Bush Seeks to Console Afghans

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine —  President Bush called Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday to offer condolences for an American airstrike this week that killed as many as 44 civilians in Afghanistan.

The call was a possible prelude to further U.S. steps to atone for the accident.

Administration officials said Bush made the five-minute telephone call from the White House, shortly before leaving Washington to begin a four-day holiday at his parents’ seaside home here. He marks his 56th birthday today.

The attack Monday has put a strain on Washington’s efforts to keep Karzai’s fledgling government unified in support of the ongoing war on terrorism, which led to the ouster of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.

Bush did not offer an apology for the incident, which is under investigation. But his call is the clearest signal yet that the United States may be ready to accept blame for the aerial assault that resulted in one of the deadliest “friendly fire” incidents of the war.

The call came as a team of U.S. and Afghan investigators returned to Kabul, the Afghan capital, from the scene of the attack in the remote Oruzgan province. Officials at the Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said that Karzai and Army Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, the top U.S. military official in Afghanistan, have scheduled a news conference today in Kabul to discuss the inquiry’s preliminary results.

The incident poses an array of problems for the United States. It has added to growing Afghan anger over the war, eroding support from villagers whose assistance is crucial to U.S. efforts to rid the country of Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

The episode also puts military leaders in the uncomfortable position of having to at least consider curtailing such operations--and possibly punishing pilots and troops--for mistakes made in an unconventional war that has become a confusing game of cat-and-mouse.

Kabul Radio said Bush told Karzai, “I hope such kind of accidents will not happen again. The United States is a powerful friend of Afghanistan and will be beside Afghanistan.”

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said that Bush told the Afghan leader “that the loss of innocent lives was very much a tragedy” and that the presidents affirmed their commitment to the war on terrorism.

The Afghan government has said that 22 of those killed were attending a party for an upcoming wedding. It also said that 120 people were injured.

Pentagon officials acknowledged that an AC-130 gunship strafed six targets in the area, but they insisted that pilots and ground spotters had identified the targets as antiaircraft installations firing on the plane. Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that the area of the attack was “an area of enormous sympathy for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”

Villagers have said the only fire came from celebratory rifle shots fired at the party, an Afghan tradition.

Bush also delivered a videotaped speech Friday to a conference of Baltic and Balkan nations. In his remarks, he promoted the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to encompass a wide swath of Eastern European countries once in the Soviet sphere, and called for a broadened role for the alliance beyond Europe.

The president told the Eastern European leaders, as he emphasized during visits to Moscow and Western Europe in May, that a united Europe needs to prepare “to meet global challenges beyond Europe’s borders.”

“The attacks of Sept. 11 took place in the United States, but their target was freedom itself. All of Europe, and freedom-loving nations everywhere, are threatened by these forces of chaos and hatred,” he said Friday.

The conference to which he spoke, in Riga, the capital of Latvia, brought together Eastern European nations hoping to gain invitations into NATO when the alliance meets in November in Prague, the Czech capital.

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Gerstenzang reported from Kennebunkport and Miller from Washington.