This is the story that ran in the UK press the day after the incident last year:
Quote:
Three British soldiers killed by bomb from American jet
JAMES KIRKUP
THE Ministry of Defence was last night facing searching questions about delays in buying vital new battlefield identification systems after a "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan in which three British soldiers were killed by United States forces.
The accident, which also left two other UK troops hospitalised, is the latest in a string of "blue on blue" incidents involving US aircraft and UK ground forces, and has heightened British troops' anxieties about "gung-ho" American tactics.
Damagingly for the MoD, the incident came more than five years after MPs first warned that British lives were being put at risk by delays in designing and ordering new battlefield identification systems meant to avert "fratricide" attacks.
Earlier this year, the public accounts committee of MPs again criticised ministers for making slow progress on the Battlefield Target Identification System, a network of compatible radios and signalling devices meant to identify allied forces to one another.
Joint UK-US exercises to help devise the new systems are due to take place next year, and the MoD does not expect to place even provisional contracts with defence firms until next year at the earliest.
The latest incident took place on Thursday evening near the British base at Kajaki, in the Helmand province of southern Afghanistan.
More than 7,000 UK troops are in the country as part of the NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF), which is fighting an increasingly deadly war against Taleban insurgents who oppose the elected Afghan government.
The deaths happened after about 90 British soldiers were ambushed on several sides by the Taleban as they conducted a fighting patrol to hunt down insurgents.
The forces, from 1st Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment, called for air support from US forces. But when two US F-15 aircraft arrived at the scene, one dropped a bomb directly on to a British position, killing the three soldiers instantly.
Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrats' defence spokesman, said that, while friendly fire incidents could never be eliminated, the tragedy suggested the MoD had not done enough to put precautions in place.
"One can only conclude that they have not tackled the problem at all, if our troops are calling in US air support that then drops bombs on the people it is supposed to be supporting," he said. "Clearly, there is still something fundamentally wrong with the communications systems here."
Ian Davidson, the Labour MP for Glasgow South West and a member of the public accounts committee, said the delay had been partly down to a failure to agree technical standards for communications systems with the US military "A lot of the difficulty seems to be in co-ordinating with the Americans, especially given their more gung-ho style," he said.
Several British service personnel in Afghanistan echoed those concerns privately. "I just can't figure out how this has happened - how do you tell the families they were killed by supposed allies?" one soldier told The Scotsman.
Another said: "Whenever I hear we have American jets overhead, I get f****** worried. They just don't seem to know what they are doing a lot of the time."
A third said: "They have a different approach to us - they fire first and think later."
As well as the ISAF mission, a separate US force is active in Afghanistan, hunting down suspected al-Qaeda terrorists along the Pakistani border.
Earlier this month, a senior British commander appealed for US special forces units to be withdrawn from his area in Helmand province, warning that they were killing and alienating many Afghan civilians. He said small teams of special forces relied heavily on air strikes for cover as they were unable to defend themselves against large groups of insurgents.
This is believed to be the second friendly-fire incident involving British troops in Afghanistan. The MoD is still investigating reports that Jonathan Wigley, 21, a Royal Marine, was the victim of allied fire when he was killed in Helmand last December.
And earlier this year, UK-US relations were strained when the Pentagon refused to give to a British coroner a cockpit tape from the US aircraft that killed Lance-Corporal Matty Hull of the Household Cavalry in Iraq in 2003. The tape was eventually leaked and submitted to the inquest, but the incident angered many UK service personnel.
Gerald Howarth, a Tory defence spokesman, warned that the US must offer "full co-operation" over the Afghan incident.
"The events around Matty Hull's death did real damage to public opinion in the UK, and that cannot be allowed to happen again," Mr Howarth said.
Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, said that the MoD would always seek to "learn the lessons" of incidents such as Thursday's.
But he went on: "I do not want us to get into a situation where we're blaming each other when, as a matter of fact, US air support has saved our people's lives on many, many occasions, particularly over the last four months in that very theatre."
British forces in Afghanistan immediately announced an inquiry into the incident, while the US Embassy in London issued a statement saying: "The United States expresses its deep condolences to the families and loved ones of the soldiers who died, and we wish those who were injured a speedy recovery."
