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December 23, 2001
WASHINGTON -- A team has been sent to investigate whether U.S. warplanes killed a convoy of Afghan tribal leaders, mistaking them for Taliban leadership, a Pentagon official said Saturday.
The investigating team was on the ground Saturday, a day after a dozen vehicles were destroyed and dozens of people were killed in an airstrike in eastern Afghanistan.
Pentagon spokesman Rear. Adm. Craig Quigley said the Department of Defense is following the same procedure it has used with other reports of civilian casualties during the war in Afghanistan.
"If anybody questions the validity of a target, our track record has been to take a look, investigate the claim," Quigley said. "The times the question has been raised we have either confirmed that we hit what we shot at, or that a weapon went astray or a target was missed or something."
The Pentagon said Friday it had solid intelligence that the 10 to 12 vehicles carried fugitive Taliban leaders as they left a "command and control compound" near Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, that also was struck.
But tribal leaders in Khost said the victims were Afghans, including Muslim clerics, invited to attend the installation of Hamid Karzai's interim government Saturday. They demanded that Karzai, Afghanistan's new prime minister, investigate the incident.
Karzai said Saturday after his swearing in that tribal elders had asked him to investigate the claim. "I don't believe it. I don't think it's true," he said. But if it is, "we will discuss it with our friends," the Americans.
Maj. Brad Lowell of the U.S. Central Command said Saturday that American officials were certain they had not made a mistake.
"We are sure that was a military convoy," he said. "The convoy was Taliban leadership. That convoy was destroyed."
Lowell said that after the planes engaged the convoy, two missiles, possibly shoulder-fired, were launched against them. The planes were not threatened by the fire, he said.
"Friends don't fire ... at you," Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces, said brusquely.
In other developments:
U.S. soldiers continued to search mountain caves and tunnels that once held al-Qaida members as the Pentagon introduced a new weapon to kill those inside such underground complexes. The new "thermobaric" bomb creates a cloud of explosive particles that blow up with a force stronger and longer-lasting than one created by conventional explosives.
The Pentagon was preparing to send more troops to the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan to help look for clues to the whereabouts of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
The soldiers could come from several units. About 2,000 U.S. Marines are in southern Afghanistan, mostly in and around the Kandahar airport. Hundreds of Marines are on several amphibious warships in the Arabian Sea, military officials said.
Army troops from the 10th Mountain Division, specially trained for cold-weather operations, could move in swiftly from their base in Uzbekistan.
Another captured al-Qaida member was brought to the jail manned by Marines in the southern city of Kandahar, bringing prisoners in U.S. custody there to 16 and overall to 24.
In China, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said he's "reasonably sure" that bin Laden has not escaped to his country and that there's a "great possibility" the al-Qaida leader is dead.