Europeans Seek to Shift Security Role to Afghan Government - NYTimes.com

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By JUDY DEMPSEY

BERLIN — The leaders of France, Germany and Britain called Sunday night for an international conference to work out a plan to shift responsibility for security in Afghanistan to the Afghan government.

The call by the three governments, the largest contributors of troops to the war in Afghanistan after the United States, came as mounting military casualties and doubts about the mission there have fueled growing public opposition to the war in Europe.

In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman, Megan Mattson, said the department had no immediate comment on the proposed conference.

However, the proposal could increase tension in the Obama administration’s relationship with its most important European allies in Afghanistan. The strains were palpable over the weekend as a NATO investigating team continued its inquiry into how many civilians were killed in airstrikes last week aimed at two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban near the northern city of Kunduz.

A senior American military official said Sunday that the German commander in the north who ordered the airstrikes had relied largely on the assessment of a lone Afghan informant, who said that everyone at the scene was an insurgent. The informant’s role was reported Sunday by The Washington Post.

The tankers were hit after they became stuck trying to cross the Kunduz River before dawn on Friday. Local officials have said that 70 people or more died, but it was unclear how many were militants and how many were villagers who had dashed to siphon fuel from the trucks. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition, and villagers buried some in a mass grave before Western military investigators could examine the scene or the corpses.

The German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, defended the call for an airstrike on Sunday. “We had clear information that the Taliban had seized the fuel trucks about six kilometers away from our base in order to launch an attack against our soldiers in Kunduz,” he told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, tightened rules on airstrikes in June in the face of Afghan anger over high civilian casualties in NATO military operations. Questions have been raised about whether the call for the strike complied with those rules.

The proposed international conference, with its suggestion that key allies were looking for ways to reduce the number of their troops, could also complicate relations among allies. The United States, which has 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, is currently weighing whether to send more.

The proposal was announced by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain at a brief news conference here. A German government spokesman said that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France had also signed on to the idea.

Mrs. Merkel said the conference would try to find a way for “much more responsibility to be taken by the Afghan government” for its own security. The conference should involve the United Nations and NATO, she said, and should take place “sometime this year” and after the new Afghan government is in place.

Afghans voted for a new government last month, but the election was marred by accusations of widespread fraud. Officials said it could be months before a winner was determined.

Opinion polls show that well over two-thirds of Germans oppose the Afghan mission, while Mr. Brown is coming under increasing pressure in Britain to justify the presence of its 9,000 troops there. Britain has suffered 212 deaths in the war.

Mrs. Merkel’s government has been criticized by other NATO countries for not doing enough to help defeat the insurgency because Germany’s 4,200 troops are restricted by the German Parliament in what they can do and where they can be deployed.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

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