NATO air strike a "major error": Afghan president

KABUL - A NATO air strike believed to have killed scores of Afghan civilians was a major "error of judgment" by German forces, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in an interview published on Monday.
Karzai, who is closing in on a first-round victory in a presidential election held last month, also revealed in the interview strained relations with the United States, saying criticism of his friends and family was intended to undermine his own position and make him more malleable.
Germany again defended the decision of its commander in the area to call in the raid last week and brushed off suggestions restrictions it places on its soldiers had prevented them from approaching the scene and from fighting ground battles.
"General (Stanley) McChrystal telephoned me to apologize and to say that he himself hadn't given the order to attack," Karzai told French newspaper Le Figaro, referring to the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Berlin has warned against hasty judgments of the deadliest operation involving German forces since World War Two.
The strike, in which a U.S. F-15 fighter jet summoned by German troops bombed fuel trucks hijacked by the Taliban, has become a big domestic issue in Germany weeks before elections.
"Why didn't they send in ground troops to recover the fuel tank?" Karzai said in the interview with Le Figaro.
German Defense Ministry spokesman Thomas Raabe on Monday said the decision to order the strike was based on information that indicated the presence of armed Taliban near the tankers.
"STRIKE RIGHT DECISION"
He rejected suggestions that a German reluctance to shoot first in combat was behind a decision not to send ground troops to secure the fuel trucks, which were parked in a riverbed.
"Based on the information we have, we believe this strike was right and the suggestion that we are not capable of fighting (ground) battles is ridiculous," said Raabe at a news conference where he was grilled for more than an hour.
"You must realize we are talking about the middle of the night, with special visibility conditions, where we don't know what the enemy is planning. Therefore I think the decision that was made at the time was absolutely correct," he said.
In a first independent estimate of the death toll, a prominent Afghan rights group said up to 70 civilians had been killed in the strike in Char Dara district of Kunduz province.
Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM), a non-governmental group funded by domestic rights campaigners, said it had reached the figure based on interviews with residents in the area.