REID STOTT has some interesting perspective on Afghan civilian casualties. The proper standard for comparison, he suggests, isn’t just how many civilians were accidentally killed by Americans, but how many more would have been deliberately killed by the Taliban had there been no intervention:

Whatever the number killed accidentally by the US, each death is a tragedy. That cannot be denied. But it also can’t be denied that the Taliban went on a four year killing spree, with estimates of up to 500,000 killed during that time. Even if we were to accept only one fifth of that number as “legitimate,” that would mean the Taliban deliberately killed more civilians each and every month than it is estimated the US killed by accident in the entire war.

And that monthly Taliban-generated death toll stopped cold, last November. Eight months where there was no four figure death toll. But you don’t hear about those numbers. There will never be a story about the 12,000 Afghans (my guesstimate, 8 months x 1500 per month) still alive today that would be dead at the hands of the Taliban, if not for US military action.

I wonder why we won’t be hearing about that?

UPDATE: Well, The Boss has it right: “‘I think the invasion in Afghanistan was handled very, very smoothly,’ he says.”