One of the most critical as well as complicated issues in the current anti-insurgency struggle in the country has been the issue of civilian casualties during Afghan or NATO military operations. Afghan government frequently has complained about operations which left misfortunate dead and injuries for innocent people. President Karzai himself on numerous ocassions alarmed foreign allies about counterproductive effect of military struggle in which civilians lose their lives.

Such pressures made top foreign allies, sometimes, to formally apologize but generally they avoided to do. Many domestic analysts maintain that the continuance of such misguided operations is the main recruitment bank of Taliban-led militants. They are potentially dangerous to alienate civilians and spark insurgency further in the country.

However, there is no available data to approve or disapprove the allegation or at least allow us to draw a graph and compare the civilians casualties and its relation with spiraling insurgency, but what can be understood from a mere theoretical analysis, indubitably, civilians casualties prove costly both in the political and military spheres. If civilians who lost their family members and the culprits were to walk out and justice was not tried, they would, if not join militants, help them to hide or provide information about whereabouts of foreign militaries.

Such sympathy can be more dangerous rather than joining militants directly. Because here numbers of people under coverage of what we call as a family, like the rest of countries with tribal culture, is quite large, in comparison to what we define as family in modern time. Militants are exploiting from such circumstances. Many of them just hide among civilians and people provide safety, when they come under real danger from Afghan and foreign military operations. Any nobody can at all differentiate them without accurate information, which is hard to arrange for each and every one who holds arm against government.

With expressing condolence to all those families who lost their family members in such a misguided operation, it should be noticed that why a collective action is not taken against militants who are the root cause of every misery here.

We Afghan people need, more than any time in the history, to tolerate foreign presence and give up our traditional anti-foreign sentiments in order to strengthen our political establishment. Keeping sympathy with insurgency and bursting in anger against foreign miss-shot cannot end our miseries. We, as civilians, have to act more responsibly and understand the vital period under which we leave in order to avoid recurrence of circular historical violence and bloodshed.