Last Wednesday, a NATO airstrike against the Kapisa Province ended with eight children dead and the Afghan government deploying a team including a number of MPs to try to figure out how it happened.
NATO, incredibly, is just getting around to officially comment on the killings, and would insist only that its officials “found” the dead children at the site of the attack, and that they can’t “confirm nor deny” that the airstrike is what killed them.
NATO’s denials are usually a bit behind the game, but in this case it seems doubly absurd, as the Afghan government had already confirmed that an informant in the area had told French occupation forces that the children were “terrorists” planning to attack the village, which led to the strike on them.
Thus while NATO can’t, apparently, say for sure that bombing the children is what killed them (they might’ve all spontaneously combusted before the explosives landed) it seems more than a little disingenuous of NATO to feign ignorance. After all, what NATO really wanted to say was also buried in the statement, and that was that the killings were “carried out according to NATO rules on airstrikes.”
