On
17 February, President Hamid Karzai issued a widely-reported decree banning
Afghan security forces from requesting coalition air-strikes on ‘Afghan homes
or villages’. This followed the reported
deaths of 10 civilians in an airstrike a week earlier on a village in eastern
Afghanistan. It is also in the wake of
an ISAF tactical directive of June last year, which forbade international
forces from using airstrikes against insurgents ‘within civilian
dwellings’. The Karzai statement was
well-received in Afghanistan and in the western media and, particularly (one
suspects), by the Taliban and their supporters.
But is it really as simple as this?
