60 Children Alleged Killed By American Military in Afghanistan
I wrote two days ago about the alleged killing of 76 civilians by the US military in Afghanistan. Now, the death toll is up to 90 civilians, including 60 children.
Of course, that’s just what a United Nations investigation reported. You could still choose to believe the United States military. The Pentagon first claimed that it had killed 30 people in the attack, and all of them were Taliban militants. Then it claimed that 5 people of the 30 people it killed were civilians.
There’s an issue in this story that goes beyond the question of whether the American military is slaughtering innocent people in large numbers in Afghanistan. It’s an issue of basic competence. If the American military believes its operations are having an impact that is in fact vastly different from what the actual impact is, how can it effectively implement the tactics of war? If the Pentagon keeps on reporting changing, incompatible versions of events, how can it expect to gain our trust?
Our nation’s military comes out of these events both bloody and bumbling. That’s a dangerous combination.
That’s war, and that’s why war is a poor instrument of policy.