Bad communications to blame for Afghan deaths-NATO

BRUSSELS, Jan 10 (Reuters) Poor communications between NATO and Afghan authorities were to blame for the deaths of civilians killed last October by alliance warplanes during a battle with insurgents, a NATO spokesman said today.

About 60 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed by NATO planes during fighting in the southern province of Kandahar during Eid al-Fitr, a major Muslim holiday, last year, according to local leaders.

The incident in the Panjwai area prompted concerns that aggressive tactics by NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to combat Taliban insurgents could turn the local population against it.

''This tragic event took place primarily because communications between international forces and local authorities did not work well enough,'' NATO spokesman James Appathurai said of the conclusions of an internal inquiry.

''While ISAF made every effort to minimise the risk of unintended casualties, ISAF proved to have had inadequate measures for coordination with local authorities who might have known ... that nomads had moved into the surrounding hills.'' He said ISAF had already made ''systematic and procedural'' improvements in communications between it, the Afghan army and the separate US-led coalition that were aimed at preventing future civilian casualties.

The report recommended no disciplinary consequences from the incident because the procedures themselves were to blame rather than any breach of them. Appathurai declined to comment on which NATO nations had been involved.

Last year was Afghanistan's bloodiest year since the Taliban's Islamist government was ousted by US-backed forces in 2001. About 3,800 people, most of them militants but including civilians, Afghan troops, aid workers and more than 180 foreign soldiers, were killed.

NATO took command of a small ISAF force in 2003 and has subsequently expanded its operations to cover the whole of the country with some 32,000 troops.

Its entry into the restive south last year took NATO into the fiercest ground combat of its 57-year history.

REUTERS BDP RN2255