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Notes -
From acoup:
The difference between dragging a civilian out of their house and shooting them in the head and dropping a bomb on the from the air is that for the former, there is no ambiguity of intent. Luckily for us, Sir Harris has left no doubt about his intent. WP estimates peak around 350k dead Germans from the air raids, while the total number of civilian deaths in GWBs Afghan adventure is given as 46k.
Both of these numbers include casualties which were genuinely unintended. Some civilians will always die in war. But in my world model, the median Afghan civilian death was unintended while the median German air raid death was intended.
(Lest there be any confusion about me whining about dead Germans, let me also state that the conduct of the Western Allies in WW2 was the least war-criminal of all the parties involved.)
That being said, I agree that any intentional killing of civilians is terrible. Ideally, it should happen very rarely and the perpetrators should be punished similarly to civilian murderers. For the US troops in Afghanistan, I do not think that there existed a directive to kill as many civilians as possible, but GWB was obviously not very concerned with human rights. So I think that there was a widespread culture of commanders turning a blind eye to any human rights violations their unit might commit.
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