Whoops, our bad: Marauding U.S. military leaves messy trail of cover-ups and casualties

War is hell. War is fog. The Pentagon seems committed to proving these axioms in Afghanistan. On July 1, the U.S. military attacked a compound in the village of Kakrak, At least 54 people were killed and 120 wounded. They were civilians; many were women and children attending a wedding celebration. Twenty-five members of the bridegroom's family were destroyed.
The event was horrible, the latest in a string of U.S. military mishaps that have caused the deaths of Afghan civilians—the total estimate of those killed ranging from hundreds to several thousand. It is probably sadly true that major military action is not possible without what's euphemistically known as "collateral damage"—especially when that action consists of air attacks and bombing raids. But throughout the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has been loath to acknowledge errors and to deal with the supposedly unavoidable and supposedly unintentional consequences of its operations. The Defense Department refused to concede that in December it had wrongly hit a convoy of tribal elders on their way to the inauguration of interim president Hamid Karzai. In January, U.S. Special Forces raided two compounds and killed over a dozen troops loyal to Karzai's government and captured and held almost two dozen more (some of whom claimed they were abused). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld eventually conceded the U.S. troops had killed and grabbed the wrong people, but he refused to characterize the U.S. actions as a mistake. No one apparently was disciplined.