President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai met at the White House Wednesday. Karzai is on his first trip to Washington since President Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan by ordering the deployment of 30,000 more troops. During a press conference, President Obama addressed the rising number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

President Obama: “When there is a civilian casualty, that is not just a political problem for me. I am ultimately accountable, just as General McChrystal is accountable, for somebody who is not on the battlefield who got killed. And that is something that I have to carry with me and that anybody who’s involved in a military operation has to carry with them. And so we do not take that lightly. We have an interest in reducing civilian casualties not because it’s a problem for President Karzai; we have an interest in reducing civilian casualties because I don’t want civilians killed.”

President Obama did not detail how he or Gen. McChrystal are held accountable when US forces kill Afghan civilians. The number of civilians killed by US forces have spiked in recent years. In February, US and Afghan gunmen killed two pregnant mothers, a teenage girl and two local officials in a botched nighttime raid. US forces then tried to cover up the killings by claiming that the three women had been discovered bound and gagged, apparently killed execution style. Earlier this week, the New York Times revealed that the number of Afghan civilians shot by US and NATO convoys at military checkpoints has recently jumped. At least twenty-eight Afghans have been killed and forty-three wounded in convoy and checkpoint shootings this year.