U.S. Defends Deadly Afghan Raid

The U.S. military defended its raid on a suspected renegade commander's compound that resulted in the deaths of six Afghan children, saying Thursday the site was packed with weapons and soldiers were fired on from inside.

News of the Dec. 5 raid in eastern Paktia province emerged Wednesday, just days after a botched weekend attack in neighboring Ghazni in which nine children, all under 12 years old, were killed. The children and two adults in the Paktia compound were found crushed to death under a wall.

The twin operations have provoked outrage and expressions of concern from ordinary Afghans all the way to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. But U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty said American forces exercised proper restraint in the Paktia operation against a weapons storage depot allegedly used by Mullah Jalani, a suspected associate of Taliban-ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

"Certainly, we followed the law of proportionality in this compound," Hilferty said Thursday. "From the compound, they were shooting at us with machine guns. Jalani has more ammunition at his house then the coalition keeps at Bagram," the U.S. headquarters.

Storage compartments containing hundreds of 107mm rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank and anti-personnel mines and several howitzers were found at the compound.

The U.S. military was quick to apologize for the Ghazni attack, sending a team of investigators to the mountain village and working to compensate victims' families.

Both incidents occurred in a part of the country that is already hostile to the presence of American troops in Afghanistan and the U.S. can ill afford to lose the sympathy of the people in that area, reports CBS News Correspondent Lara Logan.

But Hilferty said it is impossible to safeguard all civilians if they are living with known suspects.

"If noncombatants surround themselves with thousands of weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and howitzers and mortars in a compound known to be used by a terrorist, we are not completely responsible for the consequences," he said Wednesday.

The United Nations, which already warned that civilian casualties could drive Afghans into the arms of militants, sharpened its criticism Thursday.

"We believe that observance of international humanitarian law would help in avoiding these kinds of situations," said Manoel de Almeida e Silva, U.N. spokesman in Kabul.

Asked whether the world body believed the U.S.-led coalition was in breach of those laws — including an obligation to protect civilians — he said, "It's up to them to decide whether they are observing all of its aspects."

Almeida e Silva said the world body's concerns were passed along to new U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

Afghans also were outraged by the attacks.

"This is terrible and will sadden people greatly," said Wahid Ullah, a 20-year-old shopkeeper in Kabul. "This will have very bad consequences for the Americans in the future. People will grow to hate them, day by day."

Both attacks were in the Pashtun-dominated southeast and risked further alienating the country's largest ethnic group, from which the Taliban emerged and still draws its main support.

Afghan government-run television news broadcasts on Wednesday neglected to mention the children's deaths. A palace spokesman, Hamid Hilmi, said it was not a deliberate attempt to keep the news from the Afghan people.

Jalani was not among the nine people arrested at the Paktia site, 12 miles east of Gardez, Hilferty said. He did not identify the adults who were killed or say whether they were combatants or civilians.

Also Thursday, Hilferty said 10 rockets landed in and around a U.S. base at Orgun, in eastern Paktika province. One U.S. soldier and an Afghan civilian working on the base were slightly injured and evacuated to a coalition hospital and were in good condition.

The soldier, whose name was not released, was expected to be released later Thursday and return to duty in several days.

Meanwhile, a raid by several hundred U.S. and Afghan soldiers that began Tuesday in the eastern province of Khost has failed to uncover any weapons or result in any arrests.

"The fact that we did not hit the jackpot here is not indicative that the air assault was not successful. We will continue to interdict their routes of communication and we will find them eventually," Hilferty said.

The military on Dec. 2 launched Operation Avalanche, which it said involved 2,000 troops in action in southern and eastern Afghanistan and was the largest offensive since the Afghan war ended in late 2001. No major combat has been reported to date.