Having spent a distressing proportion of the years since 9/11 looking down from my aircraft onto western troops engaged in a variety of ‘nation building’ projects, and occasionally unleashing a bit of ‘deconstruction’ to try to get them out of trouble, I have come to the following views:
1) Military forces whose top two priorities are elimination of own losses and avoidance of civilian casualties are so compromised in their ability to achieve goals that their presence probably does more harm than good;
2) Troops with ‘skin in the game’ beyond getting home (usually locals) are orders of magnitude more effective than their equipment and training would suggest. They are fighting for their own futures and families, they have a time horizon beyond their six-month tour, and therefore they have a different basis on which to judge risk and ethics.
3) Providing just enough outside assistance to keep the ‘good guys’ in the battle, but not enough to help them win the war, starts out looking like a measured and ethical choice but eventually ends up with the outsider sharing moral responsibility with the ‘bad guys’ for all of the additional suffering inflicted on innocent civilians by perpetual conflict.
There is very often no ‘correct’ answer to an ethical problem, and the best (or least worst) answer is different for people of different cultural heritage. And I would observe that the law of armed conflict has an ethical foundation which is foreign to a large proportion of the world’s population. Anyone who sees these things in black and white needs to learn a bit of grey-shade perception.