Despite the U.S. military’s rejection that 90 civilians were killed in a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan, a United Nations investigation, the Afghan government and local villagers in the area in which the strike occurred say otherwise.
The strike was thought to be an attack on the Taliban, although villagers said there were no Taliban in the area.
As more and more evidence indicates a considerable loss of human life in this one instance, it’s a good time to be thinking about the cost of “collateral damage.” And that doesn’t only include the cost in human life. Our reputation as a country is also damaged when we kill civilians in war, intentionally or not. As one villager said of the United States, according to The New York Times, “They bombard us, they hate us, they kill us.”
However, what is the alternative? Our military would do well to use more caution in Afghanistan, as a Human Rights Watch report shows that our airstrikes there have tripled in the last few years and have caused severe “public backlash.” But what can we really do to significantly cut back on the collateral damage we are responsible for due to all the wars and conflicts we’re involved in?
I suppose if we were not chasing the Taliban at all or trying to restructure Iraq, we wouldn’t have to worry about collateral damage.
There has been a lot of discussion lately in this section and on our Web site about U.S. intervention in foreign affairs, specifically the Russia-Georgia conflict. If we weren’t so involved with everyone in the world, we wouldn’t have to question our war tactics and we wouldn’t worry about what Palestinians think of us when Israel decides to go on a bombing frenzy against Palestine or Lebanon. Furthermore, our objectives in war or our alliances with smaller countries like Georgia would always be clear.
But the catch is that we’ve already immersed ourselves into so many complex situations, we can’t seem to work ourselves out of them.
The paradox that many encounter when deciding whether or not to pull out of Iraq is that we’ve already committed ourselves to the cause. We pull out and leave a disaster behind us, or we “stay the course” and continue to complicate the situation while losing human lives.
If we stopped chasing the Taliban across third-world caves and deserts, it might seem like we would be better off, but can we afford not to go after Osama bin Laden in light of the Sept. 11 attacks? This brings up the even more complicated issue of whether or not we would have to worry about bin Laden had we not used radical Muslims to fight the Cold War back in the 1980s. But we did use them, and now we’re fighting against them.
Our foreign affairs policies are not the only areas that have become hopelessly complicated. The government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac appears to contradict good economics. How can a government decide it is principally reasonable to back two collapsing mortgage firms, or any other enterprise? It doesn’t really make economic sense.
But as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in his Sunday announcement, our economy depends on getting past the housing crisis, and “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are critical to turning the corner on housing.” Furthermore, these two firms were created by congress in the first place.
So all in all, one of our government’s most persistent problems is getting so enmeshed into places they don’t belong, whether it’s a foreign war or our own economy, that it can’t feasibly do the right thing anymore and can only become more enmeshed. Our government has to save us from terrorists, rescue us from the economy by backing mortgage firms, and pay our healthcare because pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies overcharge, knowing Medicaid will take care of it. Everything is merely an endless cycle that only gets worse.
So have a nice day.
Matt Watson is the opinion editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].