KABUL — American-led efforts to avert civilian deaths in the war against the Taliban suffered a new blow over the weekend when a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan killed about two dozen civilians. U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal , the head of coalition forces in Afghanistan , sought to contain outrage Monday for the attack by delivering a personal apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai . He conceded, however, that the attack Sunday was likely to shake public confidence in his pledge to minimize civilian deaths in Afghanistan .

Sunday's airstrike was the second in a week to kill Afghan civilians. A week earlier, U.S. Marines killed 12 Afghans during the ongoing offensive in the Taliban stronghold of Marjah in southern Afghanistan

There were conflicting estimates of the death toll. The Afghan Council of Ministers said that 27 civilians — including four women and a child — had been killed, while the local police chief said 21 had died.Two others were missing, he said.

Originally posted by centurion1211
Oh, I almost forgot. To obama supporters, those are all criminal acts and not terrorist acts.

Afghan Offensive ‘Aimed to Shape U.S. Opinion on War’

Washington Post Feb. 22, 2010: Gareth Porter writes for IPS News, “Senior military officials decided to launch the current U.S.-British military campaign to seize Marja in large part to influence domestic U.S. opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported Monday.”

The Post report, by Greg Jaffe and Craig Whitlock, both of whom cover military affairs, said the town of Marja would not have been chosen as a target for a U.S. military operation had the criterion been military significance instead of impact on domestic public opinion.

The primary goal of the offensive, they write, is to ‘convince Americans that a new era has arrived in the eight-year long war….’ U.S. military officials in Afghanistan ‘hope a large and loud victory in Marja will convince the American public that they deserve more time to demonstrate that extra troops and new tactics can yield better results on the battlefield,’ according to Jaffe and Whitlock.
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You want to be able to define your narrative, and we’ve had trouble doing that in the past,’ said Mark Moyar, who has served as a civilian adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan. McChrystal is under pressure to show progress fast: President Obama has directed that U.S. troops begin to withdraw in July 2011.

In recent days, U.S. commanders in Kabul and Washington have gone to great pains to describe the Marja offensive as a new beginning. ‘This is the start point of a new strategy,’ one senior military official told reporters on Thursday. ‘This is our first salvo.’

Here’s another gem: “[I] n purely military terms, sending 11,000 U.S. and Afghan troops to defeat a few hundred Taliban fighters in Marja won’t change much in Afghanistan. The greater significance of the battle is in how it is perceived in the rest of Afghanistan and in America.”