The way David Ignatius tells it, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates will do anything to express his sorrow for the deaths of innocent Afghan civilians killed by U.S. troops. He’ll even stand in the hot sun, wearing a pinstriped suit! According to Ignatius, Gates also announced that “United States will adopt a new approach of compensating the victims of such accidents first and then investigating the details.”
Well, that’s nice but it has just a hint of “You say we killed your kid? Here’s fifty grand. Now shut the fuck up.” As I suggested in my earlier complaint, it would be nice to know, when, for example, the Afghans say that 90 civilians were killed in a U.S. raid and U.S. officials say it was 5 to 7, that we get a little closure on such issues as 1) what really happened and 2) why U.S. officials made official statements that don’t seem to have even a tangential relationship with reality and 3) whether U.S. military officers who approved or participated in an operation that caused such a massive loss of civilian life might be held responsible for their actions.
Gates is certainly an improvement, by several parsecs, over Donny “Stuff happens, especially when I am in charge” Rumsfeld. But there’s more to be done in Afghanistan than simply handing out cash. We should stop murdering civilians, and we should stop lying about it.
