I am aware of all of this. This is part of why careful consideration must be made in making these kinds of strikes, whether we use drones, conventional aircraft, or even specops teams, aside from, you know, giving a shit about the innocents themselves. But first and foremost is to make sure the person(s) being targeted are even a threat that needs to be eliminated to begin with. I cannot stress enough the fact that in this case, the person being targeted was an aid worker who had worked with the US and had nothing to do with any of the bombings this strike was in retaliation for. So all those people died for nothing.
Then until we know WHY they were targeted, we cant assume we knew who he was at the time of us attacking him.
Well you certainly don't "win" by becoming just like them.
No, but you don't win by handicapping yourself. What conflict has the west won that involved us handicapping ourselves?
Ah yes, the good ol' days when the enemy actually wore uniforms and bombings were so imprecise that the British in particular liked to just bomb entire cities since they couldn't even see what the fuck they were dropping on anyway. It's worth noting that people had problems with that even back then, and even though the Germans were doing the exact same thing to them. In any case, those days are long over. The "War on Terror" is not and never has been comparable to WWII.
Do you know what the ROE is for this kinda conflict? Being shot at. THem having a gun is not good enough. So when you have Hundresd of people hiding out in a village, and instead of teaching the people what happens when they work with the enemy, you put your troops lives at greater risk by having them stand around talking to people leaving themselves open to ambush. Huh, I wonder why so many troops that come back don't trust a while group of people....
So why did we stick around after killing Osama? To get rid of the Taliban?
That was never going to happen anymore than being able to wipe out the Viet Cong. Incidentally, how many innocents died when Osama got taken out?
Because we never should have.
and yes you can deal with the Vietcong and the Taliban. You just have to be willing to do much worse. We lost vietnam because we were not allowed to hold ground. had we been able to take and hold ground, and move all the way up to the Chinese border, we would have been a LOT better off.
We also were kicking both of their asses in every conflict., WHat hurts us is when we try to win hearts and minds, only to get gunned down, blown up and the like because the group we are fighting has people in every village. Every city. What can you do if you don't punish them. "Oh you were harboring a Taliban member? Well that's fine. We will just mark you down as being a collaborator with them and that is it." Next thing you know they are doing it again and again...
A guy doesn't need to know the solution to be able to recognize that there's a problem, and that you shouldn't keep stupidly making the same mistake over and over again, and making excuses for it to boot.
The only problem is people getting overly emotional when someone they will never know in some hell hole of a country dies.
That is why we will never win a war the media is against. This is why we will never win a war if propaganda is at an all time high against the US itself by entities within.
Because something that has no effect on you. When Children that would most likely have been used to at best become Taliban fighters or farmers or what ever their father was. because That is all there is left there.
The enemy is willing to do what ever it takes to win. We should be as well. Guess what, Wanna know how South korea managed to not have a VC of their own rising up? They killed anyone who worked with the Norslies, and any and all communist uprisings were met with violent police force. Wanna know how we made sure Japan wouldn't do that to us? We fucking nuked them.
Playing nice allows the enemy to grow within their ranks, because they know we wont take the risk needed to kill the enemy. Of they know we aren't afraid to hurt women or children to kill them, we can make it so they stop caring if a child r Woman is around and more likely to be alone.....Almost like how they found Osama...
