Conflicting claims over a devastating air strike in Afghanistan's Helmand province, where thousands of British troops are fighting the Taliban, are overshadowing talks today and tomorrow at Camp David between the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, and President George Bush.
The US military said it had carried out a "precision air strike" on Thursday "against two notorious Taliban commanders conducting a leadership meeting in a remote area of the Baghran district ... after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area". The Afghan Defence Ministry said intelligence reports indicated that three militant leaders, including Mullah Rahim, the Taliban commander for Helmand province, were among those killed. An even higher-ranked leader, Dadullah Mansour, commander of the Taliban for the whole of southern Afghanistan, was at the meeting, but his fate was unknown, said the ministry.
As often happens, however, local accounts of the raid were radically different. Police in Helmand and a local MP said there had been heavy civilian casualties, because villagers had been summoned by the Taliban to witness the hanging of two men accused of being spies when the bombs fell. Some relatives of more than 40 people taken to hospital in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, and Kandahar claimed hundreds had died, but Nato and Afghan military officials said civilian casualties had been minimal, and that apart from one eight-year-old boy, all the people taken to hospital with blast injuries were adult males.
"It is interesting there were no females," said Lieutenant-Colonel Charlie Mayo, a British spokesman. "We are very confident we hit a large meeting of Taliban, and they are very sore about it." Many such incidents, however, remain unresolved – one of the worst points of friction between the Afghan government and its international allies. President Karzai has repeatedly called for Nato's International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) and the separate US force engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom to exercise more restraint, with government officials and aid workers estimating that more than 350 civilians have already been killed in operations by foreign forces this year. But the US in particular is accused of treating Afghanistan as a battleground in a single-minded campaign against the leadership of al-Qa'ida and its Taliban associates.
Christopher Langton, an Afghanistan expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said other issues likely to cause disagreement at Camp David were US pressure to eradicate opium poppies by aerial spraying, and Mr Karzai's desire to make deals with more moderate elements of the Taliban, which Washington opposes. Many of the 37 countries involved in Afghanistan are concerned at corruption, crime and a spate of kidnappings by the Taliban, leading to a hostage crisis over 21 South Korean aid workers whose two leaders have already been murdered. But Colonel Langton said constant public criticism of the Afghan leader was "giving the impression he is not in control of his own country. Having to go along with his international allies all the time costs him public support at home."
A fresh concern has been US claims that Iran is supplying arms to the Taliban in ever-increasing quantities. The latest British soldier to die in Afghanistan, Lance-Corporal Michael Jones of the Royal Marines, may have been involved in a mission to stop the shipments: he was killed last Sunday in Nimruz province, which borders Helmand and Iran. The death of L/Cpl Jones, who was reported to be serving with the Special Boat Service, brought the British toll in Afghanistan to 68.
