It is disgusting that Taliban efforts to portray our very careful fire support missions as wantonly killing civilians is succeeding:
President Hamid Karzai condemned a U.S. operation he said killed 16 Afghan civilians, while hundreds of villagers denounced the American military during an angry demonstration Sunday.
Karzai said the killing of innocent Afghans during U.S. military operations "is strengthening the terrorists."
President Karzai surely knows he is being played. But too many of his people believe that we are careless for him to act otherwise. The writers at least admit--near the end of the article--that this isn't what it appears on the surface based on even Karzai's statements:
Civilian deaths are an extremely complicated issue in Afghanistan. Afghan villagers have been known to exaggerate civilian death claims in order to receive more compensation from the U.S. military, and officials have said that insurgents sometimes force villagers to make false death claims.
But the U.S. military has also been known to not fully acknowledge when it killed civilians.
I think that last jab was unnecessary. We don't admit to accusations of killing civilians. We like to investigate rather than just accept a charge at face value. We try hard not to kill civilians, but when the enemy hides among civilians it is tough to avoid all civilian deaths. We do very well under the circumstances.
We had to supply Stinger surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to Afghan resistance groups in the 1980s to blunt Soviet air power. Today the Taliban just needs to deploy their intergrated global air defense system--the media. Yet if we fail to adapt, we make it more difficult to keep public support in Afghansitan and at home to continue the fight. It is surely not "fair."
Nonetheless, we must adapt to this reality and others:
But we'll fight within the restrictions we face because we are a nation of rules just trying to do the right thing--even when the rules are twisted against us. We'll trust our Afghan friends, refrain from dropping bombs, and follow the rulings of judges, and hopefully still win a war that our friends oppose almost as effectively as our enemies.
The reality is that the enemy is winning this public relations battle. It is unfair to our troops. But this has to be viewed as any other measure we take to win that risks the lives of our troops in combat.
Hopefully, in time we can relax the rules again or find another means of killing the enemy with lower risks of collateral damage.
