Experts: McChrystal order important, difficult - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Experts: McChrystal order important, difficult

Sending out a team to investigate an airstrike that killed Afghan civilians wouldn’t cut it for the U.S. Forces Afghanistan commander.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted to check out the damage himself.

McChrystal made his way through knee-high mud to two fuel tankers destroyed Sept. 4 by two 500-pound bombs that killed 82 Taliban militants and civilians.

McChrystal wanted Afghans to see he is serious about civilian casualties — a message that airmen have heard repeatedly since June when he took command in and one that outside experts see as important but possibly unrealistic.

“The most important bomb on my aircraft is the one I bring back home and do not drop because any risk of a noncombatant getting involved … is too much,” Brig. Gen. Steven Kwast, the Bagram wing commander, said in a July interview with Air Force Times.

A NATO team led by Canadian Maj. Gen. C.S. Sullivan, NATO’s air component commander and deputy for joint operations, is investigating the bombing.

A U.S. Air Force F-15E fighter fired on the stolen fuel tankers, under orders from German Col. Georg Klein, after a B-1 bomber flying nearby found the trucks stuck in the mud.

The F-15E arrived 15 minutes after the B-1 left the target to refuel, according to news reports. Klein ordered the bombing after he received intelligence from one Afghan source that the crowd he saw around the tankers was Taliban militants, the reports said.

Reports have varied over how many Afghan civilians died, but McChrystal confirmed civilian casualties.

An expert on the Middle East who helped devise the Iraq “surge” and re-evaluated the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan commended McChrystal for traveling to the Kunduz province to see the damage for himself. Fighting inside populated areas is seen as “barbarism” in Afghanistan, said Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“That’s why it’s even more important in Afghanistan [to avoid killing civilians] than Iraq. Iraqis have been much more tolerant to civilian casualties,” he said.

McChrystal’s order, though, comes as the U.S. military has become more dependent on precision airstrikes, Kagan said.

The advances in aerial munitions technology have created unrealistic expectations for accuracy, said Loren Thompson of the Arlington, Va.,-based Lexington Institute.

“We’ve gotten to a point in western democracies where it’s not enough to hit the target,” he said.

These advances to include the expanding unmanned aerial vehicle fleet have transformed how airpower is viewed in counterinsurgency warfare, Kagan said.

“We could not have done what we did in Iraq without our precision air power,” he said.