It all seems somehow familiar
Nato concedes Afghan shortfalls
Nato has said it needs to do better in its operations in Afghanistan, after coming under criticism from Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Mr Karzai accused Nato and US-led troops of failing to co-ordinate with their Afghan allies, thereby causing civilian deaths.
A Nato spokesman said Mr Karzai had a right to be "disappointed and angry" over the scale of civilian casualties.
It came after a week in which up to 90 Afghan civilians were killed.
More civilians have been killed this year as a result of foreign military action than have been killed by insurgents, correspondents say.
And from just a few days ago,
Nato's secretary general has called for an investigation into the killings of 25 civilians in an air strike in the Afghan province of Helmand.
June 18
7 Afghan children killed in US-led airstrike
May 31
Afghan's anger over US bombing
Each time the old woman breathed out you could hear a small groan of pain as she sat, her head in one hand, her other shoulder shattered by shrapnel and fixed in a coarse plaster.
Her son Mohammad and his wife Khwara sat next to her - they were mourning the death of their 18-year-old son and her brother.
Both were among 57 killed - almost half of them women and children - when American forces bombed their village in Shindand, western Afghanistan, and destroyed 100 homes.
May 10
US airstrikes kill 21 civilians in Afghanistan
At least 21 civilians, including six children, have been killed in US air strikes in Afghanistan, leading to angry protests among locals.
The deaths brought the total of civilian deaths to almost 100 in the past two weeks and followed President Hamid Karzai's declaration that his people "can no longer accept casualties the way they occur".
The new round of "collateral damage" also came a day after the US military said it was "deeply ashamed" of the killings of 19 civilians by marines in early March.
Let's go back to January 3, 2007
NATO acknowledged Wednesday that the number of civilians killed by its forces in Afghanistan last year was too high, but said the Western alliance was working to change that in 2007.
"The single thing that we have done wrong and we are striving extremely hard to improve on (in 2007) is killing innocent civilians," Brig. Richard E. Nugee, the chief spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, said.
Doing a fine job so far, aren't they?
This, in large part, is the true tragedy of the Afghan mission. The mission was one that had every possibility of succeeding, but has been lost by the continued and heavy use of airstrikes to make up for the fact that there are so few "boots on the ground" and because of "force protection" protocols by NATO and US forces.
So now instead of working to ensure the civilian population we are theoretically there to protect are actually protected, we have military spokespeople like Brig. General Votel claiming that he has no evidence that non-combatants were killed when they dropped 2,000lb bombs on a bunch of mud houses. Not really a surprise. The US has been consistent about lying about their mistaken bomb runs since at least 2002 when they wiped out a wedding party.
A year ago, William Lind wrote about the terrible stupidity of airstrikes in counterinsurgency operations. On Friday, I linked to a story that pointed out that the US military's own counterinsurgency manual says the same thing about airstrikes, and yet a year later and the number and frequency of the airstrikes has only gotten worse.
So we destroy what we're supposed to be rebuilding and kill who we're supposed to be protecting. There's no way we're going to win by following this path.
UPDATE: More Afghan civilians killed by foreign forces than by insurgents in 2007
