LONDON: US military investigators are to travel to a village in Afghanistan later this week to try to explain why an American AC-130 gunship killed at least 48 civilians in a bombing raid on a wedding party.

About 117 Afghans were injured in the attack on villages near Kakrak in southern Afghanistan earlier this month. US military officials at first refused to apologize for the bombing raid, insisting their pilots were fired at from the ground.

The attack appeared to trigger the first opposition to the US military from within the Kabul regime and has opened a potentially damaging rift between the president, Hamid Karzai, who is a Pakhtoon, and the powerful Tajik foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah.

US investigators have started questioning servicemen involved in the operation at a military base in Kandahar. The team will travel next to the targeted villages where they will work “for as long as it takes” to find out what happened on the night of the raid, Colonel Roger King, a US military spokesman, said on Monday.

“War is not a precise art,” Col King said, admitting that US military planners frequently had to rely on incomplete intelligence from local Afghan commanders.

Shortly after the July 1 attack Karzai summoned US military chiefs to insist that “all necessary measures” were taken to prevent civilian deaths in future. Now, however, he appears to have tempered his anger and has defended US military tactics.

But others in the government are still furious. At the weekend Dr Abdullah said for the first time that Afghan officials wanted a say in the conduct of future raids.

The other day Karzai’s chief of staff appeared to be at odds with Dr Abdullah. He said the Kabul government continued its support for US military actions and dismissed concerns about the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

After the powerful defence minister, Mohammad Fahim, Dr Abdullah is the most important figure from the Northern Alliance in the Kabul government. Diplomats and aid workers in Kabul fear a split between the Alliance and Karzai could seriously disrupt hopes for a stable government.

Fahim’s forces include 500 armoured personnel carriers and 300 tanks, which would be enough to dislodge the international security assistance force (ISAF) providing security in Kabul. US troops have in the last two weeks been called in to help guard Karzai.

The NYT said it had reviewed 11 areas in Afghanistan bombed by US planes and found 400 civilians were killed. Global Exchange, an American organisation studying the effects of the military campaign, has drawn up a list of 812 Afghan civilians killed in US air strikes.

At the heart of the problem appears to be an American reliance on often faulty intelligence. In the villages near Kakrak there were at least two engagement parties on the night of the bombing and guests fired their guns into the air in a traditional form of celebration. US troops in the area reported seeing anti-aircraft fire, although Afghans denied targeting American planes.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.