The McCain campaign is inviting more questions about their candidates' judgment on military affairs with a new ad attacking Barack Obama for a statement about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. A partial transcript:
ANNCR: Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan areOf course, civilian casualties in Afghanistan are a very real problem that threatens to undercut American interests in region. They engender sympathy for the Taliban among the civilian population and destabilize the government. What Obama was actually doing was calling for a larger troop presence there, something McCain ostensibly supports. If there's a distinction the McCain campaign is trying to make, it is apparently that they don't take civilian casualties very seriously.
BARACK OBAMA: "... just air-raiding villages and killing civilians."ANNCR: How dishonorable.
Just two weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was apologizing for an airstrike that killed 90 people. Around the time that Obama made the above statement, President Bush met with Hamid Karzai to express very public concern about civilian deaths caused by Western forces. Via Spencer Ackerman, the commander in Afghanistan, Gen. McKiernan, spoke at length at the Newseum last week about how civilian casualties harm the mission.
General Petraeus is supposedly a hero to the right, but apparently no one actually feels like listening to a word the man says. Among them, his notion that "the Iraqi people are the decisive terrain" in the battle against the insurgency and that American troops "can't kill their way out of the problem." Both of these lessons are easily applicable to Afghanistan. America can't win in Afghanistan by inflicting large numbers of civilian casualties or by ignoring the effect this has on the population whose hearts and minds are essential to success there.
Any candidate running for president should be cognizant of this.
--A. Serwer
