BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN — The accusation was damning: U.S. soldiers were said to have tossed a grenade into a crowd of Afghans in the eastern province of Kunar on Tuesday, killing two civilians and wounding five to 50 others.
American public affairs officers previously have been slow in responding. U.S. military officials here complain that Taliban leaders are often better and faster at spreading their versions of deadly events.
This time, however, public affairs officers mounted a swift and detailed information operation. Within 24 hours, a public affairs team at Bagram air base released a video showing an explosion as U.S. soldiers worked to free an American military vehicle stuck on a median in the town of Asadabad. It also provided technical details it said proved the grenade was a Russian-made version commonly used by insurgents.
It is not clear from the murky video, taken at a distance, who threw the grenade. But no American soldier is seen throwing anything.
The unusually rapid release of the video was clearly intended to show that American soldiers working on a marooned vehicle were hardly likely to detonate a grenade next to their own vehicles and comrades, three of whom were slightly wounded.
The video was posted on Facebook and YouTube, part of a burgeoning U.S. effort to use social networking sites to build support for coalition forces locked in a struggle to win over the Afghan population in the face of an entrenched Islamic insurgency. The U.S. military regularly issues statements denying accusations of misconduct, but release of combat videos has been rare.
The overnight posting of the video underscores the long-held belief within the U.S. military that it needs to be faster and more sophisticated in responding to false allegations.
Army Lt. Col. Clarence Counts, a public affairs officer at Bagram, said officials sped up the normally cumbersome release process for sensitive video feeds to quickly knock down the grenade accusations. Counts said he could not recall a similar instance in recent months.
Counts, who was involved in the information effort over the grenade accusations, said officers decided "to be a little quicker off our feet" once they realized the video was available.
"We'd love to be able to do this every time," he said. "That's our goal."
