Afstan: The NY Times makes a curious mistake

Further to this post, where did the bolded bit in the final para below come from?

Afghan Officials Say Airstrike Killed Civilians

KABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO airstrike on Thursday on a village near the embattled provincial capital of Lashkar Gah killed 25 to 30 civilians, Afghan officials in the area said. While NATO confirmed that an airstrike had taken place in the area, where Taliban fighters have been battling NATO forces, it said that the reports were being investigated and that the command was “unable to confirm any civilian casualties.”..

The strike occurred at a time when General McKiernan, who took command here in June, had made curbing civilian casualties a high priority. At the moment when the airstrike in Nadali was said to have taken place, 1 p.m. Thursday, senior officers on the general’s staff were holding a briefing in Kabul, 340 miles away, at which they laid out for reporters and Western aid groups the new measures that General McKiernan had ordered for the purpose of “protecting the civilian population” during combat operations.

At a news conference in Kabul on Sunday, General McKiernan, just back from a top-level review of war strategy at the Pentagon, said the International Security Assistance Force, the coalition he commands, had adopted the most elaborate measures ever undertaken in war for avoiding civilian deaths. “Never in history has a military coalition taken greater measures to try and avoid civilian casualties than have been taken by ISAF,” he said.

At the briefing, Lt. Gen. Jonathon Riley, the British officer who is General McKiernan’s deputy, staunchly defended the way airstrikes were conducted, saying that the combat aircraft involved — mainly from the United States, Britain, France and Canada [emphasis added] — used “precision-guided weapons that are much more precise than machine guns” and other battlefield weapons, and that airstrikes were not ordered without multiple sources of intelligence indicating that the targets were combatants...

Canada has no ground attack aircraft or UAVs in Afstan and does not conduct airstrikes. I can find no other reference to Canada's doing so. I'd like to know why the main reporter, John Burns (a Canadian) thinks the CF are engaged in air-to-ground combat there. I cannot believe the British general said we were.