LFTC - Pakistan Air-Strike Awry: America's Challenge

This Guardian report on a recent air-strike miss in Pakistan illustrates a cruel challenge confronting American military commanders: balancing a desire to kill senior Taliban or al-Qaeda leaders against the risk that innocents will be killed due to faulty intelligence or timing.  American military commanders take numerous precautions to ensure as much as possible that only the bad guys are killed.  But intel can be wrong or, more vexing, it can be right but timing is off.  Thus the air-strike against a funeral procession went awry in Pakistan because the senior leader target left the procession shortly before the strike. there is no easy solution to this, and America is being held to standards far stricter than ever before in the history of warfare.  In my view these are unreasonable.  But that does not blunt the practical reality that the locals will judge harshly any mistakes made.