Adding up in Afghanistan

Add these two things together...

U.S. Airstrikes on Afghanistan Top 750 for May FOX News 06/07/06.

From Collateral Damage: The "Incident" at Haditha by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com 06/06/06:

"Collateral damage" is, of course, a Pentagon euphemism for unintentional or incidental destruction of property, facilities, or noncombatants that crept into our language in the Vietnam years and never left. ...

... Since March 2003, almost 2,500 American soldiers, just over 200 troops from allied forces, and several hundred private contractors or mercenaries have died in Iraq. We have no idea how many insurgents, Iraqi soldiers, or militia members have died in that same period, though the number must be large indeed. But we do know one thing. In modern wars, especially those conducted in part from the air (as both Iraq and Afghanistan have been), there's nothing "collateral" about civilian deaths. If anything, the "collateral deaths" are those of the combatants on any side. Civilian deaths are now the central fact, the very essence of war. Not seeing that means not seeing war.

The lack of decent media coverage of the use of air power in Iraq and Afghanistan - as in South Vietnam - as well as artillery, tanks, cluster bombs, and the like, helps obscure both the widespread nature and the centrality of indiscriminate civilian death. At least we do see something of the odd brutal Haditha or My Lai or Ishaqi, when, sooner or later, it rises to the level of media attention. Killing civilians from the air, which automatically seems to fall into the category of "collateral" or "accidental," and never the criminal (no matter how often civilians die from it), is actually far more destructive and so far worse. It should, of course, be obvious that, if you are going to destroy what you believe to be a "terrorist safe house" in the middle of an urban neighborhood, noncombatants who just happen to be living in the environs will be "damaged." (my emphasis)

Then figure on a average of, say, three civilian noncombatants killed as "collateral damage" in each air strike. (It's probably more.)

That means in one month, the clan members of 2,250 civilian noncombatants killed have an obligation of honor, in their view of life and family, to kill Americans in retaliation.

Why do they hate us?

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