Complementary and Not Conflicting: Part Two

General Petraeus is not abandoning our restrictive rule of engagement in Afghanistan. He is making sure that they are not misinterpreted to mean that we must avoid contact with the enemy or let them escape. Kill them all, he says, but we can't rely on Allah to sort them out--we have to be careful who we kill.

The actual directive is here.

As I've long held, we have to kill the enemy, but it is counter-productive to forget that the population is the objective and not body counts. Killing the enemy must support driving the population to our side and not lead to more people joining the enemy. It is not that fighting jihadis just makes more jihadis, but fighting ineffectively makes more jihadis. Killing too many innocents while we kill actual enemies is fighting ineffectively.

And fighting ineffectively by killing innocents in the way of our efforts to kill enemies will get more of our guys killed by provoking more attacks on our troops.

It is not and never has been a choice between more firepower to save the lives of our troops on the one hand and risking our troops' lives by restricting firepower use. Being careful while we hunt the enemy is the reality of Afghanistan. We can whine that the Iraqis had more tolerance for civilian losses caused by our troops (still low, by historical standards) during the course of our operations to kill enemy forces, as the article notes, but that's the way it is in Afghanistan. They are more sensitive and we have to bow to that reality if we want to win this war.

I want to win this war. I thought our left wanted to win this "good war," too. But their rules of disengagement are pretty strict, too. They'll protest the only war they have.