<Some of us find killing innocent civilians unacceptable. Most on this BBS find it just OK. That's tragic.

As Scotty once said, you might want to...rephrase that. NOBODY on this board finds killing innocent civilians "OK." It is something that happens during a war.

Where the arguments on this board come from is the attempt to make morally equivalent the deliberate killing of civilians vs. the accidental killing of civilians. Kind of like someone backing a car over a kid that they didn't see vs. running his car deliberately up onto a sidewalk full of kids. Get it yet?

As of May, between about 1,300 and 3,700 Afghanistan civilians have been killed during the war, depending on who's doing the counting. This is certainly nothing to be proud of, but not unexpected when fighting against non-uniformed opponents in a nation where the civilians routinely carry automatic weapons and shoot into the air for various random reasons, or are set up for an American attack by rival warlords.

And it's about half the number of Afghan civilians that were killed in a single Taliban massacre at Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998. One must also consider what the cost to Afghan civilians would have been of allowing a lunatic regime to continue its rule for many more years.