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Osama Bin Laden Reported Dead, Body In US Hands
Reader Tom Hudson, and now several others, have submitted the news that Osama Bin Laden is reportedly dead, and that his body is in the hands of the US military. A statement from President Obama is expected shortly. Watch this space for more details. Update: 05/02 04:01 GMT by T : More coverage at ABC News, at CNN, and at Al Jazeera. The reports say that Bin Laden was actually killed about a week ago by a bomb in Pakistan, and the time taken to confirm his identity via DNA testing helped delay the news. In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots.
Now let's bring 'em home.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And all it cost were our civil liberties, national character, and trillions of dollars...
The prez just won his second term
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Enemy combatants and mass murderers don't warrant due process.
Weren't there multiple reports from credible sources that OBL was dead years ago?
I don't trust the media, but I trust the government even less.
Looks like Ron Paul will be vindicated in the 2012 election as his message of "bring the troops home" will resonate loud and clear.
Libertas in infinitum
The folks actually searching for him have been doing so for 10 years, don't give him the credit for their efforts. He just happens to be in office at the right time.
No, our kids are eating lead...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Or we found him living in a mansion outside Islamisbad and killed him after a firefight.
Not sure what the motivation for making this up would be. There are likely going to be reprisals for this act.
Don't worry, Obama explicitly said as much in his speech ("we must remain ever vigilant").
From what I'm hearing, expect civil rights to be further restricted in the coming months to protect from "counter attacks" over Bin Laden's death.
After all, this was never the War on Al Qaeda. This is the War on Terror, and Terror still looms... (And don't forget to lock your doors, Al Qaeda is coming to get us back over Bin Laden!)
Yeah, because nothing says competence like a guy who shows up an hour late, spouts platitudes to an empty room, and leaves. Seriously, the only competence involved is in the US military and possibly the CIA. Presidents - from Team Red or Team Blue - have next to nil to do with this sort of thing.
My last day of work at the World Trade Center was September 10, 2001. I remember turning around, looking at a lone guitarist playing near that fountain with the Globe sculpture, it was a beautiful Monday night, around 9 pm. I had worked late, so I was going to show up late to work on Tuesday. I woke up to my phone ringing off the hook. I lost my job, but compared to what others lost, I lost nothing.
The people who died that day were liberal and conservative, but all were American. Bin Laden hated us all, just because we were American. So please, no political games here. This isn't about left and right, this is about a cowardly attack on all of us, as Americans. As a hardcore liberal, I embrace my fellow Americans who are conservative on this good news for us all.
Come together, as Americans, left and right, lose the useless political snark and sniping, and celebrate this asshole's death. Good fucking riddance.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Just think if we had done that from the start. Bin Laden still dead, without wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq.
Why would it? It's pretty much accepted that bin Laden was radicalized by the 2nd in command - who, therefore, was the real power behind the throne. What's more, by landing troops in Pakistan, the US risks a great many Pakistanis joining up with terrorist groups.
Further, by killing bin Laden rather than capturing him, the US has created a martyr. That's usually a very bad move. Further, the media's interpretation of President Obama's remarks was that he had ordered bin Laden's assassination. The US has been trying to assassinate a number of other leaders recently - bodily or by character. That could create some extremely unholy alliances, since leaders generally don't approve of being assassinated and Al Queda is likely to be looking for alternative bases.
Tomorrow, then, will be just like today only the US will have fewer people to blame.
Capturing bin Laden would have been the wisest move. By depriving him of martyrdom, the US would have avoided an excalation in the conflicts. Further, it would have likely resulted in a paniced upper echelon of Al Queda as they'd not know what he knew or what he'd say. And in not knowing, they'd likely act rashly. And that is what we needed.
What happened tonight was a PR stunt intended to bolster the ratings of the Democrats and undercut Republican credentials on security. It had nothing whatsoever to do with actual security at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You really think America is in any perceptible less danger than it was before (not that it was in much danger before)? I don't presume to know the reason they were, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were hardly waged to keep America safe.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Scumbag Obama: Talk about hope and change. Continue and expand on Bush-era policies.
Hey, I am just glad that He was the one who since last August has personally overseen, analyzed intel, and, finally, authorized the strike which took Osama out. What a guy. And He is so humble about it.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
What freedoms have been taken away?
Right? RIGHT?!
Oh.
Right.
FML
Yes, it is over in exactly the same sense that the Cold War was over .... when Lenin died.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
We don't need any. Killing political leaders is, at best, useless. At worst, given the failed assassination of Gadaffi and the failed attempt to character assassinate Chavez all within the last couple of days, there's a serious risk that the US has miscalculated and will unite segments of Africa and South America with the terrorist organizations. No, that's second-worst. At worst, Russia and China will see this as confirmation of the failed assassination of Gadaffi and the failed character assassination of Chavez, deem the US to be an immediate threat to global security, and take action to stop the Blue Menace.
