NATO says Afghan airstrike killed 4 civilians

KABUL (Reuters) - An airstrike by NATO forces killed four Afghan civilians and wounded three others in Ghazni province, southwest of the capital Kabul, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said Thursday.

Air support was called in after Afghan and foreign forces came under fire from around eight insurgents in Andar district Wednesday, but a group of unarmed civilians was accidentally targeted instead of the fighters, ISAF said in a statement.

The wounded were taken to an ISAF hospital and compensation will be given to the families of the dead, the statement added.

Civilian casualties caused by foreign forces hunting militants have long been a major source of tension between President Hamid Karzai and the Western nations whose troops support his government in the face of a growing insurgency.

A mid-year United Nations report painted a dark picture of security in Afghanistan in the first half of 2010, with violent civilian deaths jumping 31 percent, although the total number caused by aerial attacks fell 64 percent.

General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, issued a directive last year limiting air strikes and setting new rules for house searches after a series of deadly incidents involving civilians.

That directive has been tightened further since General David Petraeus replaced McChrystal in June. Petraeus, who masterminded the Iraq counter-insurgency, quickly reminded the 150,000-odd U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan that "the decisive terrain in Afghanistan is the human terrain."

Deaths in NATO airstrikes still tend to be among the most emotive and widely-publicised civilian casualty incidents.

(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison)