Ground Report

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has gone on record saying that the US forces and the coalition forces in his country stop using air-power because of growing number of civilian casualties and rising resentment among Afghans. Karzai told a television network that he had recently delivered the message privately to President George W Bush. "The Afghan people understand that mistakes are made. But five years on, six years on, definitely, very clearly, they cannot comprehend as to why there is still a need for air power," Karzai explained. Karzai further went on to say that the number of civilians killed in air-strikes has doubled. A telling example of American air-strike against civilians came in a village where nine members of a family got killed when the war-planes were targeting a suspected Taliban leader.