Another Jenin?

This was an “oh, crap” moment – when the news came yesterday on that a bomb and/or fire from a gunship had killed 40 to 100 civilians at a wedding, no less, in Afghanistan. Today’s newspaper story gives some cause for pause, insofar as the casualties were reported by “...area residents [who] said about 40 members of a wedding party were killed and 100 others were wounded...” According to the article, this incident occurred in “the home region of former Taliban leader Mohammad Omar.”

This is sad and we all wished it would not have happened. But we must not forget why those big bad US forces are there in the first place – to smoke out residual Taliban and al qaeda snakes still in this region of Afghanistan.

Here’s what we do: render aid to the injured; wait until our own people can verify what went down; issue an appropriate apology; keep on smoking out the baddies. What the Afghanis will do is anyone's guess, but my guess is that the usual hate America crowd, including our "allies" in Europe and "moderate" regimes in the Arab world, will inflate the casualty estimates until it will look as though the US perpetrated a "genocide" on the Afghan people -- i.e. another pile of lies like the Jenin non-story.

Side note on Afghan weddings: it is apparently common practice at Afghan and certain Arab weddings to fire weapons into the air as a “celebration.” This is almost sufficient for a Darwin award, wherein a stupid action kills the perpetrator so that he might no longer perpetuate his line of stupid people. It’s stupid to fire one’s weapon into the air in a crowd because – drum roll, please – the bullet returns to earth at terminal velocity.

A small metal object traveling at 200 mph can make a nasty dent in an adult skull and could be fatal. It would be a much better bet to kill a child, whose skulls haven’t fully fused on top.

Take cover, and don’t look up during an Afghan wedding, dudes.