http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/15694<snip>
But left unsaid is that the lower US casualty figures in Iraq are coming at the expense of much higher civilian casualties. This is even more true in Afghanistan, where the war is heating up.
The reason for this ugly calculus is that in order to keep politically damaging US casualties as low as possible, the US military and the Bush/Cheney administration that gives the generals their marching orders, are resorting increasingly to the use of air power--bombs and rockets and remote controlled, missile-equipped Predator drone aircraft--to attack suspected militant targets.
Case in point--the 22 people the BBC reports were killed in eastern Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province yesterday in a US missile strike on what turns out to have been a wedding procession. According to reports from local Afghan police and other officials quoted in the BBC story, 19 of the victims of this horrific attack were women and children.
This slaughter--which US military authorities, following their standard MO, are denying, claiming that those killed were "militants"-- follows an earlier one Friday in Afghanistan, in which a missile fired from a US helicopter killed 15 people, all civilians.
It has reached a point that in Afghanistan, the US and its NATO allies (thought primarily the US, since most NATO forces are not in front-line combat roles, and are not conducting most of the air strikes) are killing far more Afghan civilians than are the Taliban and their allies in the country.
Afghan women collect bloodstained clothes of injured persons at a hospital in Jalalabad city, Afghanistan, Sunday, July 6, 2008 after they allegedly got injured by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in Deh Bala district of Nangarhar province, east of Kabul. Chief government official Haji Amishah Gul in the Deh Bala district says villagers have reported between 30 and 35 people walking in a group toward a wedding have been killed in a coalition bombing. Up to 10 people were wounded.
(AP Photo/Nesar Ahmad)