There's Something Wrong in Afghanistan

As the war in Iraq has degenerated into disaster (sorry, Senator Lieberman) and the war in Afghanistan is showing some serious stress signs (thank you, Pervez Musharraf), I have cut way back on blogging about collateral damage -- the unfortunate instances in which civilians are bombed by mistake.

I don't want to appear to be piling on. But with dozens of Afghan civilians being killed in a bombing raid on the village of Hyderabad over the weekend, the number of similar incidents has spiraled way out of control.

The latest incident, which may have taken in excess of 100 lives, brought to more than 200 the number of civilian casualties at the hands of coalition troops in June This is far more than are believed to have been killed by resurgent Taliban militants.

Chris Floyd, who blogs at Empire Burlesque, is far less charitable than me when it comes to covering all the bad stuff that has happened in both theaters of war. He blames an overreliance on massive bombing for the spike in civilian deaths in Afghanistan.

Whatever the cause, it's time for the U.S.-NATO command to figure out what's going wrong and why it's going wrong so often.

Meanwhile, Robert Farley digs a little deeper at Lawyers, Gun$ & Money.