LYING in hospital in Kandahar, with shrapnel wounds in both legs and his left arm, Abdul Qarim has had two days to ponder why his wife, two sons and two daughters were killed in a Nato attack on his village.

“If you call our mothers and children ‘Taleban’ then that could be one reason,” the 60-year-old farmer said yesterday. His family were not Taleban they were Tajiks. “More probably though, some people gave the wrong information to the foreigners — told them we were al-Qaeda or Taleban."

His experience illustrates the big question that dogs soldiers not just in Kandahar and Helmand but in the whole of Nato’s Afghanistan operation: Who exactly are the Taleban?

The airstrikes against a small hamlet at the edge of Ashogha, in Kandahar province, came on Wednesday as the Tajik inhabitants cooked their early meal before daylight and their Ramadan fast. Abdul Qarim heard his son Ghulam Shah, 35, call for help as he lay with blood pouring from his thigh. His father gave him a blanket, then sat down before him. At that moment 15 to 20 soldiers moved into the wrecked compound.

“They were foreigners, with special glasses fixed to their faces and powerful lights on the weapons,” Mr Qarim said. “One lifted the blanket from the edge of Ghulam, put his gun against his temple and fired. The bullets came out of his cheek. I was sitting right in front of them with my two surviving sons.”

As the soldiers searched the ruins, one stirred the body of Mr Qarim’s wife with his boot to check for signs of life. Then they left. They had found nothing, nor offered any medical aid to the survivors. Nine civilians had died and eleven were wounded. Next day, Nato admitted that civilians might have died. It has refused to confirm whether there was a follow-up operation by ground troops, or the nationality of any unit concerned.

“I thought they would be different from the Russians; not destroy my home and kill my family,” Mr Qarim said.

Nato reports are so full of “encounter battles”, “hardcore command elements”, “tactical victory” and “enemy concentrations” that you could almost believe that it was fighting a single insurgent army. The reality is that, often ill-briefed, badly informed or outright misled, Nato is embroiled partly in a counter-insurgency, partly in tribal warfare and partly as an executive arm trying to help anyone sickened by corruption and misrule from Kabul.

Nato officials claimed publicly this month that 500 Taleban had been killed in fighting near the city of Kandahar and privately suggested the figure to be double that.

A senior foreign official with long experience of dealing with tribal elders said yesterday that many of those killed were not Taleban but Noorzai tribesmen, outraged by the presence of a rival Achekzai warlord, Abdel Razak, aiding the foreigners on the battlefield. The warlord, commander of the Frontier Security Force at the border town of Spin Boldak, was enlisted to help Afghan police at the start of the operation. Yet he was already involved in his own blood feud with Noorzais and had been jailed briefly for killing 16 of them. After his release he was deployed with his men to secure Noorzai villages in Panjawi district, the focus of Medusa.

“His soldiers started looting and threatening the people,” the official said. “In two days all the Noorzais in the area united and started fighting the Government just as the Canadians became involved. A lot of them were killed.”

In Helmand province British forces were engaging not only the Taleban, but a conglomerate of non-Taleban tribes, he said, outraged by the corruption and criminality of the outgoing governor, as well as the Afghan staff who are undermining the efforts of Mohammad Daud, the new governor

Afghan intelligence admits that the Taleban is a leaderless hybrid shadow of its original form, with three different and often competing headquarters in Pakistan. That this disparate force of perhaps a few disorganised thousands can operate with such success is due to the fact that the majority of southern Afghans are sick of the squandered efforts of their own Government to improve their lives or give them any security.

At the outskirts of Kandahar yesterday three police checkpoints extorted cash from travellers. One policeman boasted that he made $600 (£320) a month from civilians. The city’s ruined roads and burgeoning unemployment suggest that nobody has benfitted from five years of world support for President Karzai’s Government.

“We’re not here to kill Talebs,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Andy Price, of 3 Commando Brigade. “Kill a Taleb and you make a blood feud with his family. We’re here to try to make them irrelevant.”

The words sound good, and reflect a genuine desire among Nato field commanders. But the organisation has a long way to go to ensure that it does not kill anyone else lumped under the term of irrelevance just because they can no longer tolerate a corrupt officialdom.

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The Taleban leadership fled Afghanistan; most followers returned to home to the southern provinces

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