths was "several kilometres away from where we had engaged enemy fighters". An investigation team dispatched after the casualty reports emerged "had accounted for all the rounds that were shot at the enemy....We found no evidence of civilian casualties."

Afghanistan: The Failing Strategy to Train Local Forces (Owen/Brady)

Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady write for The Independent on Sunday of London:

The strategic plan of creating an Afghan security force to replace US and British troops fighting in Afghanistan is in serious disarray with local forces a fraction of their reported size, infiltrated by the Taliban at senior levels, and plagued by corruption and drug addiction, an Independent on Sunday investigation can reveal.

And the way in which their capacity has been assessed over several years, during which time tens of billions of dollars have been spent on building up Afghan security forces, is so flawed that it has been scrapped.

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Less than a quarter of the army and less than one in seven police units are rated as "CM1" – meaning they are capable of operating independently. Yet the true picture is worse. An audit of the Capability Milestone (CM) rating system used to rate police and army units has revealed a misleading picture of the true level of progress.

Arnold Field, US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), described the system as "unreliable and inconsistent". His audit warns that Afghan military and police assessments "have overstated operational capabilities", with even the top-rated units unable to operate independently. As many as 50 per cent of police units in some areas are failing drugs tests it notes. On one occasion, coalition soldiers witnessed Afghan police openly smoking cannabis and unwilling to conduct operations or leave their compound.

The report details how army units can be as low as 59 per cent of their supposed size when it comes to going on duty. On average, only 74 per cent of Afghan soldiers in combat units were actually found present for duty, according to the report.

It warns of critical shortages of military advisers needed to "meet the demands of current force development goals", with a shortfall of more than 200 mentoring and partnering teams as of March this year.

The International Security Assistance Force's (Isaf) leaders acknowledge problems with the local security forces, as they brace themselves for an increase in attacks over the summer months. Isaf hopes to increase the combined strength of the Afghan Army and police from under 200,000 at the start of 2009 to over 300,000 next year, in the hope that this will accelerate a withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan.

But an analysis by the IoS reveals that the true strength of the Afghan security forces – those that have been trained and judged to be able to operate independently – is barely 34,000. This is almost a seventh of the 236,000 claimed by Nato/Isaf.

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