Here's that 60 Minutes piece to which Karen was referring.
The lead-in to the story was an incident in which U.S. forces, responding to a single rocket launched at their base which missed the base entirely and caused no casualties, rained mortar fire down on a nearby village where two men with AK-47's allegedly fled after the failed rocket attack. After about an hour of bombarding the village with mortars, they called in an air strike that dropped two (count 'em) one-ton bombs on the village, killing lots of people but not the alleged Taliban they were after.
That leads into this:
"During the Russian invasion we haven’t heard of 10 members of one family being killed by Russians in one incident. But the Americans did that," a villager remarked.These Afghans, like many others, are deciding whether to support the U.S.-backed government. We expected anger, but we didn’t expect this.
"You can't be saying that the Soviets were kinder to your people than the Americans have been," Pelley remarks.
"We used to hate the Russians much more than Americans," the villager replied. "But now when we see all this happening, I am telling you Russians behave much better than the Americans."
Really, there's no comparison. The Soviets killed something like a million Afghans over ten years. But it's the kind of thing that Afghans are saying, because so far this year, 17 air strikes have killed more than 270 civilians according to the humanitarian organization Human Rights Watch.
The rest of the story is about (a) all the care the U.S. military supposedly takes to avoid civilian casualties, including deciding how many dead civilians are "worth it" (shades of Madeleine Albright) to kill a particular enemy soldier or official; and (b) Hamid Karzai's pleas for the U.S. to stop the air strikes, which are naturally falling on deaf ears. Who does this guy think he is--the leader of a sovereign country or something? He's only still alive and in power because of protection from the U.S. military. He is clearly in no position to be giving Uncle Sam orders. He'd better shut up and do as he's told if he doesn't want to lose that protection.
Of course we'll be told by all war supporters that "we" are killing terrorists by the score in Afghanistan and Iraq and that's why "we" have to stay there. However, our military seems to be creating terrorists as fast as it can kill them.
One seven-year-old boy, Mujib, was the sole survivor of four generations of the same family who were killed in the air strike described at the beginning of the story. When asked what he thought of Americans, he replied, "I hate them." Now you don't suppose this kid might grow up to be a terrorist, do you? Nah. They hate us for our freedom.
