Moshtarak

Last Friday, the IHT carried a piece by an intelligence analyst named Lara Dadkah, complaining about US General Stanley McChrystal’s new directive on the use of air power in Afghanistan. He required that it be used only under “very limited and prescribed conditions”; Dadkah worried that the pendulum had swung too far in favour of avoiding civilian deaths. She called it a “well-intentioned directive” that is based on an immoral lie – “that war can be fair or humane.”