Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
USA Today
August 28, 2008
Pg. 12
Details are in dispute, but if a new United Nations report is correct, a U.S.-led airstrike in Afghanistan last Friday killed 90 civilians, 60 of them children ranging in age from three months to 16 years.
The midnight raid was intended to target Taliban militants and their commander in Nawabad, a village in remote western Afghanistan. Instead, according to the U.N., U.S. bombs hit dozens of people from extended families in two tribes gathering to memorialize a villager who had died last year.
This wouldn't be the first time U.S. forces tragically bungled an air attack. U.S. officials admit to killing 321 Afghan civilians with airstrikes in 2007, and 165 are reported to have died in four attacks in the past two months.
Killing innocents with bombs is, of course, a disastrously ineffective way to compete with the Taliban for the hearts and minds of beleaguered Afghan civilians, which makes it infuriating that U.S. forces continue to make such mistakes.
This latest strike provoked outrage from Afghans and led the government of President Hamid Karzai to demand an end to such attacks altogether. It even gave Russia a chance to deflect attention from its invasion of Georgia by demanding that the U.N. Security Council decry such wanton attacks.
There is, of course, a chance the U.N. investigators are wrong. U.S. forces say they killed 25 militants and just five civilians in Nawabad. But the U.N. findings match reports from an Afghan government commission and the Afghan army, allied with the United States.
The Taliban, like other brutal guerrilla forces, deliberately puts civilians at risk to provoke just such disasters, which it tries to capitalize on no matter how they occur or how many civilians die.
An unnamed U.S. official quoted in The Washington Post said Taliban forces have figured out how to plant false intelligence and lure Americans into making airstrikes that kill civilians.
It's all one more reminder that if the war in Afghanistan is to be won — no lock in any circumstances — that it won't be won from the air but with troops on the ground. And that is something the U.S. and its NATO allies have been unwilling or unable to provide in sufficient number.
Meanwhile, the tragedy in Nawabad deserves a full investigation, and a review of tactics that are providing a propaganda windfall to a ruthless enemy.
August 28, 2008
Pg. 12
Details are in dispute, but if a new United Nations report is correct, a U.S.-led airstrike in Afghanistan last Friday killed 90 civilians, 60 of them children ranging in age from three months to 16 years.
The midnight raid was intended to target Taliban militants and their commander in Nawabad, a village in remote western Afghanistan. Instead, according to the U.N., U.S. bombs hit dozens of people from extended families in two tribes gathering to memorialize a villager who had died last year.
This wouldn't be the first time U.S. forces tragically bungled an air attack. U.S. officials admit to killing 321 Afghan civilians with airstrikes in 2007, and 165 are reported to have died in four attacks in the past two months.
Killing innocents with bombs is, of course, a disastrously ineffective way to compete with the Taliban for the hearts and minds of beleaguered Afghan civilians, which makes it infuriating that U.S. forces continue to make such mistakes.
This latest strike provoked outrage from Afghans and led the government of President Hamid Karzai to demand an end to such attacks altogether. It even gave Russia a chance to deflect attention from its invasion of Georgia by demanding that the U.N. Security Council decry such wanton attacks.
There is, of course, a chance the U.N. investigators are wrong. U.S. forces say they killed 25 militants and just five civilians in Nawabad. But the U.N. findings match reports from an Afghan government commission and the Afghan army, allied with the United States.
The Taliban, like other brutal guerrilla forces, deliberately puts civilians at risk to provoke just such disasters, which it tries to capitalize on no matter how they occur or how many civilians die.
An unnamed U.S. official quoted in The Washington Post said Taliban forces have figured out how to plant false intelligence and lure Americans into making airstrikes that kill civilians.
It's all one more reminder that if the war in Afghanistan is to be won — no lock in any circumstances — that it won't be won from the air but with troops on the ground. And that is something the U.S. and its NATO allies have been unwilling or unable to provide in sufficient number.
Meanwhile, the tragedy in Nawabad deserves a full investigation, and a review of tactics that are providing a propaganda windfall to a ruthless enemy.