So the Taliban lied about the number of civilian casualties because they were afraid of losing face. Come on - give me a break. The Taliban were quite willing to display to the world as many civilian casualties as they could possibly muster. I find that logic to be rather specious. By and large the numbers he quotes are the exact same ones quoted by the Taliban - and were the same ones reported in the foreign press of India and Pakistan - his main source of inspiration.

Yes, there were many more civilians killed in this dispute than the press has reported. But it is naive to think that one can impose their "will" on a foreign force by military means and not have civilian casualties. The US has been fighting an all out war against the Taliban regime, and it is not surprising that innocent lives were lost. The argument may sway the pacifist crowd (of which I have leanings), but anyone that supports military action must be fully cognizant that acts of war are violent in the extreme. The same argument against US action in Afghanistan could have been easily invoked against US bombing of Germany where the civilian casualties dwarfed those in the last few months - think Dresden. In the extremist case, a civilian casualty is never justified no matter the enemy being fought.

The other bias that gets mixed into the report is to blame all the Afghan problems on the US. For example, prior to the US ever giving Afghanistan a second glance, there was a large number of refugees, a drought, and an impending humanitarian crisis. One can argue that the U.S. bombing made the problem worse or at least brought it to a head but to view the US military actions in isolation of the history of Afghanistan over the last 14 years is blatant propaganda. The truth is that Afghanistan has been at war during that time. The US is simply finishing the job. It's convenient to focus exclusively on the US culpability in the last few months without consideration of the larger problem of lawlessness and the totalitarian response of the Taliban. The reason the US got involved is because these people couldn't get their shit together. In order to support their fascism, they turned their attention to the outside world hoping to spread their misery to the rest of the world.

Perhaps instead of dropping bombs and killing a few thousand, the U.S. should have imposed economic sanctions to get the Taliban to hand over those "few criminals". Likely result would have been millions starving to death and the Taliban becoming more entrenched in the control of every aspect of life of their loyal electorate.

As for being a "just war", I don't find his arguments convincing. The Taliban conspired with forces which had declared war on the US. If not for the military action, it's likely that their efforts of terrorism would continue unabated. Will the US action prevent future terrorism. Probably stopped some of it dead in it's tracks. Probably created future enmity in others that might not have existed before. However, inaction was not an option. The author's sole solution to this delimma is that the US pilots should have flown at lower altitudes and we should have put in more ground troops - thus giving the Taliban a sporting chance.

I agree that Americans tend to ignore the problems of the rest of the world - as we ignored the Taliban prior to 9/11. But this tends to be a catch 22. They're pissed when we ignore them and pissed when we don't. The logical conclusion to his argument about the US apathy prior to 9/11 is that we should have intervened prior to that point - not necessarily that we should never have overthrown the government after said time. Personally, I'd have rather that they resolve their own problems - not export them - and we could have continued to ignore them. The US may not have done much to solve Afghan's problems, but we also were not the major reason for them either - leaving aside others who blame the US for every bad that's happened in the last 70 years.