INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY

I want to begin by addressing the statement that "we have women, men, and children over there fighting for our freedom". Suffice it to say, the U.S. military does not employ children to fight or serve otherwise. So I am not sure if the post is addressing the freedom of the Afghan people and their use of children to fight, it is not clear.

War by its very nature is cruel and there is always collateral damage and loss of innocent life. Our leaders do not have the power to control who lives and who dies. Entering a war zone and certainly firing missiles into an area is only done with intelligence data. As human nature is flawed that data can be flawed, as we see by the loss of civilian life in Kabul at this celebration. Proclaiming to honor the men and women in the military while accusing them of using civilians as target practice may appear contradictory. The leaders are men and women of the United Armed Services also, they too risk their lives for the freedom of the American as well as Afghan people. I have read through the reference blog associated with this post and found that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) are concerned about why the facts given by the U.S. and Afghans differ so greatly.

ISAF officials were not trying to cover for themselves, they were stating facts as presented to them. When it became apparent these facts were erroneous, NATO retracted the information on "honor killings" and issued statements with new information uncovered by additional investigation. Ironically, the account in the article comes from a member of the family of the victims. This family member fails to denounce NATO's actions but instead indicates he and local officials believed the killings were an act of tribal rivalry and that the international forces were fed false information.

It is because of these mixed accounts that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who oversees all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, has ordered a second investigation into the deaths of the civilians killed during this nighttime raid.

The U.S. military will prosecute when wrongdoing is proven. However, they also stand by the men and women of the U.S. military as well. As part of the International Security Assistance Force, they stand by the entire team. The morale of our fighting forces depend on it. The death of these civilians is not an embarrassment, it is heartbreaking. The military should know that what they are doing is valuable and right and just but never an embarrassment.