Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the German military’s role in the campaign against the Taliban as NATO acknowledged for the first time that an allied air strike in Afghanistan may have killed civilians.

Merkel and her main rival at German elections in less than three weeks closed ranks today to reject opposition calls for a troop pullout after the Sept. 4 strike, which killed scores of Afghans and prompted criticism at home and abroad. German commanders called in the strike, which was carried out by U.S. planes.

“The mission in Afghanistan is our reaction to terror,” Merkel said in a speech to a specially convened session of parliament in Berlin, referring to the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. “The consequences of not acting will affect us just as much as the consequences of acting.”

With Merkel facing a Sept. 27 election, evidence that civilians died in the air strike is heating up the campaign. She and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, her Social Democratic challenger, both told lawmakers that the Afghan government must take on more security tasks to allow NATO troops to pull back.

The air strike targeted two tanker trucks seized by Taliban militants near the northern town of Kunduz. An initial assessment led by U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s commander in Afghanistan, “concluded that civilians had been killed or injured,” NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.

Canadian-led Inquiry

McChrystal appointed Maj. Gen. C.S. Sullivan, a Canadian, to lead an inquiry into the air strike, which will take several weeks to report its findings, ISAF said. Afghan Rights Monitor, an Afghan group, said 60 to 70 people were killed in the attack.

While northern Afghanistan is under German command, Germany has kept its troops mainly to aid, rebuilding and police- training tasks in the relatively quiet region, leaving the U.S. and U.K. to do much of the fighting against Taliban insurgents in the south.

Germany has stringent checks on army operations to prevent any recurrence of its militaristic past. When German Tornado jets joined NATO-led air strikes against military targets in Yugoslavia in 1999, it was Germany’s first involvement in military combat since World War II. The Afghan mission must be reaffirmed by parliamentary vote every year.

In Berlin, Oskar Lafontaine’s opposition Left Party is organizing an antiwar protest today to press its demand to bring home Germany’s 4,200 troops. Polls show a majority of voters oppose the German military involvement.

Afghan Responsibility

Merkel said Germany’s troop presence in Afghanistan “is necessary.” Yet Afghan security forces must make “enough progress in the next five years to allow international troops to steadily reduce their role.”

She reiterated her call, made Sept. 6 with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for an international conference to be convened on Afghanistan’s future before year’s end to help the new government assume more responsibility for security, as well as tackling criminality.

Steinmeier said German troops can’t stay in Afghanistan “forever,” while also rejecting a pullout. “We need a clear perspective in order to achieve the step-by-step transfer of responsibility into Afghan hands,” he told parliament.

Germany’s Defense Ministry rejected a Sept. 6 report in the Washington Post that said the order by a German general to attack the tankers was based on a single source, going against a directive by McChrystal. The decision was based on several points of information, a ministry spokesman said yesterday. The newspaper also reported that a NATO fact-finding team found that 125 had died, of whom “at least two dozen” were not insurgents.

‘Full Force’

Merkel and Steinmeier, whose Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties have governed together since 2005, see no advantage in trying to score election points over Afghanistan, said Jan Techau, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

“The main players are leaving each other in peace and aren’t exploiting the issue,” he said in a phone interview. Still, “the debate about the timing of a withdrawal has erupted in full force.”

Steinmeier said the circumstances of the bombing must be cleared up, while rebuffing a demand by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for a pullout date. A deadline “could be understood by the wrong people in Afghanistan as encouragement,” he told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

Steinmeier was chief of staff to Schroeder, whose government sent German troops to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. Steinmeier’s “hands are tied,” Techau said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai lambasted the order to bomb the trucks in an interview in yesterday’s Le Figaro.

“What an error in judgment,” he told the French newspaper. “More than 90 dead for a simple truck, which was anyway immobilized in a river bed. Why didn’t they send ground troops to recover the tanker? General McChrystal telephoned himself to apologize and to say he hadn’t ordered the attack.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Tony Czuczka in Berlin at aczuczka@bloomberg.net; Patrick Donahue in Berlin at at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 8, 2009 08:52 EDT