Bush Administration's Failed Tactics Kill More Innocents

By Cernig

Simply horrifying:

The NYT reports:

An airstrike by United States-led forces killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others at a wedding party in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. The casualties included women and children, the officials said.

The United States military and Afghan authorities were investigating the reports about the latest attack, the American military said in a statement, but it gave no confirmation of the strikes or any death toll.

Well, at least this time the footage of yet another care-less atrocity surfaced before the US military could do its kabuki of denial, investigation, denial again, admission and finally reluctant apology.

But this new disaster, both for Afghanistan and for the West's "hearts and minds" efforts there, underlines why Obama needs to get his act straight on Afghanistan and Pakistan fast and to change the Bush course there as quickly as possible. There are some seriously worrying parts to his policy for the region as he stated it during the campaign - suggesting he would send even greater forces across the border into Pakistan, for example - which would mean an even more hawkish stance than the Bush one in the region. On the other hand, he also offered a policy option - concentrating on civilian aid, education and negotiations - that would ratchet down tensions in the region and perhaps offer a path for more moderate Taliban to renounce violence and come in out of the cold. That latter is the only way to end the US war in the region with anything even approaching a "success" for US interests.

Update: Connor O'Steen, recently returned from Afghanistan, writes in an email:

Wedding parties are an easy target to mistake because there's a large congregation of people, and in rural areas especially there's a predilection to fire guns into the air in celebration. In addition to this the parties are sex segregated, so a drone camera would probably just see a large group of armed men firing guns in Kandahar. 'What else could it be?' they say, "2+2=Taliban."

But this leads to another question, which people are feeding the US Army intelligence about these targets, and why are we still listening to them? From an airstrike near Herat earlier this year, the Army concluded that they had been fed faulty intelligence by local contacts who were using the airstrikes as a solution to familial and tribal enmities. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if we were doing the same thing in the south.

This must in the end result in an arbitrary redistribution of power: the khans that we tap and payroll for 'intelligence' have us destroy their rivals, and their local power increases at the expense of the government in Kabul. Much like the Sunni 'Awakening,' I don't see these connections as being in the long term interests of American security.

He adds that Taliban local commanders aren't in short supply and can be replaced easily by the militants, but that " the kind of communal emnity you cause through collateral damage can't be repaired."