NATO limits nighttime house raids

February 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

KABUL (AP) — American troops knocked on the door, and before the Afghan family could find the key to let them in, the soldiers broke it down.

There was no time to take women in the home to another place, said 77-year-old Mohammad Nabi. And that’s what troubled the retired school teacher most about the intrusion in the southern town of Marjah.

“If they ask us to take our women and daughters in another place, and then they do the search, we have no problems,” Nabi told an Associated Press reporter. “We will cooperate with them. But they just enter the house and start searching, and they don’t care who is there.”

A new directive, confirmed Wednesday by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, aims to limit such nighttime raids on civilians. It was prompted by a storm of complaints from Afghans who, like Nabi, were enraged over foreign soldiers’ bursting into their homes.

The move is the most recent by coalition forces to woo the Afghan public away from the Taliban.

“We didn’t understand what a cultural line it was,” McChrystal said during a luncheon with a group of young Afghans involved in a leadership program, part of a series he regularly holds to hear Afghan public opinion.

“We are trying to change the way we do these,” he said.

Such raids emerged as the top concern by Afghans after McChrystal limited the use of airstrikes, which were responsible for the bulk of civilian deaths. He said the directive, whose details remain classified, was issued in late January. The AP had been told last month that NATO forces would limit night raids, but the change was confirmed only Wednesday.

A number of groups, along with the Afghan government and civilians, had been pressuring NATO to rethink the nighttime operations.