NATO's "Mistakes" In Afghanistan

The Angry Arab (or As'ad AbuKhalil) on his popular blog The Angry Arab News Service on an almost daily basis, regrettably, documents the killing of Afghan civilians due to NATO's bombing campaign as a result - to borrow the language of righteous unaccountability - of "collateral damage".

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But, often, it is not even that. Very often it is the case that the officers manning the drones - which do much of the killing - know that civilian life will be at stake and judge that life as not valuable enough and fire anyway knowing full well the deadly consequences. Often times they fire more than once in the same location notwithstanding the past death of civilians.

And civilians are often killed due to the reckless haste which often commands NATO bombings, often judged by nothing more than trivial detail. A drone may pick up on a caravan and simply assume that it is filled militants when it is actually a civilian convoy, but the missiles are launched already.

And there is now a grotesque scale of dehumanizing the Afghan people. The American Pentagon recently issued guidelines to the effect that a bombing which may result in the death of less than 20 is permissible, but if more so than should likely be avoided due to the media attention such a high figure of death will attract. So whether or not civilian deaths are acceptable is determined based on what NATO can get away with in terms of P.R. The Afghan people are seen as dispensable and only the media aspect is the judging scale.

And NATO calls these deaths "mistakes". But as the Angry Arab titles his posts: "Mistakes happen, every day."

They number in the hundreds: "A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents."

AbuKhalil provides a nearly daily toll of these "mistakes".