So Much For “Massive Civilian Casualties”

The Telegraph has an article on how impressed Kabul inhabitants are with the precision of the US bombing.

So accurate were the hits on the Antonov transport planes that only the aircrafts’ tails, wings and some of the cockpits were left. Their fuselages had disappeared. The official supervising the runway repair, Farid Ahmad, was impressed by the Americans’ work. He said it certainly outclassed the efforts of the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who destroyed much of the city and the airport 10 years ago.

“I have been through the Russians,” he said. “I have seen Hekmatyar in action and the Northern Alliance. This is just incredible. The Americans appear to have been 98 per cent accurate.

“Hekmatyar tried for six years to destroy the TV signal on Television Mountain. The Americans managed it straight away.”

It’s a little surreal reading some of the descriptions by people as though they’re scoring a game, but to the degree that judges of such things exist, given what they’ve been through in the past quarter century between the Soviets and the various civil wars, the residents of Kabul and Afghanistan at large have to be the best-qualified people on the planet to issue points.