BRUSSELS, 10 August 2007 — NATO said yesterday it was not aware of any request by a British NATO commander for the United States to withdraw special forces from his area of operations in southern Afghanistan due to high civilian casualties.
The International Herald Tribune yesterday quoted an unnamed senior British commander in Afghanistan’s Helmand province as saying he made the request as the casualties had made it difficult to win over local people.
“NATO headquarters is unaware of such a request,” NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero said in Brussels. “Coordination on the ground is excellent between Operation Enduring Freedom and ISAF forces, also in the way operations are allocated.”
British Defense Minister Des Browne said the commander was expressing a personal view. “It is the reporting of an observation of a British officer on a particular part of the American military,” he told reporters in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
“That may be his view, but it is not the view of the Helmand Task Force commander, it is not the view of our government, it is not the view of the Americans it is not the view of the alliance,” he said. “These things can be said in the heat of battle. These are very difficult circumstances.”
Romero said ISAF, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, had taken steps to minimize civilian casualties and understood that a separate US-led force code-named Operation Enduring Freedom had done the same.
“When our forces take fire from an Afghan house, for example, the on-scene commander must satisfy themselves to make sure that the Afghan facility does not suffer innocent civilian casualties.”
Romero said the commander of ISAF had ordered use of precision weapons systems and munitions to minimize civilian casualties and NATO had ordered a stronger system of reporting in after-action reviews that would involve Afghan forces.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer last month acknowledged mounting civilian casualties had hurt support for NATO, and said commanders had ordered troops to hold off on attacks in some situations where civilians were at risk.
The International Herald Tribune report put the number of civilian casualties this year in Helmand at close to 300, most caused by foreign and Afghan forces, not the Taleban. It quoted the British commander as saying that in the district of Sangin, which had been calm for a month, there was no longer a need for special forces.
