United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Official teams investigating U.S.-led air strikes in the mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have found that they killed at least 64 people, mostly women and children attendign a wedding party, AFP reported Friday.[1] -- The day before, Des Browne, Britain's defense secretary, speaking in Washington, D.C., said that "Afghanistan poses a greater challenge than Iraq for the United States and its allies and will require a commitment from the international community for a generation," adding that "the next U.S. administration will need to make NATO's transformation from a Cold War organization a priority to help ensure long-term success in Afghanistan. -- 'I have no doubt that it will be a longer haul in Afghanistan,' Browne said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank." ...

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- Official investigations have found that U.S.-led air strikes a week ago killed 64 people, most of them women and children, the heads of separate investigation teams said Friday.

The U.S.-led coalition has denied killing civilians in the strikes on July 4 and July 6 in remote, mountainous areas near the border with Pakistan but said it was looking into the allegations. It says only militants were killed.

President Hamid Karzai appointed high-level teams to investigate the claims, which have attracted criticism from the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Afghan parliament.

The team that looked into Sunday's strike in the remote Deh Bala district of Nangarhar told AFP they were shown the bloodied clothes of women and children killed in the strike that hit a wedding party and turned left buildings into rubble.

"We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the air strikes and another nine were wounded," said the head of the mission, Burhanullah Shinwari.

"They were all civilians and had no links with Taliban or Al-Qaeda," said Shinwari, who is also the deputy speaker of Afghanistan's senate.

Another member of the delegation, Mohammad Asif Shinwari, said there were only three men among the dead and the rest were women and children.

Local officials said earlier the strikes had hit a party of mainly women and children escorting a bride to her groom. The bride was among the dead, they said.

A separate investigation into Friday's strike in the northeastern province of Nuristan had found that 17 civilians were killed there, said General Mohammad Amin, a defense ministry official who headed the team.

The coalition has said this hit "several" militants who were fleeing after attacking a base.

"We found that in the bombing 17 people were killed and nine were wounded, Amin said. "They are all civilians."

Afghan authorities said before that the dead included two doctors and two midwives who were leaving the area after the coalition said it was preparing an operation there.

The relatives of some of the victims were paid compensation, Amin said, warning the killings could see a backlash against the government and the international troops helping it to fight an extremist insurgency.

"If the government keeps quiet about these civilian casualties in Nuristan like in the past, it will be bad for the security of the province," he said.

"Any loss of civilian life is tragic," said Nielson-Green, a coalition spokeswoman, told AFP. "We never target non-combatants. We do go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties."

Civilians are regularly caught in the crossfire of the insurgency, launched after the hardline Islamic Taliban regime was removed from power in late 2001 in a U.S.-led invasion.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday that 250 people were killed or wounded in five days of military action and militant attacks starting July 4, a figure it said it "deplores."

This included in the U.S.-led air strikes and a suicide blast outside the Indian embassy in Kabul on Monday that killed more than 40 people, including two Indian envoys.

The United Nations said last month that nearly 700 civilians had lost their lives in Afghanistan this year, about two-thirds in militant attacks and about 255 in military operations.

WASHINGTON -- Afghanistan poses a greater challenge than Iraq for the United States and its allies and will require a commitment from the international community for a generation, Britain's defense secretary said Thursday.

Des Browne, in the United States to mark the 50th anniversary of a U.S.-British mutual defense agreement, also said the next U.S. administration will need to make NATO's transformation from a Cold War organization a priority to help ensure long-term success in Afghanistan.

"I have no doubt that it will be a longer haul in Afghanistan," Browne said in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.

"The nature and complexity of the challenge there is greater even than the nature and complexity of the challenge in . . . Iraq," he said. "It will take a generation to rebuild."

Afghanistan, with a society and infrastructure that has suffered three decades of armed conflict, faces rising violence nearly seven years after U.S.-led forces ousted the country's former Taliban rulers.

Browne said NATO troops have forced the Taliban to abandon its former insurgency methods to adopt new tactics, such as headline-grabbing suicide bomb attacks.

"What this means is that the campaign in Afghanistan can no longer be won by the Taliban," he said.

"However, it can still be lost by the international community if we fail to maintain our cohesion as an alliance and rapidly and sustainably fill the reconstruction and development security space that we have created."

Much of the counterinsurgency burden confronting a 50,000-strong NATO contingent has been shouldered by the American, British, Canadian and Dutch troops, while other NATO members have resisted pressure to operate outside the relatively safe north.

Browne said that experience has made Afghanistan a catalyst for fundamental change in NATO by underlining the need to refocus the organization and its members on new threats, such as Islamist extremism.

"What we need to address this issue more strategically and at the highest possible political level, and what I ask an incoming (U.S.) administration to do, is to support those of us in the NATO alliance who think the transformation of that alliance is its greatest challenge," he said.