I mean, the reason for so many civilians deaths is because when facing an enemy that is not a traditional force, that leads to what we faced.
Ni excuse, just explaining why it would happen
I'm not just talking about
genuine collateral damage, which I agree is pretty much inevitable in any war and especially one where you're fighting insurgents who blend into the civilian population as part of their asymmetrical strategy. The examples I brought up were either cases where incompetence was so severe as to be indistinguishable from malice
and there was no benefit in the form of even just a few dead terrorists (the 2015 Doctors Without Borders hospital airstrike or Biden massacring an aid worker & his family), or
actual malice carried out against people who were demonstrably not terrorists for no reason beyond a sadistic thrill (the Mahmudiyah rape & murders in Iraq or the Kill Team's murders in A-stan).
To my knowledge, the responsible parties in the latter cases were identified and prosecuted, which is good. Of course it is a good thing when soldiers are punished for going My Lai on the local population, helps limit the fallout from the acts themselves. It may have only limited the fallout, not eliminated it - there was an uptick of insurgent attacks following the Mahmudiyah rape & family massacre case, for example, and the insurgents made themselves out to be heroes to a local populace that hadn't been 100% on their side before those barbarians in uniform did what they did - but it's the right thing to do nonetheless. In both of the former cases however, no punishments were issued to my knowledge, and the Biden administration not only stated that they wouldn't punish anyone for the drone strike in Kabul but tried to pretend they only killed terrorists for a couple of months.
That's not why they do it.
When you kill somebody's kids, you make an implacable enemy of them. If terrorist can get you to stop by putting kids in the line of fire, that's good. But, if they're willing to die to make more enemies, there's little better than making your enemy a horrible monster in the process.
Oh course, there's ways to deal with it. But, our armed forces are too hard for one side, and too soft for the other.
We tried to be tougher.
Then the media caught wind
Being 'tough' is part of it and necessary to any good counterinsurgency strategy for obvious reasons, but having to balance it with the 'hearts and minds' aspect comes with the territory of being a modern liberal democracy. Modern Western values themselves preclude going full Roman or Mongol on hostile populations and I cannot realistically fault normies (who are not the same as the terminally leftist, far-left protesting activist crowd, the latter of whom tend to actually be fine with war crimes when it's Their Guy™ doing the crimes) for not accepting hypocrisy or the application of double standards on the part of their military. We can see what a
really, maximally brutal 'gloves-off' approach to subjugating foreign lands looks like right now with the Russians in Ukraine, and I don't consider it unreasonable for Westerners to demand their own militaries not stoop to that level if they're going to have the nerve to criticize the Russians' conduct.
In any case I don't think it's about the level of force being applied, it's about how smartly it's being used. The US dropped twice as much ordnance on Vietnam than it did on the Axis in WW2, and obviously neither that nor engaging in face-to-face atrocities like My Lai helped in the end (quite the contrary even!). A twenty-year campaign in which technology beyond the Taliban's wildest dreams was routinely deployed, ranging from a constant campaign of drone strikes to Trump dropping the MOAB, clearly did not help in Afghanistan either. In the first case those bombs were falling on the wrong country for the most part (4 out of the 5 million tons of bombs the US dropped were on
South Vietnam) because outside politics prevented a US invasion of North Vietnam to excise the problem at its root; in the latter case no amount of ordnance would've made up for the fact that the US was working with an even more ridiculously corrupt and degenerate gang of cowardly bullies and thugs than the South Vietnamese leadership post-Diem, who American soldiers openly hated having to cover for when they went around raping boys or growing opium. I for one find it impossible to look at these cases and not come to the conclusion that the US should've fought smarter, not harder, rather than that they lost because they weren't 'tough'
enough.
I will add that looking back at early-GWOT media provides a good deal of what TVTropes would call 'values dissonance' or perhaps 'deader than disco'. The book & later series
Generation Kill for example highlights some US soldiers (from the lower ranks mind, these are front-line corporals & sergeants I'm talking about, not officers or POGs) with an incredibly bloodthirsty attitude. Their bizarre rants and cavalier-at-best, obsessive-at-worst attitude toward killing came across as funny or even endearing back in the day (still does now to an extent, in fact!) but become markedly less so almost 20 years out, when we not only know that these men will ultimately fail and their futile work's for nothing but also see very well for ourselves the logical conclusion of such a mindset. The Mahmudiyah case in Iraq I mentioned above, where the soldiers involved admitted they raped this Iraqi teenage girl and killed her & her family purely because they felt like killing people that day (and one of the ringleaders also admitted he joined the Army because he wanted to kill people), or the 2010 Kill Team in Afghanistan where again, soldiers murdered random civilians and took their body parts as trophies for no readily apparent reason - that's what you'll end up with (in hindsight probably inevitably) when you hire bloodthirsty maniacs and then require them to fight a 21st century counterinsurgency, when their mindset is more befitting of a 17th century mercenary fighting in the Thirty Years' War.
If American morale and recruitment rates recover, you'd probably be better off turning such types away at the recruitment office. Tough patriotic guys are one thing and certainly desirable, a certain level of willingness to fight & kill is obviously inherent to the military's purpose so that's something to select for as well, but what
isn't desirable are these sorts of blood-crazed psychopaths who will disgrace the uniform with their deeds; represent a liability to whatever strategy you might have in mind that isn't a Mongol-esque 'rape and kill and pillage everything in sight'; and pose a danger to even their own side. Not just directly by way of bullying/fragging fellow soldiers who disapprove of their war crimes, but indirectly too, fr'ex in response to the Mahmudiyah war crimes the local terrorist outfit kidnapped & killed some other men from their brigade and publicized the deed as a direct response to the original American atrocity.
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