NATO reinstates weapons system used in attack that killed Afghan civilians

Western military officials announced Wednesday they had reinstated use of a weapons system employed in a strike that killed 12 people inside 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 rocketed.

The deaths marked the first major episode of civilian casualties in a massive military offensive, spearheaded by U.S. Marines, which began before dawn Saturday in and around the southern Afghan town of Marja.

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

In its initial statement on Sunday, the NATO force said two rockets had struck a building at least 300 yards away 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 McChrystal, the commander of all Western troops in Afghanistan, issued an immediate apology for the deaths.

Wednesday’s statement, though, shifted blame away from any targeting error involving the weapon, known as a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, 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,” NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said.

The new statement appeared to suggest that the family 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 NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, 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 only have been targeted if forces in the area felt certain 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@latime.com