Abu Muqawama notes that our propensity to kill several times as many civilians as we do bad guys in Afghanistan could pose a challenge for the incoming troops:
This is the kind of stuff that is going to lose us the war in Afghanistan in the next year… We simply have to figure out a way to stop killing Afghan civilians, though, and if that means killing fewer Taliban, fine.
Better watch out, AM—that kind of talk gets you hate mail from people like Dave Dilegge accusing you of hating America and being ignorant of the military.
More seriously, this has been an ongoing theme of our coverage here at Registan.net, and I will venture a guess that it will become even more important as the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan continues to increase. And yet, amazingly, there remains almost no mitigation strategy from the Army itself, if the number of robotic twenty-somethings drolly expressing annoyance at staff meetings that their standard civilian casualty response of phoning the local DSG about an incident hours to days after it happened still doesn’t work is any indication. But that is probably a separate post.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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