No More Bombing Afghan Homes, General Says

An Air Force A-10 flies over Afghanistan. Photo: USAF

Last week, in a little town in eastern Afghanistan, a Taliban captain and his men on the run from NATO forces decided to hole up in a family compound. A firefight broke out, and the coalition troops called in an air strike.

The next day, the villagers brought the results of that strike to the provincial capital: 18 corpses, including five women and seven children.

It was the latest in a series of disturbing incidents involving airstrikes on civilian homes. In the last six months, coalition planes have bombed these residences 10 times. 'Seven resulted in civilian casualties,' Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, a NATO spokesman, tells Danger Room.

So now the commander of coalition forces has issued a new order, severely restricting an air war that was already near its all-time low. Airstrikes on civilian homes ' even if the residences are being used by militants. The question is: can the new directive bring down civilian casualties, while still allowing troops to fight effectively?

Coalition and Afghan 'forces will continue to conduct combat operations against insurgents who use civilian dwellings,' Cummings says. 'But we will not use air delivered munitions against civilian dwellings unless it is a question of self-defense for our troops on the ground.'

Ground operations against these targets will be allowed to proceed as before. But with the coalition steadily withdrawing its ground troops, the new directive could have a significant impact on coalition operations ' just as the last major offensive of the Afghan war is set to begin. Similar restrictions, put in place when Gen. Stanley McChrystal commanded the coalition effort, forced infantrymen to endure wave after wave of punishing attacks before airstrikes could be called in. Troops in the field and policymakers in Washington howled. Eventually, many of McChrystal's restrictions were lifted by his successor, Gen. David Petraeus.

What's more, McChrystal had the benefit of over 140,000 troops to repel those militant attacks. Allen only has 89,000 ' a number that will drop to 66,000 by October. Last year, when Allen assumed command, White House officials said air assets would be key to any push in eastern Afghanistan. Now it looks like that airpower will be under self-imposed limits.

The new guidelines apply both to traditional, fixed wing aircraft and to helicopters, which were given much broader latitude to fire under McChrystal's leadership.

Long demanded by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the restrictions came after Taliban fighters entered Baraki Barak district, and 'hid themselves in the house of a man called Basir Akhunzada, an elder of the people,' Abdul Wali, the chief of the Logar provincial council, told The Guardian.

'There was a wedding ceremony going on, so there were many relatives staying there,' added adviser Mirwais Mir Zakhwal, an adviser to Wali. So when coalition aircraft struck, they hit more than their enemies. They killed innocents as well.

The ten strikes on civilian homes, including the Baraki Barak incident, are just a tiny portion of the nearly 3,000 fixed wing close air support missions run by the coalition during the last six months. That's one reason why Cummings insists the new restrictions 'in no way limits our ability to take the fight to the enemy.'

But after a winter of record lows, the coalition air campaign picked up again in May. Pilots fired off their weapons on 393 different missions during the month. That's up about 10 percent from May 2011's total, and up 30 percent from May 2010's figure. What will happen in June, now that Allen has given his order, remains to be seen.