It has recently been suggested that Americans ought to feel especially bad about the civilians that are dying in Afghanistan as a result of our military campaign against our enemies. But unless we think carefully about such feelings, we will encourage precisely the conduct in our enemies that endangers these civilians.

In order to expound such an idea, it is useful to distinguish two kinds of civilian deaths during wartime. Military ethicists distinguish direct from indirect killings of civilians, or "noncombatants" as they tend to be called. Since we seek to avoid directly killing innocents in ethical warfighting, the direct targeting of the enemy noncombatant population is usually prohibited. As a result, our airmen target enemy military vehicles, enemy trenches, enemy supply convoys, enemy intelligence buildings, enemy airfields and the like, rather than noncombatant hospitals, libraries and homes. But during these legitimate attacks on the enemy, noncombatants nevertheless die, since bombs go astray or secondary explosions spread fire throughout a town or the enemy deliberately puts his tanks in a schoolyard. And so the military ethicist distinguishes these indirect deaths from the kind of directed deliberate attack that we saw on September 11 in New York City, where the enemy's direct goal was to target as many noncombatants as possible. The ethical difference in these deaths is not whether we feel sympathy over the dead, but in how we assign moral culpability for their deaths. In the direct attack on noncombatants, we call the perpetrators "murderers," while in the indirect deaths of noncombatants, we call the events "accidents" and the perpetrators "unfortunates" for having had a hand in the events, but we do not hold them morally culpable.

How is this distinction important here? During the Vietnam War and again in this war, our enemies have taken advantage of our desire to fight ethically by deliberately confusing the difference between combatants and noncombatants. A weapons cache might be hidden in a civilian village. A command post might be located in a mosque. The enemy himself might avoid uniforms and try to appear like the noncombatants in order to "blend in" and protect himself from attack. In all of these cases the enemy is hoping to put the American military into a dilemma: if the Americans fear indirectly harming the noncombatants, they will not attack; but if the Americans attack and thus harm the noncombatants around the legitimate military targets, the American news media can be relied upon to show the dead civilians on national television, keeping a daily count on the numbers of civilian dead, and slowly but surely wearing down the sentimental Americans' commitment to the war. This technique worked very well in the Vietnam War and it is already starting to have an effect in this war. Noncombatant deaths are tracked and reported, and the Taliban tries very hard to ensure that each civilian death is noticed but that one question is never asked: whose fault is it that these people are dying? To prevent this question from being asked, the Taliban relies on the American overindulgence on sentimentality with its tendency to reduce careful thinking. For a thoughtful person would immediately distinguish indirect noncombatant deaths from direct noncombatant deaths. A bomb accidentally landing on a hospital is not the moral equivalent of the NYC attack. Unfortunate? Yes. Murder? No.

Furthermore, a prudent citizen would look closely at the degree to which the noncombatant deaths are the result of the Taliban's own tactic of putting their noncombatants into danger in order to play on American sentiment to halt the war. If the Taliban deliberately puts its own people at risk by obfuscating the combatant/noncombatant distinction, then the fault for their indirect deaths is the Taliban's. And as such, there should be no Pentagon hand-wringing or press corps demands for explanations in Washington. This kind of response only encourages the Taliban in the psychological warfare use of noncombatant shields. For if the Taliban thought that Americans would merely say that this is the cost of a war started by the Taliban, they would realize that they could gain no tactical benefit and they would stop trying to create opportunities for their own civilians to die on camera. Our emotional insulation could actually save many Afghan lives by removing the incentive from our enemies.

But refusal to capitulate to this Taliban tactic will require our media in particular to make much more careful decisions about what they show to the American people, by defining "newsworthiness" in a way that goes beyond "what will create the greatest shock value." For the Taliban is employing that formula as a psychological weapon. Since noncombatants suffer indirect deaths in all wars, regardless of the noblest intentions, such deaths just are not particularly newsworthy. People are murdered every day in the United States, yet how many of these murders make national news? Yet the indirect war death is not even a murder, so why should it receive such extensive coverage that reporters keep a tally of the indirect noncombatant deaths and pester the Pentagon briefings with questions every time a bomb lands in the wrong place? Obviously, deliberate noncombatant attacks should be subjected to press scrutiny, but our failure to critically distinguish these kinds of attacks from the indirect accidents of war simply encourages our enemies to use their own people as cannon fodder. And that in turn wears down the resolve of the American people to destroy the terrorists that care nothing for any civilians, ours or theirs. It is not censorship for the media to choose not to report what is truly not newsworthy during a war. But it is a civic responsibility not to use information and images irresponsibly, in a way that uncritically shocks the American citizen with the horrors of war, especially when those horrors are being employed as a psychological weapon by our enemies.

Jeffrey Tiel is an associate professor of philosophy at Ashland University.