Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai is criticizing NATO troops for causing civilian deaths. Civilian deaths are a tragedy in war, but hardly a new phenomenon. Do we stop the fighting when cowardly Al Qaida/Taliban thugs hide behind innocent people? It's a horrible dilemma. If we hold back, they win, and retain control of these unfortunate people's lives. If we fight on, we can win their freedom - though the Taliban put them at risk of death.
Victor Davis Hansen has an insightful essay on the subject, reflecting on examples from history.
"Nevertheless, in those combat operations, the marines and army not only proved that to meet them in battle was a near death sentence, but also killed thousands of low-level terrorists and hundreds of top-ranking operatives who otherwise would have continued to harm Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. Is Iraq relatively quiet today because many who made it so violent are no longer around?
Contemporary conventional wisdom tries to persuade us that there is no such thing as a finite number of the enemy. Instead, killing them supposedly only incites others to step up from the shadows to take their places. Violence begets violence. It is counterproductive, and creates an endless succession of the enemy. Or so we are told.
We may wish that were true. But military history suggests it is not quite accurate. In fact, there was a finite number of SS diehards and kamikaze suicide bombers even in fanatical Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. When they were attrited, not only were their acts of terror curtailed, but it turned out that far fewer than expected wanted to follow the dead to martyrdom."
"In any case, the president — immune from criticism from the hard Left, which is angrier about conservative presidents waterboarding known terrorists than liberal ones executing suspected ones — has concluded that one way to win in Afghanistan is to kill as many terrorists and insurgents as possible. And while the global public will praise his kinder, gentler outreach, privately he evidently thinks that we will be safer the more the U.S. marines shoot Taliban terrorists and the more Hellfire missiles blow up al-Qaeda planners."
Go ahead and read it; you know you want to.
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