Just to make it clear, I fully supported the new strategy in Iraq promoted by Petraeus (and others earlier). Integrating our forces into the society worked. Still, "hearts and minds" is not the same thing as "let the bad guys kill us at will while they hide behind women and children."

Nobody, including me, wants to carpet bomb cities just because they have enemy combatants or supplies in them, which is how we fought all our wars up until now (see also: "why is this war taking so much longer than WWII?") This is not a valid approach for wars fought not by states but by hostile groups that have wormed their way into the states.

On the other hand, setting a standard of "zero civilian casualties" against an enemy that has no problem whatsoever using civilians as shields is a recipe for suicide.

The real, complex answer is in between, and I believe our current strategy is a fairly good one. The Iraq strategy will not plug one-for-one into Afghanistan (for many reasons I don't want to go into here), but something workable should be possible.