DUSHANBE, August 6, 2014, Asia-Plus – Reuters reports that The U.S. Defense Department has confirmed that a U.S. Army general was killed when a man in an Afghan Army uniform opened fire at foreign troops in a military base west of Kabul on August 5.

He is reportedly the most senior U.S. officer killed in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.  The attack happened during a visit by NATO officers to the military training academy at Camp Qargha base.

Around 15 coalition soldiers were wounded.  The German Army said a German general was among the wounded. 

Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said there were Americans among those wounded.  Officials in Kabul said three Afghan officers were injured in the attack.

The attack comes just months before international combat troops are due to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

New York Times reports that for the first time since Vietnam, a United States Army general was killed in an overseas conflict.

The slain officer, Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, was reportedly the highest-ranking member of the NATO-led coalition killed in the Afghanistan war, and his death punctuated the problems vexing the Americans as they try to wind down the 13-year-old conflict, contending with a political crisis that has threatened to splinter the Afghan government and leave it unable to fend off the Taliban.

The general was among a group of senior American and Afghan officers making a routine visit to Afghanistan’s premier military academy on the outskirts of Kabul when an Afghan soldier sprayed the officers with bullets from the window of a nearby building, hitting at least 15 before he was killed.

Though American officials said General Greene was not believed to have been specifically targeted, his violent death at the hands of an Afghan soldier, not an insurgent, was a reminder of the dangers faced by even the highest-ranking, and best protected, officers in Afghanistan, New York Times reports.

Kirby said officials believed the gunman was “a member of the Afghan national security forces,” but he had no other details about him or the circumstances of the shooting.

Still, Admiral Kirby maintained on Tuesday that the insider attack, the first in months, would not change the Obama administration’s plans to leave a residual force in Afghanistan after most American forces are withdrawn at the end of the year and the NATO combat mission here formally concludes.

Admiral Kirby reportedly emphasized the progress that Afghan forces had made in recent years, citing as examples their role in limiting violence in the presidential election in April and the June runoff vote.

According to New York Times , General Greene, 55, was one of the most senior officers overseeing the transition from a war led and fought by foreign troops to one conducted by Afghan forces.  His specialty was logistics — he was a longtime acquisitions officer — and he had been dispatched to Afghanistan to help the Afghan military address one of its most potentially debilitating weaknesses: an inability to manage soldiers and weaponry.

Yet on Tuesday, he became one of the more than 2,300 American service members killed in Afghanistan, New York Times says.