Weapon that killed 12 Afghan civilians is back in use

Western military officials announced Wednesday that they had resumed use of a weapon system employed in a strike that killed 12 people in an Afghan family home, most of them women and children.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization said an investigation found that the weapon had not malfunctioned in Sunday’s strike but that it still was not known why the house was hit.

The strike was the first major incident involving civilian casualties in a military offensive spearheaded by U.S. Marines that began Saturday around the southern Afghan town of Marja.

Before the start of the assault on the Taliban stronghold, American commanders pledged to do their utmost to protect people living in the area. Civilian casualties spur fury among Afghans, and cause what commanders regard as a dangerous erosion of public support for the Western military presence.

In its initial statement Sunday, the NATO force said two rockets had struck a building at least 300 yards from the intended target. The following day, that estimate was revised upward to a miss of more than 600 yards. U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western troops in Afghanistan, issued an immediate apology.

Wednesday’s statement, though, shifted blame away from any targeting error involving the weapon, known as a HIMARS, or high mobility artillery rocket system, which is a multiple-rocket launcher mounted on a truck.

“The review is still ongoing, but it has been determined that the HIMARS weapon system functioned properly,” said NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.

The new statement appeared to suggest that the home that was hit was in fact the building that Western forces had intended to strike. However, Air Force Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a spokesman for the ISAF, stopped short of confirming that, saying the matter was still under investigation.

Under NATO’s strict new rules of engagement formulated over the summer, the house could have been targeted only if forces in the area felt certain that there were no civilians inside. The strike could thus have been based on faulty intelligence or other human error.

Afghan officials on Monday offered another possible explanation, that insurgents had forced the family to allow them to use the home as a position from which to fire on U.S. and Afghan troops.

The NATO force, however, identified all 12 of the dead as civilians, and has not publicly revised that position.

laura.king@latimes.com