It is really sad the way that people only see one side of the story of the Afghan war.  We only see things from our side of the pond, and we see the good , but not all of the bad that we do, as a country.  We tend to think of things, in generalities, and lump groups of people who live in a common area, into one pile of terrorists.  There are plenty of people in Afghanistan who are against eh taliban, and we dont see the damage that we are doing by hitting them with drone strikes.  Most casualties in wars are civilians , who had nothing to do with the conflict itself.  There are always conflicting stories about the death tolls.  I believe it is used to de-escalate our fears that , we, as a country, are doing something that could actually turn out to be very harmful instead of helpful