Afghan President Karzai visits scene of deadly American-led raid

President Hamid Karzai paid a condolence visit today to a remote western region that was the scene of a controversial American-led raid last month, pleading for forgiveness and assuring villagers that those responsible for civilian deaths would be punished.

The president’s visit to the Shindand district of Herat province underscored the lingering ill will over the Aug. 22 strike, official accounts of which remain at wide variance. The U.S. military has acknowledged killing 35 insurgents and seven civilians in the Special Forces strike carried out jointly with Afghan forces in the village of Azizabad; the United Nations and the Afghan government say 90 people were killed, about two-thirds of them children.

Investigations into the incident continue, but none of the parties has substantially altered initial assessments of the number and nature of the casualties.

Across the border in Pakistan, angry protests continued over an unusual cross-border incursion by U.S. troops early Wednesday in which as many as 20 people were killed, many of them thought to be civilians. The Pakistani parliament passed a resolution today condemning the raid in South Waziristan, a day after the Pakistani government lodged a strong diplomatic protest with the U.S. ambassador.

But the strike appeared to signal growing U.S. determination to unilaterally strike at militant targets in Pakistan’s largely ungoverned tribal areas.

Underscoring that, villagers and officials in North Waziristan today reported a missile strike they said they believed was carried out by a U.S. aircraft, an unmanned Predator drone. The attack reportedly killed eight people, five of them identified by local officials as “foreigners.” That term is often used to describe Al Qaeda militants from Arab countries or Central Asia. It was not immediately known whether any was a high-profile insurgent figure.

In Afghanistan, Karzai has been facing plummeting popularity caused in part by disillusionment over the country’s slow pace of recovery and continuing violence in the nearly seven years since the fundamentalist Taliban movement was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion.

Facing an election contest next year, the Afghan leader has sought to distance himself from some actions by Western troops who are battling an increasingly powerful insurgency, but also inadvertently causing growing numbers of civilian deaths.

“It has been five years that I have been working days and nights to avoid such incidents, but I was not successful,” the president’s office quoted him as telling villagers at a mosque in the Shindand district, not far from the site of the raid.

“If I had been successful, the sons of Azizabad would not be steeped in their own blood,” added Karzai, who repeated the government’s previous assertion that 90 people had been killed in the strike.

The president’s office also disclosed today that the Afghan leader had spoken with President Bush a day earlier and said that Bush expressed sorrow over the Azizabad deaths.

“Both presidents discussed ways of preventing civilian casualties,” the statement said. Karzai told villagers that those responsible for the strike “will be brought to justice and punished” but offered no details.

 laura.king@latimes.com

Special correspondent Faiez reported from Kabul and Times staff writer King from Istanbul, Turkey. Special correspondent Zulfiqar Ali in Peshawar contributed to this report.