Originally Posted by
Easy Street
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.
Perhaps I am just guilty of the superiority complex, playing the "must be better" card.
Honestly, I view organisations like Daesh (which have now established themselves in Afghanistan) to be of a lower status than vermin - because even vermin has a place within nature.
They're sub-human and deserve every kinetic action against them - I don't take kindly to armed thugs with primitive mindsets shooting up entire villages, raping women and children after murdering their husbands and fathers right before their eyes, beheading hostages in front of the camera or even burning downed pilots to death.
I justify each strike against them as one more step to saving the innocent, who are victims of their barbaric practises.
However, I don't want our country to go after them without doing everything it can to avoid civilian deaths - because then we are in danger of becoming them, and they will use that to radicalise more people. That just doesn't sit well with me.