The Noive!

The Washington Post indignantly headlined it Karzai orders NATO to stop airstrikes on Afghan homes. The tone continued in the article:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded Tuesday that the U.S.-led coalition stop all airstrikes on Afghan homes, drawing his government closer than ever to direct opposition to the American presence here.... Tuesday’s demand followed his earlier insistence that foreign forces end night raids, stop unilateral operations, and stay off roads and out of Afghan villages....

And they went on to refer to "a thinly veiled threat":

He added that foreign forces are close to “the behavior of an occupation” and the “Afghan people know how to deal with that” — a thinly veiled threat that Afghans could rise up against NATO and drive them out as with past occupying armies. He said Afghanistan would be “forced to take unilateral action” if the bombardment of homes did not cease, although he did not specify what that action would be.

The fact is, Karzai is dreaming. “They must treat Afghanistan as a sovereign nation.” Like that'll happen. A telling quote:

Karzai’s demands to stop night raids and coalition airstrikes struck one U.S. military official as “mind-boggling.”

We're doing whatever we want there, and the fact is Karzai's government (for whom and which I hold no brief whatsoever) has no legal recourse to stop us. There's no status of forces agreement. We occupy - kind of - Afghanistan and until we leave (if we leave) we'll continue to behave however we want.

Because we're America, dammit. It's our way.

And so is this kind of article - just like Iran always "threatens" to retaliate if they're attacked, so too Karzai uses "demands" and "orders" and "threats" to stop us killing Afghan civilians... Because in the new American reality, we're Good and those who aren't 100% with us are 100% against us.

(And no; the fact that "the majority of civilian casualties in Afghanistan[is attributed] to insurgents rather than to NATO forces" doesn't change my mind. We're better than they are, aren't we? Why are 1 in 4 civilians dying there dying because we're bombing their houses? Is that how we fight our wars of choice now?)