Bombing restraint poor way to deal with Taliban propganda

Noel Schachtman:

As part of his push to win over the people of Afghanistan, top US Gen. Stanley McChrystal in July abolished air attacks in all but the most dire of circumstances. But that ban is having all kinds of ugly and unexpected consequences.

US troops are paying a tough price for it. Consider the running firefight that Echo Company of the 2nd Batallion, 8th Marines faced in the town of Mian Poshteh in late August.

For 36 hours, the local Taliban did everything they could to kill the Marines of Echo Company. The militants planted improvised bombs. They fired mortar rounds at the adobe compound where the Marines were holed up. And when most of the Americans left to get fresh supplies, the Taliban attacked from three sides, while a sniper took aim at the troops' heads.

The Marines, on the other hand, had to hold back.

Sure, they could return fire, launching rockets and artillery and Cobra helicopters at the militants. But for a day and a half, Echo Company had no effective access to the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal: bombs dropped from the sky.

McChrystal's goal was to eliminate the innocent deaths that the Taliban have turned into propaganda victories. But his cautious rules of engagement are not only putting more US troops at risk by taking away America's most potent advantage in this conflict, they've sidelined the tools and processes most likely to keep air strikes from killing innocents.

Which means units like Echo Company aren't the only ones in greater danger by waging this supposedly more careful air war.

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Air Force "weaponeers" run sophisticated computer models to predict what will happen when a particular bomb strikes a particular building at a certain angle. "Targeteers" scour huge terrain databases for mosques or schools. Spy drones watch battlefields to make sure that militants are really around -- and that women and children aren't.

Bombs still go astray, of course, with terrifying consequences. But this system for employing air power is so precise, even Human Rights Watch praises its "very good record of minimizing harm to civilians."

Too bad it's hardly used any more.

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There is much more.

There are too issues here. One is dealing with Taliban propaganda. Propaganda has become their best anti aircraft weapon. They deliberately used human shields to drive up non combatant deaths and for some reason our forces had no effective way to counter their war crimes.

The second issue is the added danger to US forces from the rule. What it means is that instead of the Taliban bugging out after about 20 minutes, they hang around and do more killing, thereby driving up our death count and playing into the hands of the anti war pukes in this country.