tell a friend
War is dirty business, and the battlefield does not necessarily favor the most virtuous or well behaved party. Humanitarian activists argue that protecting civilians caught in today's conflicts is not only the right thing to do, but ultimately a winning strategy. But doesn't that sound a bit too convenient? Manufacturing a win-win situation - in this case by downplaying the strategic disadvantage or the added risks to US soldiers when they are held to the highest standards - can falsely simplify a real ethical dilemma, and worse, trivialize what it means to take moral action. Doing the right thing is rarely without cost, and we shouldn't have to sell it that way to the American people.
Skeptical as I am, I have been genuinely surprised to see through this project that reducing civilians casualties from airstrikes has proven to be actually, truly, beneficial for winning the greater war. Repeatedly, U.S. war planners have argued that compromising our principles was necessary for victory, only to find out the bombing mission didn't work, and in many cases completely back-fired.
In Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, Robert Pape meticulously looked at every bombing campaign from WW2 to Bosnia and found that bombing missions aimed at civilian targets almost always failed to provide the coercive effect that strategists predicted. Only attacks on military targets, those that altered the battle chessboard, could cause the enemy to change course or submit. In other words, our most brutal acts of violence, from the firebombing in Japan to carpet-bombing in Vietnam, not only went against our moral principles, but were in vain.
Thankfully, these days the U.S. military obeys a pretty strict taboo against targeting civilians directly. Humanitarians and military strategists seem to agree that recent successes in Iraq were driven largely by shifting the focus from hunting insurgents to protecting civilians. The previously favored approach of keeping a distance and striking hard (pretty much the definition of an airstrike) was replaced with one of working closely with Iraqi people to develop arrangements of shared responsibility, such as a civilian police force, that would build trust between them and U.S. forces as well as limiting the influence of insurgents. In Afghanistan, after a series of efforts to reduce civilian casualties caused by airstrikes, military planners now are about to implement the same broad shift towards protecting non-combatants - not for moral reasons, but because it is the only path they see to victory.
In fact, you can look at the history of bombing and make a case that our emphasis on reduced civilian casualties was less about precision-bombing technology or moral enlightenment, and instead the result of a grizzly process of trial and error. Pressure to change tactics has come from generals on the ground, not just activists, who have seen through their own experiences that bombing civilians is counter productive. In the short term, civilian casualties cost us the trust of people across the spectrum of society, from international humanitarians to Afghani village elders who would otherwise help us weed out combatants. In the long term, moral credibility has shown to be an important ingredient when winning the ideological fight against terrorism.
For many, this may be a painfully obvious realization, but let's not get carried away in thinking good deeds have always been rewarded in the battlefield. Perhaps one of the few positive things to come out of the terrorist threat and resulting wars is this unforeseen marriage between strategic necessity and moral virtue. For once, those crying for decency and those chanting for victory are starting to sing the same tune.