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CBS:

After six years, the liberation of Afghanistan has become a triumph without victory. The fighting is the greatest it has been since the beginning of the war and more civilians are dying. In fact, 60 Minutes was surprised to hear this: while the enemy has killed hundreds of civilians this year, a similar number of civilians have been killed by American forces. With relatively few troops there, the U.S. and NATO rely on air power. The number of civilians killed in air strikes has doubled.

60 Minutes wondered whether civilian deaths are undermining the effort to win the Afghan people.

You think? This is the part that stood out:

"There's this macabre kind of calculus that the military goes through on every air strike, where they try to figure out how many dead civilians is dead bad guy worth," says Marc Garlasco, who knows the calculus of civilian casualties as well as anyone.[..]

"Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem," Garlasco explains. "But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld."

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets -- Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed.

The full video and transcripts are available on CBS's website.

I've been trying to get some sort of handle on exactly what went on in Somalia. Something about it did not pass the smell test for me. A military expert with whom I consulted expressed some of the same reservations about the story that I had (albeit with far more specific knowledge).

First, the AC-130 is not a precision weapon in any practical term. It is fairly accurate area weapon and can contain it's fire to areas slightly larger than a football pitch (100mx90m). They may have hit "a senior terrorist figure" (who can tell from that altitude) but they hit a lot of other people in the process. Unless there were special forces on the ground calling in the fire it would be haphazard. Talk about back to the future, when every dead Vietnamese was Viet Cong -- the only requirement for identification was an unmoving corpse.

Then, as a follow up, he sent this article from the Guardian UK:

The US air strike on Somalia failed to kill any of the three top al-Qaida members accused of terror attacks in east Africa.

A senior US official said today that Sunday night's attack had killed between eight and 10 "al-Qaida affiliates" near the southern tip of Somalia.

But he said that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Abu Taha al-Sudan and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, all linked to the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2002 Mombasa hotel attack, were still on the run. "Fazul is not dead," said the official, contradicting earlier reports. "The three high-value targets are still of interest to us."

I'm not sure what to think about this. Why Somalia now? Is this another case of "Wag the Dog" the Republicans accused Clinton of during the "Monica-gate" scrutiny?

Zbigniew Brzezinski:

"Iran's announcement that it has enriched a minute amount of uranium has unleashed urgent calls for a preventive U.S. air strike by the same sources that earlier urged war on Iraq. If there is another terrorist attack in the United States, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be also immediate charges that Iran was responsible in order to generate public hysteria in favor of military action. But there are four compelling reasons against a preventive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities:...

1. In the absence of an imminent threat (with the Iranians at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war.

If undertaken without formal Congressional declaration, it would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the President. Similarly, if undertaken without the sanction of the UN Security Council either alone by the United States or in complicity with Israel, it would stamp the perpetrator(s) as an international outlaw(s).read on"