U.S. Tones Down Denials of a Mistake

U.S. officials said Saturday they were still confident that a convoy bombed by American warplanes two days earlier was a legitimate target but retreated from categorical denials that the victims were Afghan tribal elders and promised a full investigation.

Pentagon officials initially described the 10 to 12 vehicles struck near the eastern city of Khowst late Thursday as carrying Taliban leaders. They dismissed reports from the region that the attack killed 65 supporters of the new Afghan government en route here for Saturday’s inauguration.

Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, who was here for the inauguration, insisted that the airstrike was directed at “a good target.” But Franks said an investigation will be conducted to determine whether the attack might have been an unfortunate incident of “friendly fire.”

Another U.S. official here for the ceremonies also claimed to have intelligence reports identifying the convoy as Taliban leaders or members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and said U.S. aircraft were fired on from the vicinity of the convoy just before the vehicles were bombed.

“The indications that I have right now tell me that this was a target that we intended to strike,” Franks told reporters after the ceremony installing Pushtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai as prime minister.

Karzai also said his initial information suggested that there had been no attack on tribal elders en route to witness the transfer of power here.

“I will definitely check it out with our American friends,” he said. “I don’t think it’s true. The first information I got was there was no such bombing. I will check it out.”

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency quoted Afghans in the region of the attack as saying the Pentagon was misinformed about those traveling in the convoy.

The agency quoted regional councilman Abdullah Jan as calling for Karzai to order an inquiry into the attack. Jan told the news agency that at least two senior regional leaders were killed.

“There were no Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters in our convoy,” the agency quoted Jan as saying.

Others in the region said the convoy had been forced to make a detour after running into a Taliban roadblock--a pattern of movement that might have led surveillance teams to conclude that the travelers were aligned with the ousted fundamentalists rather then trying to flee them.

In the United States, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said that after two days of investigations into all available intelligence on the strike, no evidence had been found to justify the allegation.

“We’re confident in what we hit,” said the spokesman, Maj. Brad Lowell. “We have now determined that it was leaders of the Taliban.”

Lowell said that during the strikes, two shoulder-fired air-defense missiles were launched at U.S. jets and helicopter gunships from the vicinity of the convoy. He said the missiles missed the aircraft by wide margins.

“At no time were the aircraft in jeopardy,” he said. The convoy was destroyed in the strike, Lowell said.

“Any time we receive information like this, we take it extremely seriously--we exhaust all available resources to confirm we fired on military targets,” he said.

“For the second straight day, we went back to all our intelligence to confirm that we struck at the right target,” Lowell said. “We can confirm from that investigation that the munitions hit the target, which we have now determined to be Taliban.”

In a related development, Franks also told reporters here that Bin Laden may have slipped out of the Tora Bora region in eastern Afghanistan that U.S. air power had been striking hard for the last few weeks.

“There really are only about three possibilities: He can be in Tora Bora or in that area dead. He can be somewhere else in Afghanistan and still alive. Or perhaps he may have gotten over into Pakistan,” Franks said.

Discovering whether Bin Laden was killed in the punishing airstrikes will depend on how soon U.S. forces can comb the complex network of caves in the region, he said.

Franks said he remains confident that Bin Laden eventually will be found.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.