[Mr. Karzai’s growing antipathy toward the United States is no secret, and civilian casualties have proved to be one of the most corrosive issues between the allies. Yet the photographs and the video, handed out by Mr. Karzai’s office last week, have injected a new level of vitriol into the relationship and shown how the Karzai government’s political speech has been increasingly mirroring that of the Taliban — including the insurgents’ habit of twisting facts, or simply making them up when necessary.]
By Matthew Rosenberg
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An image of a funeral in
Afghanistan that the government tied to a recent American airstrike
actually
took place in 2009. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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KABUL, Afghanistan — It was the kind of
dossier that the Taliban often publish, purporting to show the carnage
inflicted during a raid by American forces: photographs of shattered houses and
bloodied, broken bodies, and video images of anguish at a village funeral, all
with gut-churning impact and no proof of authenticity.
But this time, it was the government of
President Hamid Karzai that was handing out the inflammatory dossier, the
product of a commission’s investigation into airstrikes on Jan. 15 on
a remote village and the supposed American cover-up that followed.
In an apparent effort to demonize their American
backers, a coterie of Afghan officials appears to have crossed a line that
deeply troubles Western officials here: They falsely represented at least some
of the evidence in the dossier, and distributed other material whose
provenance, at best, could not be determined.
An examination of the dossier by The New York
Times also revealed that much of the same material was posted on a Taliban
website last week, a rare instance of the militant group’s political speech
matching that of the government it is fighting to topple.
Mr. Karzai’s growing
antipathy toward the United States is no secret, and civilian
casualties have proved to be one of the most corrosive
issues between the allies. Yet the photographs and the video, handed
out by Mr. Karzai’s office last week, have injected a new level of vitriol into
the relationship and shown how the Karzai government’s political speech has
been increasingly mirroring that of the Taliban — including the insurgents’
habit of twisting facts, or simply making them up when necessary.
The purpose of the dossier, according to other
Afghan officials, was to justify Mr. Karzai’s stalling on signing a
long-term security agreement with the United States and to
improve the chances for peace talks with the Taliban by showing that he is no
American stooge, as the insurgents have often derided him.
For American and European officials, the
episode has reinforced a growing sense that for all the talk of securing an
enduring partnership, Mr. Karzai may have no intention of ever signing the
security agreement. Without an agreement, the Obama administration has said, it
will pull American forces from
Afghanistan when the NATO combat mission here ends this year.
“There is no overall partnership,” a European
diplomat said. “We have some Afghan partners, and we have a lot of Afghans in
the government who want us to leave. I think we’re all beginning to realize
that.”
The troubled relationship with Mr. Karzai has
worsened to a point where the Afghan leader, in his public statements, seems to
blame the United States for the war with the Taliban. He often portrays
American intransigence as the main obstacle to peace, not the Taliban’s
unwillingness. The sentiment underpinned a statement Mr. Karzai made on Jan. 18
after the insurgents attacked a restaurant in
Kabul popular with Western civilians, killing 21 people. He drew
equivalence between the restaurant attack and the latest airstrikes, using the
opportunity as a chance to castigate the United States along with the Taliban.
Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Mr. Karzai
implied that Americans wanted the security deal to keep the war here
going. He could not agree to any deal, he said, if Americans “expect
Afghanistan to continue as a semi-war zone for many years to come.”
He cited the dossier to drive home his point.
“Did you see the video?” he said. “Did you see the woman whose face was
missing? She was a member of this nation.”
Mr. Karzai’s remarks seemed in line with what
Afghan officials close to the president say is his current habit of seeking out
negative information about the Americans, and often disregarding more neutral
or positive reports. One official said he has told advisers that the United
States is ultimately responsible for all Afghan deaths, even though the vast majority of civilian
casualties come in Taliban attacks, according to the United
Nations.
Western officials and some Afghan have begun
to push back. On Jan. 17, after the lead Afghan investigator looking into the
airstrikes said at least 14 civilians had been killed, Abdul Basir Salangi, the
governor of Parwan Province, where the strikes took place, offered a blunt
retort. He said the death toll was in the single digits and those claiming
higher deaths tolls were “supporters of the Taliban.”
