KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — After more than five years of increasingly intense warfare, the conflict in Afghanistan reached a grim milestone in the first half of this year: U.S. troops and their NATO allies killed more civilians than insurgents did, according to several independent tallies.
The upsurge in deaths at the hands of Western forces has been driven by Taliban tactics as well as by actions of the American military and its allies.
But the growing toll is causing widespread disillusionment among the Afghan people, eroding support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and exacerbating political rifts among NATO allies about the nature and goals of the mission in Afghanistan.
More than 500 Afghan civilians have been reported killed this year, and the rate has dramatically increased in the last month.
In some instances, it was difficult to determine whether the dead were combatants or noncombatants. But in many other cases, there was no doubt that the person killed was a bystander to war.
Still, Western military leaders argue that any comparison of casualties caused by Western forces and by the Taliban is fundamentally unfair because there is a clear moral distinction to be made between accidental deaths resulting from combat operations and deliberate killings of innocents by militants.
"No [Western] soldier ever wakes up in the morning with the intention of harming any Afghan citizen," said Maj. John Thomas, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. "If that does inadvertently happen, it is deeply, deeply regretted."
Moreover, alliance officials say Taliban fighters are ultimately to blame for many of the fatalities attributed to coalition military operations because the insurgents deliberately place civilians in harm's way, using them as human shields and employing other brutal tactics.
Human rights groups acknowledge that there are mitigating circumstances. But to the families of victims such as Azizullah the salt merchant, such distinctions are lost in a wave of grief and indignation.
At dawn on June 16, Azizullah went to prayers with his older brother, Mohammed Reza. It was the last time Reza saw his younger brother alive.
At midmorning, Reza received a call on his cellphone from Afghan police saying Azizullah had been wounded, then another saying that he had died, shot by North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops as he sipped a cool drink a few steps from his storefront in a rundown district of Kabul.
