http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090905/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan

I'm sure you know the story. The bad guys hijack our stuff, we catch them at it and blow them away. In the process, a bunch of innocent civilians get killed.

Well, I'm sorry, but its in the nature of war that sometimes innocents die, and in this case, I just don't see any way around it. We had no way of knowing there were innocents clustered around those trucks, and even if we did, we had every right to attack them. They were our trucks, and we knew the enemy was there in force. The innocents knew it was contraband, and even if they had been forced at gunpoint to help unload the trucks by the Taleban, it's not on us. It's on the Taleban.

There is a fundamental moral difference between killing people at random because MAYBE some of them are enemy combatants, and not refraining from attacking a valid target because MAYBE there are civilians (perhaps even hostages) there. Even if we knew for a fact there were non-combatants there, (which we didn't), the decision to attack has to take into account how valuable that target is to the enemy, and how many of their resources are present, and what risk it presents to our own people if we don't attack.

I once spoke to an Italian who bitterly remarked (about an incident in WWII) that "the Americans had every right to bomb that train station, but they didn't have to do it at the height of rush hour when everybody was just trying to get to work". Maybe, but I can think of valid reasons why it might have been necessary to do it at that time. Even so, I don't think this particular incident is quite in the same category.