Sitting in the Union one afternoon last week, I overheard a group of students (of the professional protester ilk) talking about the war. I found myself agreeing with the points they made about the war’s toll at home: the unnecessarily bloated defense budget, American jingoism at the Olympics, Tom Ridge’s incessant warnings of an “imminent” terrorist threat, male airport security guards searching female passengers a bit too thoroughly, etc.

But then they started to talk about Afghanistan. One decried — as many others have — the “collateral damage” of the U.S. bombing campaign, remarking that we have now killed more innocents than Osama bin Laden. According to the young man, this placed the United States on the same moral level as the Saudi terrorist.

Memorial Union is not the only place such an argument has been made. The idea that the United States, in killing — inadvertently or otherwise — Afghan civilians, has “become the evil we deplore” is nearly sacrosanct in lefty bastions like The Nation and The Progressive. It’s also completely ridiculous.

The most recent figures put Sept. 11’s death toll at around 3,000. Marc Herold, an economics professor at the University of New Hampshire, estimates civilian casualties in Afghanistan number about 3,700. Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives puts the number between 1,000 and 1,300. The Associated Press thinks a figure in the mid-hundreds is probably more accurate.

Why such a disparity? Ask Mohammaed Ismail, a reporter for Bakhtar, the official Afghan news agency. On Oct. 2, he visited the scene of a U.S. air strike in Kabul. He found eight dead civilians. He filed his report but noticed later the number of dead had been increased to 20. When his report was broadcast later on Taliban-controlled radio, it was 30. Even Human Rights Watch — which plans a full investigation of all allegations once the fighting has subsided — concedes that, for a host of reasons, estimates of civilian casualties are probably grossly overblown.

Not that we should get caught up in numbers, though. Even if the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan exceeds those from New York and Washington, it wouldn’t make the war there any less just (yes, I think the war in Afghanistan is a just one).

What distinguishes the U.S. war in Afghanistan from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is intent. For the United States, civilian casualties are an unfortunate consequence in pursuit of a just goal (finding the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11). For Al Qaeda and the Taliban, civilian casualties are the goal.

Never in the history of warfare has a military taken such pains to minimize the potential for civilian casualties. Whether the military’s commitment stems from genuine humanitarian concern or from knowing how valuable Afghan civilian casualties would be to America’s enemies in the propaganda war (my money is on the latter), any fair assessment of the campaign can only conclude the military’s efforts in this respect have been nothing less than extraordinary.

Targets in Afghanistan are selected using multiple sources of intelligence, among them Afghan soldiers, reconnaissance satellites, unmanned drones and U-2 spy planes. All information is cross-checked to ensure its accuracy. Along with military commanders, lawyers review the targets to evaluate the potential risk to civilians. Attack routes are chosen to avoid areas of high civilian concentration as much as possible, and all credible reports (i.e., those not originating from the Taliban) of civilian casualties are noted for investigation.

This is certainly not to say mistakes don’t happen. Weapons veer off course (only 60 percent of the 18,000-plus bombs the U.S. has dropped on Afghanistan have been precision-guided), and information is sometimes inaccurate. On Dec. 1, American bombers attacked several villages near Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden was rumored to be hiding. Doctors Without Borders reported finding some 72 civilians who were killed in the attack, many of them women and children. There are countless other stories like this.

What these stories say to me, though, is not that the United States deserves its “Great Satan” honorific, but that war, no matter how carefully planned and executed, by its very nature puts civilians at risk. What is significant about the war in Afghanistan is the concerted effort being made by the U.S. military to avoid these deaths. Al Qaeda made no such effort. Indeed, its entire operation Sept. 11 was not designed to minimize civilian casualties, but to maximize them.

To suggest a single civilian death — accidentally taken — renders an otherwise moral effort immoral is ridiculous. General Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of the war, said, “Any innocent loss of life is a shame.” Juxtapose that with the image of Osama bin Laden laughing as he discussed the innocent people who died in the World Trade Center. To suggest these two people are morally equivalent (the “evil that we deplore”) is to engage in the same sort of naíve and fanatical disregard of reality that foments Islamic fundamentalism throughout the world.

Chris McCall ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in German and political science.