Q. They bomb us, we bomb them. They kill children, now we kill children. So what is the difference between them and us?
A. Quite a lot. First, we do know that almost 6,000 innocent were murdered, but we do not know how many Afghani citizens have been killed � either due to misplaced American bombs or to Taliban shells falling back among their citizens or to Taliban executions and terrorism against their own people. We do know that it is the deliberate policy of the Taliban to put their combatants among mosques, hospitals, and schools to ensure their survival, out of the expectation that Americans, unlike themselves, would not deliberately inflict collateral damage. If our enemies know that difference, why do not some of our own citizens, such as yourself?
For the sake of argument, let us assume that more than 100 noncombatant Afghanis have so far been killed. The dead, of course, are the dead, and their loss is tragic. But there is a difference, a moral difference, between deliberately targeting civilians in peace and deliberating attempting to avoid them in war � especially at the risk of endangering the lives of our own pilots. And just wars have never been waged with 100 percent moral perfection, but rather � as against Germany or Japan, for example � with the full knowledge that innocents die in order that the mass murder of their governments be stopped, and on the expectation that their own lives, and those of their children, will not in the future be sacrificed as victims of or abettors to their own government's evil.