Jon Chait notices Sarah Palin accusing Barack Obama of saying that American soldiers in Afghanistan simply "target and kill civilians in Afghanistan." Oh boy, that Sarah. She's just our barracuda because, you know, she is that. What Barack Obama actually said was,"We've got to get the job done [in Afghanistan], and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there." Chait explains, "The point was clear and obvious. Without enough troops on the ground, we're reduced to using too many airstrikes, which creates more civilian casualties and damages our standing." But it's actually a bit more specific. As Rob Farley explained to me yesterday, one of the unexpected effects of the surge in Iraq was that the increased presence of US troops led to increased accuracy in airstrikes. Fewer civilians died. And the reason was simple: With more troops on the ground, air support had better intelligence of what and where to strike, so they made fewer mistakes. The argument Obama is making is that without sufficient troop density in Afghanistan, the pilots lack the ground-level intelligence to properly target their air strikes, so civilians do die, and in large numbers. And when you're trying to apply counterinsurgency principles -- which is what Palin says we need in Afghanistan, on advice from a long-dead Civil War general -- you can't have a population that sees you and your war machinery as the primary threat to their survival.
