While the United States military is finally willing to concede that it killed at least some people in the massive Farah air strike, they scoffed at a list of the 147 names of civilians local officials say were killed in the attacks, which destroyed multiple homes across two villages.
Officially, the military is now saying the toll is being “extremely over-exaggated” by the Afghan government. The strike, which is now being called by far the deadliest single incident since the 2001 US invasion, has outraged the civilian population and led President Hamid Karzai to demand that the US put an end to all air strikes in the troubled nation.
The concession that they had killed 50 people, while insisting most of them were insurgents, flew in the face of reports from numerous sources and comments from a myriad of Afghan officials. Still, it was a step up from previous claim that the Taliban had rounded up all the people ahead of time, killed them with hand grenades, packed the bodies into houses, then fooled the US into leveling the houses. Yesterday, they admitted that claim was “thinly sourced.”
You've got to be kidding! How about this: for each innocent man woman or child killed in these raids, an equal number of family members of those who back this kind of action are chosen at random and killed in a like manner. We'll see how quickly the bombings and other military actions are stopped, and negotiations are began in earnest.