Quote:
Originally Posted by tater
The US does as much as possible to mitigate civilian deaths, period.
It's not US tactics that cause needless deaths, it's the enemy not following the rules of war, and operating out of uniform in areas mixed with civilians.
If the US wished to cause civilian deaths, there'd be MANY MANY more of them. We could in fact virtually wipe out all the civilians, but we chose not to.
Setting unrealistic expectations—say, zero casualties—helps no one. We continually work to minimize the number. Another way to look at it is to imagine how many we could cause if we wished to kill civilians, then look at how many fewer we actually do. So if the number was 25,000 killed in 10 years, and we could have killed 25 million, then we're killing 1% of the number we could if we wished to.
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Well obviously the US isn't trying to kill
everyone in Afghanistan but that's not the point. The US wasn't trying to kill everyone in the North and South Vietnam's of the time but still ended up killing a significant amount of civilians.
If civilians are being killed, any civilians, for any reason (on purpose, in error or other), then it is equally wrong. Also we're not seeing any reliable numbers from Afghanistan, partly because it is in many respects a third world country. I doubt everyone is even under any kind of actual citizenship - system there, so broken down as a nation it is and has been. How would the outside world know if a whole bunch of civilians were to die there, for whatever reasons? Because of the media presence? I don't think I trust the 'embedded' media that has been there for the last decade.