KABUL, Afghanistan -- President Hamid Karzai yesterday paid a condolence visit to a remote western region that was the scene of a controversial U.S.-led raid last month, pleading for forgiveness and assuring villagers that those responsible for civilian deaths would be punished.

The president's visit to the Shindand district of Herat province underscored the lingering ill will over the Aug. 22 strike, official accounts of which remain at wide variance.

The U.S. military has acknowledged killing 35 insurgents and seven civilians in the Special Forces strike carried out jointly with Afghan forces in the village of Azizabad; the United Nations and the Afghan government say 90 people were killed, about two-thirds of them children.

Investigations into the incident continue, but none of the parties has substantially altered initial assessments of the number and nature of the casualties.

Mr. Karzai has been facing plummeting popularity, caused in part by disillusionment over the country's slow pace of recovery and continuing violence in the nearly seven years since the fundamentalist Taliban movement was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion.

Facing an election contest next year, the Afghan leader has sought to distance himself from some actions by Western troops, who are battling an increasingly powerful insurgency but also inadvertently causing growing numbers of civilian deaths.

"It has been five years that I have been working days and nights to avoid such incidents, but I was not successful," the president's office quoted him as telling villagers at a mosque in the Shindand district, not far from the raid site.

"If I had been successful, the sons of Azizabad would not be steeped in their own blood," added Mr. Karzai, who repeated the government's previous assertion that 90 people had been killed in the strike.

The president's office also disclosed yesterday that the Afghan leader had spoken with President Bush a day earlier and said Mr. Bush expressed sorrow over the Azizabad deaths. "Both presidents discussed ways of preventing civilian casualties," the statement said.

Mr. Karzai told villagers that those responsible for the strike "will be brought to justice and punished," but offered no details.