Way Off The Mark

The day started out like so many others for U.S. counterinsurgency forces in Afghanistan: monitoring the airwaves for enemy communications. From the southeastern part of the country, the U.S. picked up a signal from the phone of a small-time Taliban commander, Mullah Wazir, whose band was suspected of ambushing road crews in an effort to halt reconstruction of the pitted Kabul-to-Kandahar highway. When Wazir's phone flickered to life, the U.S. traced it to a mud-walled fortress near the town of Ghazni. The U.S. command at Bagram air base outside Kabul quickly dispatched an A-10 Warthog fighter plane, able to lay down enough fire to decimate a small army.

What the eavesdroppers had no way of knowing on Dec. 6 was that Wazir was long gone. He had left his sat-phone behind, and according to Afghan security officials, a local laborer had apparently switched it on. Outside Wazir's house, nine children were shooting marbles in the dirt. Around 10:30 a.m., villagers saw the Warthog circle once over the house, vanish behind a mountain and come roaring back, firing what villagers said were 35 explosive rounds. Each was powerful enough to destroy a tank. The children were in the pilot's field of attack. There was little left of them except the marbles, a few shredded prayer caps and small pools of blood.

Just hours earlier, U.S. forces made a similar blunder, killing six other children along with two adults, members of a village family in neighboring Paktia province. That raid was supposed to take out a powerful clergyman named Mullah Jalani, who was accused by the Pentagon of operating training camps for mujahedin, hiding a sizable arsenal inside his stockade and firing at U.S. troops with what officials call a "crew-served machine gun." But many question why Jalani had been targeted. Just two days before, he had been drinking tea and cracking jokes with the pro-U.S. governor of the provincial capital, Gardez. Special-forces teams that operate out of a fortress near Gardez maintained a hands-off policy toward Jalani. They say he might have set up illegal roadblocks to extort money from travelers, as many local commanders do, but they don't regard him as a terrorist. Later, local security officials said, U.S. forces were surprised when orders came to target Jalani. During the three-hour air and ground assault, the wall of a house collapsed on the eight victims. U.S. spokesmen said the damage was caused by secondary explosions from the hidden arsenal. But villagers told TIME that a U.S. bomb hit the wrong house, 50 yards from the militant's. And one villager said Jalani escaped in a burqa when the U.S. troops allowed women to leave his compound before bombing it.

Among the number of Afghan casualties inflicted by the U.S., the mistaken killing of 15 children stands out. "We are very angry," says Ghulab Khan, a local farmer observing the row of eight rocky graves in Paktia. The incidents are bound to inflame anger at American soldiers and the pro-U.S. President, Hamid Karzai. The deaths embarrassed U.S. military commanders struggling to bring security and normality to the country, and deepened worries among Afghan authorities and civilians about the accuracy and skill of U.S. counterinsurgency methods. "It shows the need for better coordination," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad, "and that we need to look at the intelligence-gathering process."