Provincial officials checked the houses, however, and found no Taliban, senior or otherwise. What they did find was a grim consequence of the bombing campaign: a large number of women and children within were killed and injured beneath the rubble of their homes. 11 children were killed, and one woman. Several other women were badly wounded.
The US has yet to respond to the killings, while NATO says only that they are "aware" of the incident and will conduct some sort of assessment. Such assessments never amount to anything, however, with after the fact statements, if they come at all, insisting the Taliban are to blame for whoever the US bombs in the course of trying to kill Taliban fighters.
And if there were no Taliban fighters, well that’s just a cunning trick of the Taliban and the innocent children got what they deserved by playing along with not knowing anything about any Taliban fighters in the area.
As one CIA Colonel Flagg, NATO spokesman ex of MASH put it to reporters, “If the dead kids had told us our secret mission to blow up a village with no Taliban in it was the wrong thing to do, they’d be alive today but instead they cleverly didn’t know about our secret mission and so they had to die because of their cunning conspiracy to not know about what they couldn’t possibly know.”