Christopher Pang, a former NATO official now at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a security think tank in London, warned that the investigation must be transparent.
"The most important thing is that the US authorities investigate this thoroughly and are seen to investigate thoroughly," he said. "There is a growing awareness that the Afghan mission risks losing both the support of the Afghan population and the electorates in the countries that are providing forces for the mission."
Paul Smyth, a former RAF commander at the RUSI, said that the nature of the Afghan mission meant ground forces were ever more dependent on air cover.
"As land forces operating in inaccessible and hostile environments place increasing dependence on close air support, the frequency of close air support attacks has increased," he said.
The latest deaths take the number of British military fatalities in Afghanistan since November 2001 to 73.
Additional reporting by Tim Albone
Q & A
WHY WERE UNITED STATES FORCES ANYWHERE NEAR BRITISH TROOPS?
Joint activity carried out by military personnel from more than one country is an everyday occurrence, particularly in the part of Afghanistan where the soldiers died.
British air forces carry out air support for US troops and vice versa. Close air support is an operation in which air fighters drop bombs on enemy forces who pose a danger to colleagues on the ground.
In Afghanistan, the threat comes from the Taleban.
DID THE AMERICAN PILOTS KNOW BRITISH TROOPS WERE ON THE GROUND?
Yes. "Fighter crews don't go around indiscriminately attacking the Taleban in areas like this," explained Tim Ripley, research associate at the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies (CDISS) at Lancaster University.
"Each party involved will have been in contact with the other. They were meant to be in the same place."
He added that each side would have established verbal and visual contact with the other.
WHO TOLD THE PILOTS TO DROP THE BOMB?
Close air support is co-ordinated from the ground by a forward air controller whose job it is to instruct the fighter pilots on where to go and what targets to hit. In this case, the British forward air controller will have been asking the American forces to hit nearby targets. The co-ordinates of the target are read out by the forward air controller to the pilots, who reads them back to confirm before dropping a bomb.
WHERE WILL THE INVESTIGATION BEGIN?
The interaction between the British ground troops and the American pilots will have been preserved on the fighter jet's data recorder. This will yield clues as to whether there was a misunderstanding between the ground controller and the fighter crew.
"The whole procedure of summoning close air support, flying past to establish visual contact and then reading out and reading back the co-ordinates is a carefully rehearsed procedure which should be done by the book on every occasion," said Mr Ripley. "It will be pretty clear early on where something went wrong."
COULD FAULTY EQUIPMENT BE TO BLAME?
This is extremely unlikely, according to Mr Ripley. "Systems such as this are 99 per cent accurate and there are very few incidences of equipment failure compared with human error. It is possible something may have gone wrong with the bomb itself. If the fins were not attached properly at the air base, this may have caused the bomb to go off target."
WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE GONE WRONG?
Another possibility is that the co-ordinates for the attack location were wrong because of misinterpretation of the GPS equipment by the ground troops - a deadly mistake in which the British forces sealed their own fate.
A third explanation is that the US pilots entered the co-ordinates incorrectly into their own system, despite having read them back correctly over the radio. This possibility could be established by examining information from the fighter jet's data recorder.
COULD THIS BE A DELIBERATE ACT?
Each bomb has a blast radius within which casualties are likely even if they are not hit by the bomb itself.
Sometimes the Taleban are so close that it is impossible to bomb them without risking the lives of soldiers on the ground.
It is possible the British troops believed the risk of being hit by the bomb or its blast radius was less than the risk of being killed by nearby Taleban and that they ordered the American pilots to drop the bomb in a desperate bid to save themselves.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE PILOTS NOW?
The pilots involved will now have to be interviewed at length to determine what went wrong.
WHAT WERE CONDITIONS LIKE AT THE TIME?
The area is "open and uncluttered", according to Mr Ripley, and it was not fully dark. "It is unlikely that poor visibility was a factor unless they had already dropped one bomb and the dust and debris from it obscured their vision."
He said the area was well known to all troops and was full of Taleban forces. "It is like the old Blackadder sketch - you just attack the same area again and again."
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