However, I'll offer a conspiracy theory if you like. Osama bin Laden has been ill for some time, we know that. The American public is quite incapable of maintaining focus if it perceives the goal as being reached, we know that too. Osama bin Laden gets offered up as a sacrificial lamb, but in a way that radicalizes the whole of Pakistan and could easily lead to a coup. Al Queda loses a man it no longer needs in a gambit to gain a country it covets. You can replace men, but it's much harder to replace a subcontinent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
long after most Americans have forgotten why we went to war in the first place.
Pretty funny that you should talk about "forgetting", because then you say:
And of course we had to forget that most 9/11 hijackers were Saudis
Well you seem to have forgotten is that they were mostly Saudis - trained in Afghanistan, by Al Quidea.
Since that was where AQ was based, where the terrorists were trained, that was in fact the single best place to start in striking back and reducing the threat. I mean, here you seem to imply we should have attacked Saudi Arabia, even though there government there did not condone the terrorism. For a long time after we invaded Iraq there were cries in fact that we should ONLY be in Afghanistan. But you seem to have forgotten that too.
You seem to have forgotten we are not fighting the people of Afghanistan but AQ who has people based there, just as in Iraq for a time we were not fighting many Iraqis any more, but instead a coalition of AQ fighters from all over - including Syria and Saudi Arabia again.
Indeed your message about not forgetting is an important one, which is why I felt it necessary to provide historical fact over re-written sentiment.
Fighting terrorism now means having a TSA agent fondle you or getting photographed naked.
I hate the new rules too and think they are silly.
But to be fair, AQ has shown a fetish long after 9/11 of trying to work terrorism through planes, and so that is where the focus has been on protection. It's a matter of finding what is reasonable and what actually works, something I think they are a long way from yet. It's the right focus but totally the wrong technique.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I find it very strange to cheer about somebody's death, but here I am.
It's pretty rare to find undiluted evil in the world, but he sure was it. I was in 5th grade at the time, in northeast NJ. We could see the towers from the top of the slide, and then just two pillars of smoke. Even though I was only 11, I knew damn sure what was going on and what it all meant.
And I'm damn glad he's dead. His organization continues, of course, but he wasn't exactly a figurehead either. I'm not going to speculate on the ramifications of this, because they're happening now and in the next few hours and days.
So good job to all involved. Truly a moment in history.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
More coverage at ABC News, at CNN, and at Al Jazeera. The reports say that Bin Laden was actually killed about a week ago by a bomb in Pakistan, and the time taken to confirm his identity via DNA testing helped delay the news. In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots.
That's from the summary. NONE of the three sources state that, and none of the sources I read have said anything like that. I'm not going to jump to conclusions and say he was killed by a bomb in Pakistan a week ago, when the President said he was killed in a ground operation. He was likely killed by American rifles, whether face-to-face or initially from a distance.
While Osama has been hard to track down, lower echolon leaders have been killed left and right. Didn't change a thing. Partly because the US managed to always find a way to kill a lot of civilians (by accident they claim) to fuel new hatred.
Thinking the death of Bin Laden will change anything is like thinking the death of Roosevelt in 1945 meant the end of WW2. (For those lacking in history, it didn't).
The world has changed massively after 9/11 but it also has continued to change. Take the current unrest in North Africa and the middle east. Ghaddafi (however you spell it) went from terrorist leader to friend to target in less then a decade. Now there are calls from the left to watch the bombings in Libya but ALSO to interfere in Syria... wtf? I am sure Israel is wondering just what the hell is going to happen next. Do you think it is an accident Hamas is changing its tune now its allies are burning from within?
If anything this shows how silly the idea of control is in the world. Bin Laden became a symbol but had little control. He achieved next to nothing. The uprising against the oppressors in muslim nations is instead against both religious AND secular leaders (Syria is secular, its Iranian ally is strongly religious) and the uprisings are both religious and secular. About the only prediction that stands is that nobody predicted any of this.
What will happen now Bin Laden is death? A symbol is dead but the things that made him a symbol are not. There is severe dissatisfaction in the world and people seem more ready then ever to use violence to made their dissatisfaction known. You might hail this is a fight for freedom or extremists wanting to force their view on the rest of the world, but the fact remains that right now more struggles are happening then in a long time in history.
A leader of a decade ago is dead, few will mourn him but he is a relic. There are new struggles to overcome. Iraq is still a mess, Afghanistan is a war zone. Pakistan is on the verge of collapse. North Korea is facing collapse and won't go queitly, Libya is in civil war. Syria is about to erupt in war. The list goes on and on. Wikileaks Assange has disappeared of the radar of news but that is still far from finished.
No, I don't think we can breath a sigh of relieve just yet.
And that in a way is a good thing. The world has NEVER been a safe place. Better we are aware of it not being safe and work to make it safe even if we make mistakes then to live in false security.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Dead Nailed it, along with the follow comments:
The biggest casualty will probably be our Constitution. Whenever a tragedy likes this occurs, the government always announces a get tough on terrorists policy that will have no effect on the psychopaths who do this, but will severely limit our rights.
Yep. I give it a week before Bush announces a "war on terrorism". And we all know what "war on XXX" means, don't we? Bye-bye Bill of Rights.
