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The Goldstone Report and Afghanistan
[New Republic] Marty Peretz - The Taliban do not fight by the rules of modern warfare which try to limit the exposure of non-combatants. The enemy in Afghanistan meshes with old women and men, with children and the infirm. Taliban loyalists, always without uniforms, move in and out of combat roles. The same issue arises with the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war in which Israel is accused of blithely targeting civilians. Israeli soldiers fought in Gaza in a fight forced upon them by the Palestinians sending rockets into towns and kibbutzim of the Negev with increasing frequency but mostly at random. They took enormous risks not to shoot or bomb people who may have not been combatants. There is an asymmetry that is endemic to the judgments in the international system on first-world armies fighting third-world terrorists.