NATO would only “confirm there has been a situation,” while promising to send a “joint NATO assessment team” to find out exactly what happened and how. So far the nationality of the warplane has not been identified.

The details of the attack are not entirely clear. Kapisa Governor Mehrabuddin Safi said the strike hit the Giawa village, and other officials said there may have been a night raid in the area shortly before the strike.

Karzai has deployed his own team to the district to investigate the killings, promising a “all-out probe” in a statement released earlier today. A number of MPs are part of the delegation being sent, and it is just one more in a long line of embarrassing incidents straining Afghan-NATO ties.

U.S. Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti said aboutust 29 Afghan army units and seven Afghan police units – together about 1 percent of total security forces – can be called “independent,”  but that even they require combat and logistical support from NATO forces.

Scaparrotti tried to put the failure in a positive light. ”These soldiers will fight, particularly at the company level, there’s no question about that. And they’re going to be good enough as we build them to secure their country and to counter the insurgency,” he said. ”Will they be at the standard we have for our soldiers? No, not at least the conventional forces.”

The tone is typical of a military culture that systematically misrepresents the progress of the war. As Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis has recently written, facts on the ground in Afghanistan “bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.” Davis wrote up a classified report on the progress of the U.S. mission, but concluded he “witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.”

The Afghan army and police, ostensibly scheduled to take over the security role for the country in 2014, are made up of illiterate criminals and drug addicts who quit in droves. Many are corrupt, inept, and the army is potentially infiltrated with insurgents.

A recent classified coalition report, says the New York Times, “makes clear that these killings have become the most visible symptom of a far deeper ailment plaguing the war effort: the contempt each side holds for the other, never mind the Taliban. The ill will and mistrust run deep among civilians and militaries on both sides, raising questions about what future role the United States and its allies can expect to play in Afghanistan.”

The weakness of the Afghan security forces is coupled with a robust and violent insurgency, with 2011 seeing a rise in overall violence in the country for the fifth year in a row. Unfortunately, the likely response from the U.S. government is not to withdraw, but to remain in a combat role for the foreseeable future.

In Iraq, which US troops have already left, the massive CIA presence in Baghdad has been re-purposed. Once focused chiefly on tackling al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and other insurgents, the spies are now “monitoring developments in the increasingly antagonistic government.”

In many ways thing have come full circle for the CIA, which had a presence on the ground spying on the Saddam Hussein regime before the 2003 US invasion. Now, having spent the last eight years helping the military prop up the Maliki regime, the agency again finds itself there spying.

In Afghanistan — though exactly what sort of government the occupation will leave behind remains up in the air — the expectation is much the same as with Iraq, only moreso. The deployment will be even bigger, characterized by more aggressive operations and constant drone strikes.

Adm. Bill McRaven, the special operations commander who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, confirmed that special operations forces would be the last to leave under the Obama administration’s current plan and may play a leading role in the Afghan war going forward.

In anticipation of a drawdown of U.S. troops in 2014, the Obama administration and the Pentagon are considering streamlining special operations in Afghanistan, combining overall village security with the elite Joint Special Operations Command’s kill/capture strategy that focuses on secret night raids.

The shift to special operations would be in keeping with President Obama’s overall strategy shift since taking office. Obama has significantly increased the use of JSOC, night raids, and kill/capture operations in Afghanistan which has been a vast and largely secret program.

Obama has more than tripled the incidence of night raids. “An estimated 12 to 20 night raids now occur per night,” according to a study published back in September, “resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” And many of the associated tactics, like “mass detention operations, holding entire villages for questioning on site for prolonged periods of time,” may violate international law.

These tactics very often kill civilians and the vast majority of those detained during night raids and sent without a trial to the detention facility at Bagram Airbase have been civilians.

These forces have been known for their brutality. In one notable incident in February of 2010, U.S. Special Operations Forces surrounded a house in a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and ended up killing two civilian men and three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). U.S. troops, realizing their mistake, lied and tampered with the evidence at the scene, attempting blame the murders on the Taliban.

The Obama administration has also increased the use of JSOC forces around the world, most notably in Africa where U.S. military interventions occur mostly in the shadows.

According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, JSOC forces “reportedly conduct highly sensitive combat and supporting operations against terrorists on a world-wide basis.” “Without the knowledge of the American public,” writes historian Nick Turse, “a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed.”

The potential shift to JSOC forces is probably an attempt by the White House to make it seem like the U.S. war in Afghanistan has ended, at least for the most part. Meanwhile, a JSOC-led war in Afghanistan is likely to have terrible consequences for transparency and accountability for what goes on there after the bulk of U.S. forces leave.

