Coalition Airstrike In Afghanistan Kills Family

In a second deadly incident involving civilians in Afghanistan in just the last two days, nine members of the same family.

A coalition airstrike has destroyed a mud-brick home and killed nine people from four generations of an Afghan family. This is the second major incident in two days where Western coalition forces have killed civilians. On Sunday, US Marines fired on cars and pedestrians as they fled a suicide attack. Up to 10 Afghans died in that violence, and President Hamid Karzai condemned the killings.

The Afghan leader has repeatedly pleaded for Western troops to show more restraint amid concern that civilian deaths shake domestic support for the foreign military involvement that the president needs to prop up his weak government - increasingly under threat from a resurgent Taliban. The US military is reporting that militants fired on a US base in Kapisa province on Sunday night. Kapisa is about 50 miles northeast of Kabul. Fighter aircraft were scrambled the they returned fire, and that is when they hit a civilian home. A relative of those killed, Gulam Nabi, said the bombs killed four women, four children between the ages of six months and five years, and one elderly man. Sayad Mohammad Dawood Hashimmi, Kapisa deputy governor, confirmed the nine deaths, as did an Interior Ministry official in Kabul. A US military statement said that coalition forces "dropped two 2,000-pound bombs" on a compound after a rocket was fired at the base and armed militants were observed running into the compound for cover. "Coalition forces observed two men with AK-47s leaving the scene of the rocket attack and entering the compound," coalition spokesman Lt Col David Accetta said. "These men knowingly endangered civilians by retreating into a populated area while conducting attacks against coalition forces." An Associated Press reporter at the scene says that a large mud home in a compound of five buildings was completely destroyed, leaving only bits of mud. Among those killed were Gulam Nabi's parents, his sister, his nephew, and four of the extended family's youngest children. Once again, actions of militants have put civilians lives in peril. What should the armed forces have done in this situation? In an effort to get the militants, should they have fired at the compound?