FORWARD MARINE BASE, Afghanistan'Three U.S. Special Forces troops were killed and 20 injured in Afghanistan Wednesday when a 2,000-pound \smart bomb"" missed its Taliban target north of Kandahar and exploded within 100 yards of the American forces and a group of opposition fighters.
The Pentagon offered no immediate explanation for what caused the deadliest ""friendly fire"" incident of the war. It occurred at 10 a.m. in Afghanistan, or 12:30 a.m. EST, after a U.S. air controller on the ground called for an air strike on Taliban troops to support
an attack by Hamid Karzai's opposition forces, who were advancing on Kandahar from the north.
Karzai, a Pashtun opposition leader newly designated as head of the provisional government of Afghanistan, was slightly injured by the errant bomb, which also killed five Afghan opposition soldiers and injured 18 others.
Karzai's forces are one of two opposition groups attacking the last remaining concentration of Taliban forces in Kandahar, the militia's spiritual home in southern Afghanistan.
""We're seeing reports of Taliban digging in, building or erecting defensive positions,"" Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told reporters at
the Pentagon.
At the same time, U.S. Marines, operating from this base within striking distance of Kandahar, positioned themselves to cut off roads and other likely paths for vehicles that Taliban and al Qaeda fighters might use in fleeing Kandahar, said Maj. James Parrington, a senior commanding officer here.
Parrington's statement was the clearest indication yet that U.S. ground troops might
be about to engage in combat. Since the Marines landed at this desert airstrip Nov. 25, they have conducted motorized and
airborne reconnaissance patrols in an ever-expanding radius.
The Pentagon Wednesday night identified the three American soldiers killed in the friendly fire incident as Master Sgt. Jefferson Donald Davis, 39, of Tennessee; Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Henry Petithory, 32, of Massachusetts; and Staff Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser, 28, of California. All were from the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, based at Fort Campbell, Ky.
The deaths bring to four the number of Americans killed in action in Afghanistan. CIA paramilitary officer Johnny Micheal Spann died Nov. 25 during an uprising by Taliban prisoners in northern Afghanistan.
While the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., is investigating what caused Wednesday's friendly fire incident, a senior defense official at the Pentagon said that one theory gaining attention is that the coordinates of the Special Forces troops who called in the air strike were mistakenly loaded into the satellite-guided bomb, instead of the coordinates for the Taliban forces they were attacking.
Another senior defense official noted that the Central Command has concluded preliminarily that just such an error led to the war's first ""friendly fire"" accident, Nov. 26. That incident seriously wounded five U.S. troops when a bomb landed near a fort outside the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif during an uprising by Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners.
Afghan fighters and U.S. warplanes struck Osama bin Laden's forces in Tora Bora Wednesday near their last major stronghold, and local commanders claimed Wednesday afternoon to have succeeded in cutting off al Qaeda fighters from supply routes.
Moving to heal their ruined and fractious country, Afghans signed an accord Wednesday to create a multiethnic government in which a triumphant military force, the Northern Alliance, will share power for six months starting Dec. 22 with an array of rivals that excludes the all-but-vanquished Taliban.
