Civilians die in coalition bombing

Police said Sunday four Afghan civilians were killed and five wounded in a US-led force air raid that pounded Taliban insurgents in mountainous eastern Afghanistan on Friday.

The US-led coalition confirmed the military had dropped a precision-guided bomb on militants who had fired mortars on an outpost in the same area and at the same time.

It said it had reports of non-combatant casualties but they could not be verified. (link)

Meanwhile, Linda McQuaig in her column in the Toronto Star writes about the Canadian media's war boosterism:

One way to prevent this pro-war momentum from setting in here would be for us to demand that the casualties we inflict on Afghans also be treated with some attention and respect. Instead, our government and media celebrate the number of "Taliban" we kill...

More surprising is the disrespectful way our government and media treat even Afghan civilian casualties.

There's been minimal coverage here of the repeated pleas from Afghans – including President Hamid Karzai – for an end to the U.S. and NATO bombings that have killed countless Afghan civilians. (And they are literally countless; we don't bother counting them.)

As part of the NATO force over there, Canada is surely complicit in these war deaths.Yet our media tend to make short shrift of them, even raising doubts about whether they really take place.