The number of Afghan civilians killed in U.S. and NATO airstrikes dropped by nearly half last year to 126, the U.N. said Tuesday. The overall civilian death toll in 2012 also declined some 12 percent to 2,754, compared with 3,131 the previous year, according to an annual report by the United Nations Mission to Afghanistan that tracks statistics in the 11-year-old war. The top U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, Jan Kubis, welcomed the decline in casualties but was quoted as saying by the Associated Press that the human cost of the conflict remains unacceptable.
