This morning, the BBC reports on the progress of the Nato offensive against the Taliban insurgents. One never stops being surprised at the straight-faced reporting of civilian deaths as mere “accidents”. If you got “accidentally” mugged every time you left your home for an entire month, you would start looking into the “accidental” nature of the phenomenon, just a thought.

As to the reporting itself, take the following:

Unrelated to the Marjah offensive, an airstrike in neighbouring Kandahar province killed five civilians who were mistakenly believed to have been planting roadside bombs.

The deaths come after two US missiles struck a house on the outskirts of Marjah on Sunday, killing 12 people, half of them children [our emphasis]

The question of course is, how can you mistake someone not planting a roadside bomb for someone who is? and even if you DID find people on the ground planting bombs, surely there is a way of stopping them without bombing them to smithereens? To misquote the late great Bill Hicks: “You’re in a plane, they’re on foot, I think I can see a way out of this”