Minister: German army "made mistakes" in Afghan strike (Roundup)

Nov 6, 2009, 15:06 GMT

Berlin - The Germany army 'made mistakes' when it ordered a fatal airstrike in Afghanistan but the operation was still 'appropriate', Defence Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg said in Berlin Friday.

The minister was speaking after the German military, or Bundeswehr, was sharply criticised in a secret NATO report over its conduct during the September 4 strike in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan in which dozens of people, including civilians, were killed.

A report to Afghan President Hamid Karzai stated in mid-September that 30 civilians and 69 Taliban fighters were killed in the strike, although the figures are disputed.

On Friday prosecutors in Dresden, where Colonel Georg Klein, the officer who ordered the airstrike, is based, asked federal prosecutors to decide if international law defining war crimes was applicable in the case.

Guttenberg told reporters in Berlin that procedural errors had been made during the operation, in which Klein had requested that US fighter bombers attack two hijacked tanker trucks stuck in a river bed.

The NATO report had suggested that Klein has overstepped his authority in ordering the strike.

However, Guttenberg said that 'even if such procedural errors had not been made, it would have had to come to this airstrike,' adding that the manoeuvre was 'militarily appropriate'.

The newly-appointed minister pointedly referred to the Afghan deployment as a 'non-international armed conflict,' meaning that it is a war, although not one between the armies of sovereign states in the classical sense.

Previous defence ministers in Germany have, mindful of a public averse to anything resembling a war, strongly avoided such phrases.

Public support for the Afghan mission in Germany is consequently low, and in the wake of the Kunduz bombing calls for a withdrawal of German forces intensified.

Germany has some 4,300 troops stationed in the Kunduz province, which had been one of the calmer areas of the country, although attacks from Taliban and other militants have intensified in recent months.

Guttenberg presented the NATO report to members of the German parliament earlier on Friday, but said that there would be no public version as there were too many classified details contained in it.

Meanwhile, the decision by the Dresden prosecutor to refer Klein's case to the federal prosecutor had raised the issue of whether the airstrike might have been a war-crime.

The office of the federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe said it had not yet accepted the case.

Germany is one of the few nations in the world where civilian courts, not courts martial, decide if actions by the military are right. Germany abolished courts martial after the Second World War.

However, Guttenberg's definition of the deployment appears to reduce the likelihood that the federal prosecutor would rule that Klein could be accused of murder.

The minister added that more training for German troops was needed with regard to ordering airstrikes, a process that the Bundeswehr has comparatively little experience with in Afghanistan, in contrast to other nations in the ISAF alliance conducting the war there.

'I wholeheartedly regret every civil victim,' the minister added.