Email This Story
It began with U.S.-led coalition forces calling in air strikes on Taliban guerrillas.
Civilians died in the crossfire.
President Karzai expressed outrage, while international aid officials called the incident "profoundly distressing." In a whirlwind of counterclaims, investigations were launched.
But this wasn’t last week’s debacle in the villages of Afghanistan’s Farah province. This was December, 2003, in Ghazni province, specifically the village of Petaw, less than 100 miles southwest of Kabul.
Nine children were killed in a U.S. airstrike intended for a Taliban assassin, who escaped. The Americans offered blankets, clothing, food and toys to the survivors. "We accept blame," said spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty in the aftermath of the attack. "We offer our condolences to the village.”
Even in the early years of the U.S.-led international foray into Afghanistan, bungled air attacks overshadowed the West’s attempts to hold the moral high ground against the Taliban and al Qaeda.
In April of 2003, 11 civilians were killed by a misplaced bomb in the village of Shkin. A year earlier, a wedding party of 48 people was cut down in Uruzgan province, not long after four Canadian soldiers lost their lives in another misdirected bombing by an A-10 aircraft. Plenty of regrets were expressed, but tactics and weaponry remained unchanged.
Even when the Taliban’s resurgence picked up pace in 2006 and 2007, the U.S. and its NATO allies stubbornly resisted demands for a fundamental review of the use of stand-off, air-launched munitions against an enemy in sandals bearing mainly small arms – an enemy only too willing to use civilians as human shields.
In July, 2007, the issue was given a divisive new focus by the killings of villagers in Helmand province. NATO chiefs were forced to admit that bombs dropped by U.S. aircraft had inflicted the losses - only days after the Pentagon had dismissed estimates by the U.N., the Associated Press and leading Afghan aid groups that the number of civilians killed by international forces was roughly equal to those killed by the Taliban and other insurgents.
Brigadier General Joseph Votel told a Defense Department news conference: “We think the procedures that we have in place are good. They work, they help us minimize the effects (on civilians).”
But civilian losses have continued to occur. Neither the Pentagon nor NATO have instituted procedures to count and acknowledge the dead. Rather than reducing collateral killings by accurately quantifying errors and correcting them, U.S. officials have simply said they're sorry for losses, and pressed ahead with more bombing.
Now comes the assertion by President Obama’s national security adviser, retired Gen. James Jones: "we can't fight with one hand tied behind our back." Gen. Jones, of course, is past military chief of NATO, and one of the U.S. commanders most responsible for the West’s Afghan quagmire.
As such, he knows his lines well. "We have to be careful to make sure that we don't unnecessarily wound or kill innocent civilians,” he repeated on U.S. television today.
Unfortunately this tired mantra has not produced results. Only last September, shortly after upwards of 90 Afghans died in a botched airstrike in Herat province, Jone’s former boss, Robert Gates, the Obama administration’s Secretary of Defense, made the same assurances during a visit to Kabul.
"I offer all Afghans my sincere condolences and personal regrets for the recent loss of innocent life as a result of coalition air strikes," Gates told a news conference outside the U.S. Embassy.
"While no military has ever done more to prevent civilian casualties, it is clear that we have to work even harder."
That last point could not have been lost, this past week, on Gate’s commander in chief, Barack Obama. The president was fully briefed and ready to chastise one of his visitors - Washington’s treasonously incompetent quisling in Kabul, Hamid Karzai. Then the fiasco in Farah was dropped into the equation.
Suddenly, it was Karzai dishing out the discipline. Now that’s collateral damage…
