KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan soldier fired on a vehicle he believed was driven by NATO soldiers on a shared base in southern Afghanistan, slightly wounding a foreign civilian worker, officials said Monday.
It was the latest in a string of insider attacks by local forces on their international allies.
The attacks are threatening to undermine a partnership that is key to the handover of security responsibility to the Afghan government and therefore to the entire plan to draw down international troops. NATO said it is reviewing protocols for protecting its troops in the wake of the current attack spike.
The Sunday evening shooting in Helmand province came the same day an Afghan police officer shot and killed four U.S. service members in Zabul, also in the south.
That followed a shooting Saturday in which a man wearing the uniform of a government-backed militia group killed two British soldiers in Helmand.
The soldier turned his weapon on a vehicle that was driving inside Camp Garmser, a shared base in Helmand, said NATO forces spokesman Maj. Adam Wojack. Another Afghan soldier disarmed the attacker and took him into custody.
The assailant told interrogators he had thought he was targeting troops, Maj. Wojack said. He declined to give the nationality of the injured civilian, adding that the wounds were minor.
The insider assaults drew unusually strong comment Sunday from the U.S. military’s top officer, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, who called the problem of rogue Afghan soldiers and police attacking allied troops “a very serious threat” to the war effort.
Gen. Dempsey said something has to change in order to address the escalating problem, suggesting that Afghans need to take the matter as seriously as the Americans do.
But U.S. and NATO officials appeared to step back from that assessment Monday. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said in a visit to Tokyo that the insider attacks are a “last gasp” of a Taliban insurgency that has not been able to regain lost ground.
And the top spokesman for the international military coalition in Afghanistan, German Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz, told reporters in Kabul that they feel the Afghans are taking appropriate measures to try to prevent attacks.
“The Afghans started, according to their own reports, a revetting of their own soldiers and policemen and have already relieved a couple of hundred from active duty,” Gen. Katz said, noting that the Afghan forces have increased training about cultural differences between the two forces.
A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the Afghan government is making every effort to stop the attacks, noting that Mr. Karzai has made it a priority in meetings.
So far this year, there have been 37 attacks by Afghan allies or those who have infiltrated their ranks, killing 51 international service members. At least 12 such attacks came in August alone, leaving 15 dead.
The spike in insider attacks is souring the relationship between NATO troops and the Afghan forces that they are training and fighting alongside.
But military and defense leaders have insisted that these attacks are not hampering the war effort, and that it will not impact the plans to have combat troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
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