The terrorists struck to maximize civilian casualties, both when they blew up those truck bombs outside our embassies and when they struck the WTC.

On the other hand, we strike in a way to minimize civilian casualties. If we wanted to, we could send over several B-52s and B-1s at a time and carpet bomb neighborhoods. A single B-52H can carry over 50,000 pounds of ordinance and a B-1B can carry about the same. That's a lot of 500 pound bombs. If we really wanted to kill a lot of civilians, we could load each B-52 with up to 51 cluster bombs like the CBU-58, each containing 650 grenade-like submunitions. A single B-1B can carry up to 84 Mk-84 500 pound bombs or 30 cluster bombs. A single strike like that could easily kill more Afghan civilians than we lost in the WTC using nothing more than conventional explosives.

However, we don't do anything remotely resembling carpet bombing of civilian centers. Why not? The answer is surprisingly simple - because we're not targeting civilians.