No Changing Hearts and Minds at 6,000 Feet

The facts of the May 4 US aerial bombardment in the Farah Province continue to surface and the more that comes out the more troubling it becomes to understand. The number of women and children that were killed and injured in this action continue to garner attention in the press (Financial Times, June 19, p.6) and raise the questions of how this happened. The US claims that the Taliban were honeycombed within the village and the air strikes were the only method to root out the insurgents who had been in a fierce fire fight with Coalition troops hours prior to that attack. Local villagers claim that the Taliban were no closer to the village than several kilometers and the had melted back into the gullies and woods prior to the arrival of US aircraft. Today there are still many children in the hospital in Herat with severe burns who have gone through numerous skin grafts and whose prognoses for survival are still in doubt given the primitive state of health care in rural Afghanistan. All this calls into question the entire strategy of combating an enemy you cannot distinguish from the population at 6,000 feet. The days are over where we can count on the “miracle of airpower” do get the job done quickly and cleanly. There are no surgical air strikes which kill the enemy and protect the innocent that the military and the US public has been seduced into believing in ever since the days of the Gulf War. There are air strikes that produce endless surgery for the innocent victims of such attacks but nothing that gives us that magical edge to differentiate between friend and foe from thousands of feet above. If we are to make difference in this country we must engage them from six feet above the ground not 6,000 by moving with the population not above them.