As I posted yesterday, US Paramilitaries in Afghanistan stand accused of shooting ten civilians, including eight schoolchildren. According to one report, many of the victims were handcuffed before their execution. The Afghan investigator thinks that the killings took place…

Mr Wafa, a former governor of Helmand province, met President Karzai to discuss his findings yesterday. “I spoke to the local headmaster,” he said. “It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack.”

Karzai agrees…

The findings by the delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took 10 people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and 10, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead.

So does the province’s governor…

The governor of Kunar, Fazullah Wahidi, said that “the coalition claimed they were enemy fighters,” but that elders in the district and a delegation sent to the remote area had found that “10 people were killed and all of them were civilians.”

So does the local headmaster…

Rahman Jan Ehsas, the local headmaster, told The Times that seven of the students were handcuffed before they were shot. A local farm labourer and a shepherd boy were also killed, he said.

So do ordinary Afghans…

Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.

So do local authorities…

An MP from Kunar, who just returned to Kabul, also spoke to the rally, and confirmed that the children were killed, and all the peoply were so angry at that.

So, it seems, do the UN…

Kai Eide, the head of the UN in Afghanistan, issued a statement reinforcing Afghan claims that most of the dead were schoolboys. “Based on our initial investigation, eight of those killed were students enrolled in local schools,” he said.

NATO disagrees, of course, and it may indeed be false or distorted. It may be Taliban propaganda (though that would reveal extraordinary entryism); it may be a lie, to stoke up the public (though that would suggest that NATO-Afghan relations are drilling through the bottom of the barrel); they may all be, well – wrong (though that would be incredibly incompetent). We can’t be sure. What’s certain, however, is that everybody but the military seems united on the belief that these were the killings of civilians; children, indeed. If that doesn’t demand the attention of a purportedly civilized state, what would?

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