Afghan civilian deaths: Who is to blame?

Call for help

The fighting in Bala Baluk began soon after dawn, after insurgents took over an old fortress in Garani and high ground in an adjoining village, Ganjabad.

The entire district has only 140 police officers; the Taliban outnumbered them at least 2 to 1, perhaps 3 to 1.

By midday, the police were taking casualties as they tried to advance through agricultural fields near Garani, maneuvering past walls and culverts that provided abundant cover for the enemy. The Taliban fighters, it seemed, were everywhere.

The insurgents captured one officer, set fire to a police vehicle. The police lines grew shaky.

Still outmatched after reinforcements from the neighboring capital district arrived, commanders called the Afghan army for assistance, said the provincial police chief, Abdul Ghafar Watandar. The first of its arriving soldiers, too, swiftly found themselves pinned down by a fusillade of heavy machine-gun fire and a rain of rockets from Taliban forces.

It was time to call for help again -- this time, from the Americans.

'This was massive'

In the minds of Western officials, part of the grand scheme for Afghanistan is that its national army will one day be able to shoulder responsibility for the country's security.

To that end, units of U.S. troops are partnered with Afghan police officers and soldiers, living and working alongside them. In Farah, these teams are made up of U.S. Marines.

The training that takes place is hardly theoretical in nature. More and more often, the mentors find themselves, along with their trainees, in the middle of a shooting war. On May 4, that happened yet again.

Navy Cmdr. Benjamin Nicholson, the senior American military official at the U.S. base outside Farah City, described a battle whose ferocity and complexity escalated as the day went on.

"There are skirmishes all the time, but this was massive," he said. "Generally you see a small attack and withdrawal. This time they pressed the engagement. It didn't stop."

Just as the Afghans had, the Americans called for their own reinforcements.

With Marines from the mentoring teams already in the thick of the fighting, special operations forces joined in, first one group of them, and then a second.

Airstrikes

"It kept growing and growing," said Nicholson, who as head of reconstruction in the province did not command either the trainers or special forces, but closely followed the battle's progress.