90
Estimated number of insider attacks reported to date in Afghanistan, including Tuesday’s
143
Deaths resulting from insider attacks sibce 2008
61
Deaths in 2012, the peak year for insider attacks
Sources: Long War Journal, Associated Press
An American major general was shot to death Tuesday in one of the bloodiest insider attacks of the long Afghanistan war when a gunman dressed as an Afghan soldier turned on allied troops, wounding about 15 including a German general and two Afghan generals.
A U.S. official identified the slain American officer as Maj. Gen. Harold Greene. An engineer by training, Greene was on his first deployment to a war zone and was involved in preparing Afghan forces the scheduled departure of U.S.-coalition troops at the end of this year.
Greene, deputy commanding general of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, was the highest-ranking American officer killed in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan and the most-senior officer killed in foreign combat since 1970 in the Vietnam War.
Five major generals were killed in Vietnam.
The attack at Marshal Fahim National Defense University underscored the tensions that persist as the U.S. combat role winds down in Afghanistan — and it was not the only assault by an Afghan ally on coalition forces on Tuesday. In eastern Paktia province, an Afghan police guard exchanged fire with NATO troops near the governor’s office, provincial police said. The guard was killed in the gunfight.
It was unclear if the two incidents were linked. Police said they were investigating.
Early indications suggested the Afghan gunman who killed Greene, a native of upstate New York, was inside a building and fired indiscriminately from a window at people gathered outside, the U.S. official said. There was no indication that Greene was specifically targeted, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly by name about the attack.
A U.S. official said that of the estimated 15 wounded, about half were Americans and several of them seriously hurt.
U.S. officials still asserted confidence in their partnership with the Afghan military, which appears to be holding its own against the Taliban but will have to operate independently once most U.S.-led coalition forces leave at the end of the year.
Insider attacks rose sharply in 2012, with more than 60 coalition troops — mostly Americans — killed in 40-plus attacks that threatened to shatter all trust between Afghan and allied forces. U.S. commanders imposed a series of precautionary tactics, and the number of such attacks declined sharply last year.
The White House said President Barack Obama was briefed on the shooting. Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel both spoke with Gen. Joseph Dunford, the top U.S. general in Kabul, who said a joint U.S.-Afghan investigation was underway.
The Pentagon’s press secretary, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby said the general who was killed and other officials had been on a routine visit to the military university on a base west of Kabul.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in a statement praised the “Afghan soldier” who carried out the attack. He did not claim the Taliban was responsible, although in the past the rebels have encouraged such actions.
Foreign aid workers, contractors, journalists and other civilians in Afghanistan are increasingly becoming targets of violence as the U.S.-led military coalition continues its withdrawal.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned Tuesday’s attack as “cowardly.”
It is “an act by the enemies who don’t want to see Afghanistan have strong institutions,” Karzai said in a statement.
The site of the attack is part of a military compound known as Camp Qargha, sometimes called “Sandhurst in the Sand”— referring to the famed British military academy — because British forces oversaw building the officer school and its training program.
Soldiers were tense in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. One soldier in a NATO convoy leaving Camp Qargha fired an apparent warning shot in the vicinity of journalists who were in a car, as well as pedestrians standing nearby. No one was wounded.
Elsewhere Tuesday, a NATO helicopter strike targeting missile-launching Taliban militants killed four civilians in western Afghanistan, an Afghan official said. NATO said it was investigating.
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