An Afghan family says innocent people were killed, but the U.S. military expresses certainty that those who died in the early hours of May 14 were insurgents, including a Taliban commander.
Reporting from Surkhrod, Afghanistan The father's eyes reddened with tears as he hefted an English textbook that had belonged to his ninth-grade son, Habibuddin. The boy, along with eight other people, was shot dead this month when American special-operations forces swooped down on the family's remote mud-brick compound in the dead of night.
"There were no Talibs here none," Rafiuddin Kushkaki, the owner of the sun-yellowed wheat fields ringing the rural compound, declared in a defiant voice that trailed off into a sob. "Someone tricked the Americans. They made a mistake."
U.S. military officials, however, expressed certainty that those who died in the early hours of May 14 were insurgents, including a Taliban commander they say was painstakingly tracked to this pastoral district in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. They also assert that the nocturnal strike, and hundreds of others like it, had unquestionably saved many lives, both Afghan and Western.
As the seemingly irreconcilable narratives of a single deadly encounter point up, no tactic employed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan is so thoroughly obscured by the fog of war as night raids, which are now occurring at a quicker tempo than before in nearly nine years of conflict.
Many Afghans believe these strikes are most often based on faulty intelligence, and carry a heavy risk of accidental civilian deaths as villagers, in the confusion of sudden awakening and darkness, attempt to defend their homes against unexpected invasion.
Human rights groups also point to what they say is the difficulty of holding the military accountable in the aftermath of raids, even when there are civilian deaths involved. Afghan President Hamid Karzai told reporters after returning home from a trip to Washington this month that night raids, to which he has publicly demanded a halt, were among the most important topics he raised with President Obama.
The raids' planners, however, insist on the accuracy of their tracking methods and source-vetting, the degree of care taken to avoid harming innocents, the closeness of coordination with Afghan authorities and the life-and-death urgency of their mission.
Reporting from Surkhrod, Afghanistan The father's eyes reddened with tears as he hefted an English textbook that had belonged to his ninth-grade son, Habibuddin. The boy, along with eight other people, was shot dead this month when American special-operations forces swooped down on the family's remote mud-brick compound in the dead of night.
"There were no Talibs here none," Rafiuddin Kushkaki, the owner of the sun-yellowed wheat fields ringing the rural compound, declared in a defiant voice that trailed off into a sob. "Someone tricked the Americans. They made a mistake."
U.S. military officials, however, expressed certainty that those who died in the early hours of May 14 were insurgents, including a Taliban commander they say was painstakingly tracked to this pastoral district in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. They also assert that the nocturnal strike, and hundreds of others like it, had unquestionably saved many lives, both Afghan and Western.
As the seemingly irreconcilable narratives of a single deadly encounter point up, no tactic employed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan is so thoroughly obscured by the fog of war as night raids, which are now occurring at a quicker tempo than before in nearly nine years of conflict.
Many Afghans believe these strikes are most often based on faulty intelligence, and carry a heavy risk of accidental civilian deaths as villagers, in the confusion of sudden awakening and darkness, attempt to defend their homes against unexpected invasion.
Human rights groups also point to what they say is the difficulty of holding the military accountable in the aftermath of raids, even when there are civilian deaths involved. Afghan President Hamid Karzai told reporters after returning home from a trip to Washington this month that night raids, to which he has publicly demanded a halt, were among the most important topics he raised with President Obama.
The raids' planners, however, insist on the accuracy of their tracking methods and source-vetting, the degree of care taken to avoid harming innocents, the closeness of coordination with Afghan authorities and the life-and-death urgency of their mission.
