AP IMPACT: study suggests drones kill far fewer civilians than many Pakistanis believe

[truedelphi]

64. What? What? What?

To succeed in any military venture, an army must have the hearts and mind sof the civilian population. Do you not understand that?

"Kill ratios" as you so blithely put it can be extremely high and yet indeed be accepted by a civilian population that is being starved to death, killed and tortured by the enemy occupying it.

I don't know your age, but I was young enough that I heard first hand stories of what happened in Europe under the Third Reich's armies. My parents had friends who fled Paris when Hitler's forces took over France.

My dad spend time in Belgium and Holland with the civilians there after the Allies won and drove the Germans out. And you know what? The Dutch were falling down in the streets, dying of malnutrition from the period of October 1944 to the time the Allies took over. And they were also being rounded up. When I visited Europe in 1979, I was befriended by an older man whose brother had been killed during such a roundup. The brother had stayed home from school ill with malnutrition or the flu. The Germans were going house to house and they took every single adult or near adult male over to the local park and shot them.

I heard in 1979 story after story of how a Dutch person would be walking along the street, and the people around them would fall over and collapse, as there was little food allowed for the Dutch - the Germans were taking it all. (The cost of a single loaf of bread was over $ 150 dollars.)

The Taliban did not starve the people in Afghanistan. Even women in Afghanistan are now saying things were better there under the Taliban. Sure, they say, "we have to give up our civil rights as women, but we can walk around our town and shop without worrying that we might be blown away." (TV show on PBS, "POV" or else the one that comes on right after it, had a couple of episodes relating to this.)

No woman want to wear a burqha but they would rather wear burqhas than be killed or wounded - or live in fear of such, for the next ten decades.