{"id":3508,"date":"2007-05-06T22:20:57","date_gmt":"2007-05-07T05:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/06\/so-much-for-effort\/"},"modified":"2007-05-06T22:23:16","modified_gmt":"2007-05-07T05:23:16","slug":"so-much-for-effort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/06\/so-much-for-effort\/","title":{"rendered":"So much for effort…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, it was announced<\/a> that NATO’s anti-Taliban raids in Kandahar province had killed approximately 50 civilians. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his part, let it be known that he is ‘losing patience’ with all the civilians NATO has been killing<\/a>. As the US simultaneously denied that any such thing had happened and promised to look into it and insisted<\/a> that it was entirely the Taliban’s fault, NATO officials insisted that in the future they would try to keep the civilian massacres to a minimum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, this is quite a messy situation. Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema warned<\/a> that the civilian death toll could cost the US the support of Afghanistan’s civilian population (to the extent they ever had it). This is one of those situations that needs to be treated with kid gloves.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to Friday, and Afghan officials say that days after the initial killings: the very day NATO promised to be more careful in the future in fact, a US bombing attack killed 13 more<\/a> civilians. Needless to say, the Pentagon once again had no information that such an incident had ever taken place, but they promised to look into it… again.<\/p>\n

Right about now, a lot of you are probably thinking this story sounds kind of familiar. In fact, it happens with surprising regularity, the civilian body counts, the initial denial, the eventually admissions<\/a>, Karzai’s mock outrage, even the part where NATO promises to make wholesale changes<\/a> so it doesn’t happen again.<\/p>\n

What efforts NATO has actually undertaken in the past (or will undertake in the present incident) I’m not sure, but one thing is painfully obviously to the civilian population living under their occupation, it’s not good enough. NATO troops have killed civilians in at least 12 separate reported incidents in 2007 alone: their bodycount since this ill-conceived war began must simply be astronomical. Most of us manage to get through our entire lives without slaughtering dozens of innocent villagers: is it to much to ask that NATO manage to go more than a few weeks in-between atrocities?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, it was announced that NATO’s anti-Taliban raids in Kandahar province had killed approximately 50 civilians. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for his part, let it be known that he is ‘losing patience’ with all the civilians NATO has been killing. As the US simultaneously denied that any such thing had happened and promised to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3508"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}