President Karzai really annoys me by his enthusiastic embrace of his role as "good cop" by placing America and NATO in the "bad cop" role over civilian casualties:
On Saturday, President Hamid Karzai had urged NATO to do more to protect civilians during combat operations to secure Marjah.
NATO forces have repeatedly said they want to prevent civilian casualties but acknowledged that it is not always possible. On Saturday, the alliance said its troops killed another civilian in the Marjah area, bringing the civilian death toll from the operation to at least 16.
Though NATO had made progress in reducing civilian casualties — mainly by reducing airstrikes and restricting combat rules — more needed to be done, Karzai said.
"We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties," he said. "Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal."
I understand that he is reacting to the incredible ability of the Taliban to buy and threaten local journalists into writing about the non-existent carnage from our air strikes (and counting on our idiot Western press to parrot that line). The fact is, our efforts are very careful and historically speaking very few Afghans die because of us. Far more die from Taliban violence directed at civilians and more die from Taliban use of civilians as human shields. Both of those tactics place the responsibility on the Taliban. Very few civilians die from accidental US/NATO weapons--which are our fault, if not crimes--let alone deliberate murders.
Yet Karzai acts as if he is the defender of his people against sloppy (at best) Western firepower.
Let me just say that his criticism will continue until the point that his own soldiers are routinely on point against the Taliban. When it is an Afghan unit out there with their lives on the line, with American advisors holding a radio able to call in firepower, my bet is that Karzai won't be nearly so worried about civilian casualties and will instruct his guys to call in the orbitting planes with their JDAMs.
This is the hand we've been dealt. We have to play this hand until we can counter with our own information operations the Afghan belief that our firepower kills too many civilians --if we can do that, of course. Until then, we have to fight the war we're in and not the war we'd like to be in.
