AMERICAN GENERAL IN AFGHANISTAN NICKNAMED "BOMBER MC NEILL"

More on the the bombardment of a village in Afghanistan in which many civilians were killed on Friday. See my previous post on this story earlier today. Jason Burke has a further story in The Guardian, dated Sunday July 1, 2007, in which he reports that U.S. air strikes and bombs killed up to 80 people in the Afghan village in Helmand province. After a NATO force was attacked and ambushed by Taliban fighters, commander of NATO forces, U.S. General Dan McNeill, who is reported to be enamored of "air power," sent out bombers and war planes to bomb the village where the Taliban took refuge.

Writes Jason Burke:

"The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother's children, were killed. . ."

"In Afghanistan, the civilian deaths caused by US and NATO-led troops have infuriated local people and prompted President Hamid Karzai to publicly condemn foreign forces for careless 'use of extreme force' and for viewing Afghan lives as 'cheap'. The increasingly fragile President has urged restraint and better co-ordination of military operations with the Afghan government, while also blaming the Taliban for using civilians as human shields.


"Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, raised the issue of civilian casualties on a four-hour visit to Afghanistan on Friday on which he met the senior NATO commander there, the American General Dan McNeill.

"Senior British soldiers have previously expressed concerns that McNeill, who took command of the 32,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan only recently, was 'a fan' of the massive use of air power to defeat insurgents and that his favoured tactics could be counter-productive.


"'Every civilian dead means five new Taliban,' said one British officer who has recently returned from Helmand. 'It's a tough call when the enemy are hiding in villages, but you have to be very, very careful,' he added.

Note the following sentence in Jason Burke's article:

"The American general has been dubbed 'Bomber McNeill' by his critics."

Because of incidents like the above, my solution is simple. Ban all war planes, do away with the American squadrons, retire everyone in the Air Force. Air planes must be restricted to peaceful purposes, such as commercial aviation. No one should be allowed to shoot a cannon from an air plane, or drop a bomb.