KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — After a week of tense public disagreement over the civilian casualty toll in a U.S.-led raid in western Afghanistan, officials with the United Nations, the Afghan government and the NATO-led force in the country said Saturday that all sides had agreed to a joint investigation.
As many as 90 civilians, about two-thirds of them children, were killed in the Aug. 22 raid in Herat province, the U.N. has asserted; the Afghan government's count is slightly lower.
But U.S. military officials have sharply disputed those numbers, saying they believe that about 30 people were killed in the early morning strike on the village of Azizabad, only five of them civilians.
In the wake of the raid, President Hamid Karzai made his most strongly worded appeal yet for greater caution by Western troops during combat operations in populated areas. He said the deaths and their circumstances warranted a broad reexamination of operations by coalition troops, who are trying to contain an increasingly powerful Taliban-led insurgency.
If the U.N. estimates are borne out, the toll would represent what is believed to be the greatest number of civilian fatalities caused by Western troops in a single incident since the Afghan conflict began nearly seven years ago.
The issue is sensitive for all sides. The Afghan government is keenly aware that such casualties erode public support for the Western troop presence and heighten anger toward the U.S.-backed Karzai administration.
Western military officials, for their part, are deeply frustrated by what they describe as a Taliban propaganda war using civilians as pawns. Taliban fighters, they say, routinely place civilians in harm's way by using populated areas to stage strikes against Western forces, as well as carrying out suicide bombings that are far likelier to kill civilians than better-protected troops.
Coalition officials also accuse the militants of trying to hide their own battlefield casualties by falsely labeling them as civilian dead. Further clouding the issue, compensation payments offered to the families of those accidentally killed by Western and Afghan troops sometimes spur false claims, military officials say.
Continuing tensions among the parties were evident in the fact that plans for a joint probe were announced by the U.N. and the North Atlantic Treat Organization's International Security Assistance Force -- not the separate U.S.-led coalition, whose forces took part in the raid.