No one disputes that civilians died in the
airstrikes, which hit Wazghar, a remote village in a valley thick with Taliban
fighters. But more than a week after the raid, the death tolls offered by the
American-led coalition and the Afghan government differ starkly, as do their
accounts of how the civilians died.
The operation was planned and led by the
Afghan Army, American officials have repeatedly emphasized. They said the
airstrikes were necessary to save dozens of Afghan commandos and a handful of
American advisers who were pinned down by heavy Taliban fire; an American and
an Afghan had already been killed in the action.
The airstrikes destroyed the two compounds
producing the heaviest Taliban fire, and two children were killed in one of the
houses, they said.
By contrast, the Afghan commission appointed
by Mr. Karzai to investigate the raid described the action as primarily
American, with roughly eight hours of indiscriminate and unprovoked bombing
followed by a house-to-house rampage by American soldiers. The commission has
said that it can prove that 12 civilians were killed, and that there were
indications of two to five additional civilian deaths.
“Villagers on the streets and even inside
their houses were shot,” said Abdul Satar Khawasi, a member of Parliament from
the area who led the investigation. “Ten houses were destroyed.”
He said the bulk of the evidence came from two
sources: accounts given by villagers, and the photographs and video that were
distributed last Sunday by Mr. Karzai’s office.
No commission members appear to have actually
visited Wazghar. Instead, Mr. Khawasi sent his driver and a bodyguard to
conduct the interviews and take photographs and video, according to Mr.
Salangi, the provincial governor.
But at least two of the images distributed in
the dossier could not have shown casualties from the Wazghar strikes, because
the photos are more than three years old.
One was taken at the funeral of victims of a
NATO airstrike in northern Afghanistan in 2009, which killed at least 70
civilians. It was distributed by Agence France-Presse and Getty Images and published in
The Times on Sept. 5, 2009, along with an article about
the airstrike.
The origins of the second misrepresented
photograph are murkier. It shows the bodies of two boys wrapped in burial
shrouds, and has been used for years on websites assailing civilian deaths in
American drone strikes in Pakistan.
Now both the Afghan government and the Taliban
are using it: It was posted on the Taliban’s website two days before the
government began handing out a CD-ROM with images said to be from Wazghar.
Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for Mr. Karzai, said
the commission assembled the dossier and a reporter’s query was “the first time
I am hearing” that some of the material was misrepresented.
American officials would say only that they
thought the doubts about the dossier spoke for themselves.
The CD-ROM contains nine other photographs,
all of which appear to be frames from a video clip on the disk. The video
purports to show the funeral of villagers who were killed in the airstrikes and
houses that were destroyed. The graphic images include some of a woman whose
face is gone.
The Times’ examination found no physical clues
in the video that would help determine where or when it was shot. The file’s
creation date is Dec. 18, nearly a month before the raid, though it may not be
accurate; digital time stamps on the accompanying photos say they were created
in April 2014, and the video’s embedded data could be similarly unreliable.
Even if the video is actually of a funeral in
Wazghar, some Afghan and Western officials said there was no way to tell from
it whether an airstrike or some other gunfire or explosion had killed the
people seen being buried, or who was responsible.
“There wasn’t an investigation,” said one
commission member, who requested anonymity to avoid being seen to publicly
challenge Mr. Karzai.
The commissioner said some officials
complained to Mr. Karzai about the inquiry’s conduct and conclusions, but he
dismissed their objections in favor of Mr. Khawasi’s account. “The president
himself knows who is biased,” the commissioner said.
He was referring to Mr. Khawasi’s
well-documented anti-American sentiments. In a video recorded two years ago,
for instance, Mr. Khawasi is heard urging a crowd of angry Afghans to wage a
holy war against Americans, saying, “Anyone who sits silent is a traitor.”
Briefing reporters last week about his
investigation, Mr. Khawasi called the airstrikes “cowardly bombardment.”
Americans, he said, “are heartless people.”
The Taliban have since posted the purported
funeral video on their website. The civilians were “killed mercilessly,” the
narrator says, and the images of the bodies show “actions that have documented
American savagery.”
Afghan employees of The New
York Times contributed reporting.