Taliban kills innocents, while NATO victims are collateral damage

People who stick their head into the corporate media echo chamber hear nothing but pro-regime propaganda. The VOA, in particular, dishes it out in industrial-strength portions:

US Afghan Commander Calls on Taliban to Save Lives « VOA Breaking News: "The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan is responding to new data on civilian casualties — calling on the Taliban to stop the killing of innocent men, women and children.
General John Allen said Saturday the death toll from insurgent attacks “is much too high and deserves Mullah Omar's direct attention and action.” He also said he expected the Afghan Taliban to “act immediately” if it had any real interest in stopping the killings.
The commander of the International Security Assistance Force issued his statement Saturday, hours after a United Nations report said more than 3,000 civilians died in Afghanistan's conflict last year. The report called the 2011 death toll the worst in the decade-long war.
The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said insurgents were responsible for 77 percent of the Afghan civilian deaths. The number of deaths caused by NATO-led and Afghan government forces dropped by 4 percent."

The UN is but a tool of the US, so any report that they produce is immediately suspect. There's no credibility there, since the UN is on US soil, and on the US payroll. The bureaucrats there know that if they cross the US government, their cushy jobs could evaporate, and they'd be back in the backwaters where they came from.

It would be just delightful if there was a truly impartial international organization that could be trusted to see things in a balanced way. The Taliban are not sweethearts, but they, after all, are Afghans, and the US military is an unwelcome guest in that miserable land.

If the UN was worth the paper its charter was written on, the US wouldn't be in Afghanistan to begin with, and George "Dubya" Bush would be on trial for crimes against humanity. That neither of these is the case demonstrates the effectiveness and value of the UN and the entire "international community" which it purports to represent.