Reply #46: Well, he was fictional, but the point was that Evil is relative

[maxsolomon]

The Taliban do not see their actions are 'Evil', they think they are righteous. That when they throw acid in the face of a woman, when they suicide bomb a bus full of police recruits, they truly believe that Allah will reward them. In fact, Allah requires then to resist the Infidel in any way they can. If they can't get to us because we're attacking with drones, then they will attack our surrogates or those we care about. Even if it's their sister.

Kurtz' fictional realization was that War requires humans to set aside notions of Good and Evil and embrace our most brutal nature. For millenia, that's what war was - you killed all the men, cut off their genitals as trophies, looted and burned the cities to the ground, raped all the women to your heart's content, and enslaved the children if you felt like it, and paraded the lot through your capital to the cheers of your citizens.

And you can see in our COIN policy, in Marjeh, that we're not willing to do that. The Taliban extort and kill collaborators so the populace will refuse to work with us out of fear of their lives. If we destroyed Marjeh, killed every living being in it, wiped it off the map, then we wouldn't have Marjeh to worry about. And we have the technology to make it easy.

But we won't do that because we judge that action as Evil. And that is why we need to get the fuck out. We CAN'T save the Afghanis from themselves.