Afghanistan and Airstrikes Redux

This article in the Washington Post confirms my fears about the use of air power in Afghanistan.  It's very hard to win the hearts and minds of the populace when you are blowing up brides on their wedding days.  It just doesn't sit well with most people.  U.S. led air strikes have claimed the lives of 78 civilians in Afghanistan this month alone, including 47 women and children at the aforementioned wedding.  This is a moral, tactical, and public relations disaster.

The neglect of the Afghanistan front due to the war in Iraq, which resulted in the failure to be able to properly follow up on our initial victory and created a dearth of troops on the ground, coupled with the concomitant need to rely on air power as a poor substitute for said troops, is, I fear, going to haunt us down the road.  And none of this should be a shock to anyone who was paying attention. 

So let me repeat -- dropping bombs on people as a job doesn't mean jackshit in terms of preparing someone to be President of the United States.    (A related aside -- it would make me happy if President Obama would instruct the military to never, ever utter the phrase "collateral damage" again -- it may be the most coldly Orwellian phrase I've ever heard.)

Comments

[Crissa]

So that makes how many weddings we've bombed?

I don't understand why we even allow airstrikes on targets we don't have boots at. It disgusted me to find out we'd fitted cargo planes with guns to fire at the horizon and fired missiles directed at pick-up trucks on the say-so of some informant.

Do the people who approve these things ever think of whether it's a good-guy or bad-guy type maneuver?