I can't agree with that assumption. I haven't been in a situation such as our soldiers and Marines are facing in Afghanistan, and perhaps you have. If so, then I will defer to your your superior knowledge.
However, based on first hand conversations with family members and many close friends and co-workers who served in Vietnam, and at least one in the first Gulf war, I don't believe that more than a very, very tiny minority of our people are deliberately killing innocent Afghan civilians. If some are, then those few deserve to be punished severely, deliberate murder is murder under any circumstance.
OTOH, we haven't fought a "conventional" enemy in a "conventional" war since Korea in 1953. Ask any vet who served in Vietnam or Iraq, he or she will tell you that it's practically impossible to positively identify the enemy when he looks the same, dresses the same, and acts the same as the civilian population. The innocent-appearing farmer plowing his field by day may well be an armed and deadly fighter by night. How is a 19 year old soldier or Marine raised in a Chicago slum or in Kornfield Korners supposed to identify which Afghan civilian among the hundreds of other innocent-appearing Afghans he sees every day is in reality an enemy who will try to kill him and his buddies that very night?
In fact, our enemy guerrilla combatants count heavily on the inability of a foreign enemy to identify who is and who isn't the enemy. That tactic is an integral component of every guerrilla strategy, and it has worked extremely well against our forces from Vietnam to Iraq and now Afghanistan. What surprises me is that more Afghan civilians are not being killed because of mistaken identity, and in fact there probably are more that no one will ever know of except the men who were there when the killing occurred.
And don't forget, the US and our allies killed almost 1,100,000 German, Italian, and Japanese civilians in WWII, along with many thousands of civilians in German and Japanese-occupied nations that were not our enemies. Most of those casualties were not deliberately inflicted, but some were. General Lemay ordered the firebombing of all major Japanese cities, and Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both orders were given in order to convince the suicidal Japanese military and naval high commands that the war was irretrievably lost, and that Japan would virtually cease to exist as a nation unless they surrendered. Also, 60,000 German civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden in the last few days of WWII in the European theater, and a great many WWII historians now contend that those non-combatants were deliberately killed in order to persuade the German government to surrender unconditionally or else suffer more of those horrific firebombings.
I'm not arguing that the deliberate killing of civilians is morally justifiable. I believe that it is morally impermissible in all situations except the very, very few instances in which the deaths of a large number of a nation's civilians can be averted by killing a much smaller number of an enemy nation's civilians, and even then I'm not sure that I could sanction that tactic. What I am saying is that such killing has been a reality in every war, and it will always be so as long as man goes to war with his fellow man.
>OTOH, we haven’t fought a “conventional” enemy in a “conventional” war since Korea in 1953. Ask any vet who served in Vietnam or Iraq, he or she will tell you that it’s practically impossible to positively identify the enemy when he looks the same, dresses the same, and acts the same as the civilian population.
This is why the politicians had to create the terms “enemy combatant” & “enemy non-combatant.” According to the Hague Conventions {the Hague is the one people usually cite as the Geneva convention regarding *lawful combatants* and POWs} such non-uniformed militaristic action makes them unlawful combatants and therefore NOT SUBJECT TO ANY PROTECTION FROM THE HAGUE.
IOW, it could very well be lawful for US troops to execute, “gangland style,” captured taliban/al’queda operatives w/o any trial.
Such a policy would garner much opposition from Americans who would call it murder, but it might not be.