Registan.net

Much as it pains me to admit a Presidential candidate might have said something accurate about the world, I have to say: Barrack Obama is right, and a over reliance on airpower is killing far too many civilians and undermining the effort to stabilize the country. This is no surprise to regular readers here, or at Péter Marton’s blog, or Afghanistanica, or Bonnie Boyd’s Central Asia blog, or anyone who covers Afghanistan with an ounce of seriousness.

Ahh, but what if you’re stuck in the right-o-sphere? The Instapundit uses an unattributed report from Strategy Page to case doubts on the idea that any civilians actually get killed in these air raids:

[W]hen I read it originally in The Guardian I remember thinking that this would have been a marginally plausible criticism of Afghanistan policy (though the “killing civilians” bit is mostly Taliban propaganda)… Well, the narco drug lords are an issue — has he been reading StrategyPage? Actually, probably not, as here’s what StrategyPage says about air raids and “civilian casualties:”

Last week, U.S. forces detected a meeting of Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan. Smart bombs hit the meeting, which had gathered over a hundred Taliban followers to witness the execution of two men suspected of passing information to the government. Over a hundred people were killed. The Taliban promptly claimed most of the dead were civilians. But they always do that, and no one believes them anymore.

No one but Obama, I guess.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. That is just wrong. It is fundamentally disconnected from reality.

In a macro sense, the idea that air strikes are too big and too inaccurate is not in the least but outrageous—the Winograd Commission, which was convened in Israel to analyze why their war with Hezbollah last year didn’t go well, came to three main conclusions about the failure of Israeli strategy. Most pertinent here is lesson one: Western militaries are in active denial concerning the limitations of precision weapons. This is a lesson NATO is figuring out, as evidenced by their decision to use smaller bombs to reduce the number of civilian casualties.

But Obama and the Israelis aren’t alone in realizing an over-reliance on air power is counterproductive: just last week the British commander in Helmand province not-so-politely asked the U.S. Special Forces to leave the area, as their reckless house raids and constant air strikes were turning the population against them. This shouldn’t be new news to anyone, as I said above, who follows Afghanistan with an ounce of seriousness.

Don’t let that stand in the way of National Review, which whines on its “Campaign Spot” blog:

Wow. I cannot recall the Associated Press ever before so blatantly rushing to save a candidate from his own words.

They’re referring to an AP “fact check” report which basically restates the above and mentions that the Republican hit machine is trying to twist Obama’s words to mean that he is accusing American troops of deliberately slaughtering innocent Afghanis. Of course, a look at what Obama actually said reveals something entirely different:

We’ve got to get the job done there [in Afghanistan] and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.

I fail to see how he’s implying anything nefarious about the troops, other than that they use sloppy tactics and the wrong tools for the wrong job. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseum, it is a standard, defensible, logical position to take. But the best NRO can do is quote Central Command bragging about how its 155mm howitzers are really adaptable to battling small group militants in villages, and how a few paratroopers provided humanitarian assistance, and it’s all a big liberal lie to slander the troops. Of course, they did admit to the fact that NATO and American troops have killed far more innocent civilians this year than the Taliban has, but why should facts that support what a Dumbocrat said about the war be relevant?

To summarize before I get really angry over the nasty power of spin and group think: I don’t really see how this amounts to “slander.” When Jaap de Hoop Scheffer—the Secretary General of NATO—complains about the air raids and civilians casualties, I fail to see how Obama stating the same means anything other than he might have a better finger on the situation than the other candidates (that’s not necessarily the case, mind you, but just for the purposes of this discussion).

Update: In a fairly representative post, QandO chimes in, challenging the truth of something Obama didn’t say, and what’s the big deal anyway because it’s just a few hundred dead Afghan citizens. Think I’m kidding?

First we don’t have a strategic bombing campaign going on in Afghanistan. That means strike aircraft don’t strike at targets which haven’t been nominated or designated by those fighting the Taliban or based on some good hard intelligence, such as that provided by a drone or such. So again, Obama hasn’t a clue about that of which he speaks. He simply assumes we fly around willy nilly bombing civilians and villages because we might get lucky and kill some bad guys. Our strategy, according to Obama, is kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.

Umm, that’s not at all what he said. Obama said our “air raids” (by which he clearly meant air strikes), and our reliance on them as the deciding factor in fire fights due to local troop shortages, was counterproductive. As I said above, that’s really not a controversial thing to say, and NATO happens to agree with him. But McQ didn’t limit himself to twisting what Obama said:

First note the fact that we’re talking a total of 517 total deaths in 7.5 months according to AP. And that’s assuming we take the word of “Afghan and international officials” that everyone of those killed was actually a ‘civilian’ and killed by NATO (or actually killed at all). Keep in mind there’s money in claiming a civilian is killed by NATO forces. So according to these mostly unverifiable claims, NATO (not the US, NATO) has killed civilians at a clip of 38 a month while the Taliban is killing them at a rate of 31 a month. While regretable, the numbers are relatively small and hardly evidence of a concerted campaign to bomb civilian areas. If it is we need to hire a new Air Force.

Yes, we never meant to kill more people than the Taliban, so therefore it’s America-hating to say we’re making a mistake by accidentally doing it anyway. And who knows who’s a civilian anymore? I mean, Afghans are reknown liars when it comes to their dead children, so why should we care what they think or say anyway? We’re there to liberate them!

Yuck. This whole ridiculous kerfluffle—a tempest in a teapot based only on partisan affiliation if ever I saw one—is just another example of the Right-o-sphere’s death in the war on terror.

Stumble it!