Afghan collaterals

SECOND EDIT

US air strikes in Afghanistan’s Farah province have left around 130 people dead and scores of others injured. This is said to be the deadliest attack on civilians since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This was not a brief air raid but a sustained bombing of three villages that were pounded to pieces. US officials have expressed regret but have not gone so far as to accept responsibility for the terrible atrocity. Analysts have sought to explain the high civilian casualties in air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq by blaming crowded neighbourhoods. Besides being grossly insensitive, such explanations overlook basic flaws in US counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Their use of so-called smart weapons notwithstanding, air strikes are not a smart idea when one is fighting an insurgency. Civilians get killed in large numbers contributing to swelling support for the insurgents. Blaming the presence of the Taliban in the village in Farah doesn’t justify an air strike on a civilian area. The Taliban is using civilians as shields and the US knows it. Why then does it persist with bombarding villages? Is the death of a few hundred Afghan civilians in a single operation collateral damage that Afghanistan must endure?
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is right in calling on the US to halt its air strikes. He is right in demanding that US forces in Afghanistan should operate from a higher platform of morality. Not to do so makes foreign troops fighting the Taliban no different from their adversary. US President Barack Obama has proposed an increased deployment of US forces in Afghanistan. Simply a surge in the number of soldiers on the ground is not going to defeat the Taliban. It is important to win the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan. The US has not done well on this score. Air strikes such as the ones in Farah last week trigger rage among the Afghans, pushing them into the waiting arms of the Taliban.
Mass support for foreign military presence in Afghanistan still exists. But with civilian casualties growing according to the UN, 2,000 civilians were killing in fighting last year, and pledges of reconstruction failing to materialise, the mood is changing. The war against the Taliban cannot be won without Afghan public support. The coalition forces must tread carefully.