U.S. Airstrikes Kill Afghani Citizens

As many as 147 Afghani villagers were killed in an aerial assault by American forces on Monday and Tuesday. The air strike was directed at Taliban militants who were previously fighting the Afghan Army at a police check-point near the villages of Granai and Shiwan in western Afghanistan. Many women and children were counted among the dead. The Taliban had already left the area when the bombs fell; no militants are known to have been killed by the air strike.
In Farah province protesters took to the streets and merchants closed their stores vowing not to reopen until the bombing had been investigated and the protesters demands were met. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested that the villagers may have been killed by Taliban grenades. However, this notion has been all but disproven. Obviously, U.S./Afghani relations are stressed. Afghani civilians are angry at the U.S. and many are demanding that foreign troops leave Afghanistan. Can you blame them?
This air strike was a heavy-handed misfire resulting in the deaths of innocent people. The U.S. military has made many of these mistakes using heavy artillery from Iraq to Vietnam. There is a pattern of indifference towards civilian casualties in foreign wars in the U.S.; they're regarded only as collateral damage. Why do innocent people have to die? One would think that with the advances in military technology and the billions of dollars spent on weaponry in the U.S. every year that these types of atrocities could be avoided. Maybe they can be. The U.S. military commanders are either apathetic or incompetent. Whatever the case may be, we need to change our policy on air strikes and realize the devastation that can occur as a result. A more conservative employment of bombers and a zero tolerance for civilian death would be a good start. The United States should be setting the standard for humanitarian principles on the battlefield, not disregarding them. Americans would not tolerate their fellow citizens being blown up, nor should they tolerate this treatment of Afghanis or any other civilian population.