“There is no mention of the Soviet war, the mujaheddin, the Taliban or the U.S. military presence,” reports the Washington Post. “In their efforts to promote a single national identity, Afghan leaders have deemed their own history too controversial.”

When state-funded indoctrination books whitewash entire swathes of relevant history, societal problems don’t simply go away. They’re compounded. Afghans are suffering on a daily basis from war and yet the U.S. and their Afghan “education” wardens appear to have decided to keep children ignorant of the causes of their country’s troubles.

Attempting to erase four decades of history is something extremely beneficial for the criminals, thugs, and extremists that have terrorized the country in that time. U.S. officials and the Afghan Ministry presumably want to prevent Afghans from knowing that the Soviets invaded and slaughtered perhaps over a million Afghans, or that the U.S. helped spur extremist jihadis to power, or that the Taliban forced a delusional brand of religious savagery on the people, or that the U.S. has committed extensive atrocities and war crimes throughout ten years of military occupation. Lucky for the Russians, Americans, and Taliban.

“Our recent history tears us apart. We’ve created a curriculum based on the older history that brings us together, with figures universally recognized as being great,” said Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s education minister. “These are the first books in decades that are depoliticized and de-ethnicized.”

Depoliticized, de-enthicized, and de-factized. The curriculum, which was “reviewed” for “inappropriate material” by people the Post calls “U.S. military cultural advisers,” is anathema to education. It does the opposite of what education is supposed to do, instead keeping Afghans ignorant and doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, never having learned from them in the first place.

The US soldier is said to have killed the man thinking that the 22-year-old Afghan guard was about to attack him. NATO declined comment but the US said it was “aware” of the incident and investigations are apparently underway.

The guard was one of several contractors hired to guard the exterior of the base. He asked to be let inside the base for some reason, starting an argument with the US soldier, which ended in the shooting. Afghan police say the US soldier, who was not named, “thought he was acting in self defense.”

Between Taliban infiltrators launching attacks in the uniforms of allied security forces and incidents like these, the distrust between Afghan troops and NATO occupation forces appears to be increasing, and could lead to more itchy trigger fingers on both sides.

The Pentagon has dismissed the report, insisting everything it said was totally honest, apparently including statements that appear to contradict one another. Congressmen who have met with Lt. Col Davis have admitted to receiving “a lot of resistance from the Pentagon.”

Click here to read the New York Times story on Lt. Col. Davis

Click here to read Lt. Col Davis’ unclassified report at AFJ

Insurgents fighting occupation forces and the corrupt Karzai government were responsible for 2,332 civilian deaths in 2011, concluded the UNAMA report, while the U.S.-led forces were responsible for 410 civilian deaths. Fighting in Afghanistan has killed 12,000 civilians since 2007, according to UNAMA.

“Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were the single largest killer of Afghan children, women and men in 2011,” the report said. ”The tactics of choice of anti-government elements subjected Afghan civilians to death and injury with increasingly lethal results in 2011.”

For NATO, the most deadly tactic for civilians was airstrikes, which killed 187 people. Another 63 people were killed in 2011 in U.S.-led night raids, which have enraged Afghan communities. As high as that number is, the death toll from night raids was down 22 percent from the previous year.

The Obama administration’s surge in Afghanistan has failed on virtually every front, worsening the security of the country and causing increasing harm to Afghans.

UN diplomats have urged all combatants in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties. But the most sure-fire way of dropping civilian casualties down to almost nothing – namely, pulling out of Afghanistan and ending the war – went unmentioned.

But this time, as NATO DMs met, the discussion was about making the unwieldy behemoth smaller, as they are finally realizing that NATO will have to finance the military indefinitely.

The enormous $11.6 billion price tag, nearly eight times the revenues of the entire Afghan government, is ending the delusion that the Karzai government will be able to pay for it even a decade down the road.

While the talks contemplate how to make that military a little more affordable (not for Afghanistan, surely, but for NATO), Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has raised the idea of other, non-NATO countries chipping in, saying it’d be “much better in a longer-term perspective.” Though a number of nations have offered to give the Afghan government a little aid, the number willing to bankroll the military in perpetuity is likely low.

Officials still disagree on whether the unsigned letter was authentic or not, and the contents of the letter also remain a closely guarded secret, although it did apparently convince the administration that there was some openness to negotiation.

That the letter was never authenticated reveals how eager the Obama Administration was to start a round of talks aimed at showing some progress.

The only known specific content of the letter is a call for Obama to hurry up and release five Guantanamo Bay detainees, which is still reportedly in the works.