Well, we now know what happened in Farah province. On Friday evening, the Pentagon released an unclassified version of its executive summary about the May 4 incident.  The report is damning, in that spells out how the military violated its own rules of engagement and that those violations may have led to as many as 86 civilians killed. But today, there were some signs that the Farah incident is also leading to change. We heard out of Kabul today that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander there, has ordered his forces to apply more stringent rules to their use of air power when chasing Taliban forces hiding amongst Afghan civilians.

He called on U.S. forces to limit its use of air power to instances when U.S. troops could be overrun in an effort to limit civilian casualties. According to this report, McChrystal told his forces, “When we shoot into a compound,  that should only be for the protection of our forces. …I want everyone to understand that.”

The change is the military’s acknowledgment that killing civilians ultimately may lead ot more fighters, not less, no matter how many Taliban are killed in an airstrike. But using less air power could come at a cost. The United States has come to depend on air power, in part, because it doesn’t have enough ground forces. Moving forward, I wonder if a more stringent use of air power mean that the commander will eventually have to ask for more ground troops.