Joint forces probe NATO air strike

KABUL, Afghanistan | U.S. and Afghan authorities investigated Saturday whether a botched NATO air strike was to blame for the death of Afghan soldiers and police during a search for two American paratroopers missing in a Taliban-infested area of the country’s west.

The probe into a possible friendly fire incident further aggravates already strained relations between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the international community, which holds his enfeebled government partly responsible for rising instability.

After enduring a drumbeat of criticism from world leaders in recent days, the Afghan government struck back on Saturday, saying it viewed a U.N. official’s prescription for ridding the country of corruption and warlords as an infringement on its national sovereignty.

The air strike occurred Friday during heavy fighting in Badghis province, a remote area that borders Turkmenistan. Two days earlier, two American paratroopers disappeared there while trying to recover airdropped supplies that had fallen into a river. Fighting broke out between members of a search team and Taliban insurgents, the U.S. military said.

Eight Afghans - four soldiers, three policemen and an interpreter - were killed. Seventeen Afghan troops, including soldiers and police, five American soldiers and another Afghan interpreter were wounded, the U.S. said.

Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry said the deaths and injuries likely happened “during an air attack by NATO forces” on a joint U.S.-Afghan base.

U.S. officials would not confirm the account, but said that a joint investigation was under way to determine whether any of the casualties were caused by NATO “close air support.”

Although the U.N. says most civilian casualties have been at the hands of militants, the deaths of men, women and children in NATO air strikes have raised tensions between the Karzai government and the U.S.-led coalition - already running high because of widespread corruption and drug trafficking that have proliferated in the last four years.

Since a presidential election marred by fraud returned Mr. Karzai to power, a host of international figures, including President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, have called on the Afghan leader to take concrete steps to clean up his government.

On Friday, Kai Eide, head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, lectured the Karzai government, saying “we can’t afford any longer a situation where warlords and power brokers play their own games.”

Mr. Eide said members of Mr. Karzai’s new government should be vetted not just for ties to insurgent groups but also for links to criminal or drug activity. Mr. Karzai’s running mate, a former Tajik warlord, has repeatedly denied allegations that he has been involved in drug smuggling.

Mr. Eide’s remarks drew a sharp rebuke Saturday from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which accused Mr. Eide and others of interfering in the makeup of the new Karzai government.

“Over the last few days some political and diplomatic circles and propaganda agencies of certain foreign countries have intervened in Afghanistan’s internal affairs by issuing instructions concerning the composition of Afghan government organs and political policy of Afghanistan,” the ministry said. “Such instructions have violated respect for Afghanistan’s national sovereignty.”

Elsewhere, the deputy governor of the southern province of Zabul, Ali Khail, said NATO forces raided an office of the Afghan Red Crescent Society in the city of Qalat early Saturday, killing a security guard and arresting three local Red Crescent employees. NATO issued a statement saying coalition forces killed a militant and arrested a few other suspected militants, including someone who was helping insurgents transport weapons and bomb-making materials to the area.