Yep. Let's put face recognition cameras in all airports and log activity of anyone who enters or leaves an airport. We all know it wouldn't stop the attack, but hey, it will help us correlate who boarded the planes with their respective political associations.
You don't get it. If the Constitution is a casualty, then the terrorists have won. Their aim is to destroy this country. The Constitution IS this country. It's the only thing that makes us different from any other country in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_public_education kinda rolls the clock back a few centuries.
174 comments and nobody's mentioned this, but what happened to the presumption of innocence?
I mean, a guy arrested at the scene of a mass shooting, covered in blood and holding an assault rifle, screaming about how the aliens in his head told him to murder all of mankind... still gets a trial. Timothy McVeigh (the second biggest terrorist to attack US soil) got a trial. People who systematically abduct and rape hundreds of little girls and hide their bodies in barrels get a trial.
If absolutely nothing else, now we'll never truly know if he really did it. Who the power behind him was. Who was sponsoring him, who was protecting him (aside from the obvious: Pakistan), who were his allies. Think of all he could know.
Action movies lie to you. Dead guys give zero intel and create martyrs. Killing him was, by a huge long away, out and out the worst way to handle it. Bring him in alive. See what he knows. Then put him in prison for the rest of his days.
This was a poor choice.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
And the Far Left and "Moderate" Left will find some way to slam the "Far Right" out of the box...
You know...you'd best just drop the crap, for that's what that was.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Sorry? What exactly did Saddam and Iraq have to do with the 'War on Terror'? I mean, other than pissing off the fundamentalist Muslims even more than before.
I mean, a guy arrested at the scene of a mass shooting, covered in blood and holding an assault rifle, screaming about how the aliens in his head told him to murder all of mankind... still gets a trial.
Not if he's still shooting when the police, or anyone with a gun, arrive. Then he gets shot.
OBL and AQ were still planning other operations. Sometimes in the middle of action there is no time for trial. In a real war trials are madness, you cannot fight real bullets with lawyers not matter how many lawyers you have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Further, by killing bin Laden rather than capturing him, the US has created a martyr. That's usually a very bad move.
I could see it going either way. Bin Laden was a charismatic figure head of an ideology. Sometimes death creates a martyr, but more often in history it kills the movement. When it does create a martyr, it is because the movement is rising anyway, like when John Brown's death became a catalyst in the growing abolitionist movement. More often the cause dies quietly, like when Guy Fawkes failed to draw people to the cause of Catholicism.
In this case, it appears Middle Easterners have largely given up on the political ideas of Bin Laden, and instead have started turning towards democracy as a way out of their problems. It's hard to know public opinion for sure in that region, but there have been many uprisings of people demanding democracy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sorry? What exactly did Saddam and Iraq have to do with the 'War on Terror'? I mean, other than pissing off the fundamentalist Muslims even more than before.
It was started under the false premise that it was relevant to the War on Terror and the extremists responded. Our soldiers fought terrorists associated with the same terrorists who attacked us.
In downtown Austin, Texas, in the time since the story broke I've heard what sound like numerous celebratory gunshots.
What better way to celebrate the death of a terrorist, than with a potentially deadly act of random violence!
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Nonsense. Military/intel forces are not interchangeable. Except for the actual take-down, getting Bin Laden was a surveillance/analysis problem, not a mass force problem. Taking everything we had in Iraq and throwing it at the task would not have helped, except perhaps for things like UAVs which were not in short supply anyway. A large chunk of the man-hours spent in finding him were probably put in by intelligence people here in the US, going over the data and putting pieces together.
Remember, Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, and has probably been there for most of the decade. Pakistan has been very upset just with the pinprick drone strikes we've been doing. Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan? Because when you blame the how long it took to capture Bin Laden on Bush invading Iraq, that's the alternative you're implying.
If you oppose the war in Iraq, fine, there are valid reasons for doing so, but saying that it delayed Bin Laden's capture is ridiculous.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Young Georgie had to get revenge because Saddam made his daddy look bad
Abbottabad is about 50 km north of Islamabad, and 150 km east of Peshawar. It's also the location for a number of major military establishments. Which, of course, raises a whole lot of very interesting questions about the Pakistani government's knowledge of, and possible complicity in, his holing up there.
In chief, specific freedoms regarding privacy. Most of that weight is distributed across the Patriot Act and airport security measures. While I haven't heard a lot of complaining about the Patriot Act in quite some time, the what the TSA has been up to in the last two years or so could possibly be regarded as unreasonable search and seizure. Most of this goes unnoticed in the daily lives of a large swathe of the American population, but it's there, to be sure.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
I am a Muslim, and I'm so happy they finally nailed this creep.
He's killed thousands of Americans, including many Muslims in my community who worked in lower Manhattan. 9/11 even destroyed the local mosque at the Towers.
Bin Laden was never a Muslim leader, back in the 1990s Muslim leaders spoke out against him and called for his capture, after his involvement in bombing of US embassies. Even his "spiritual leader" told the press that Bin Laden is not qualified to speak for Islam and he had no training to make rulings or give fatwas.
God's gonna judge him, and I hope He gives Bin Laden what he deserves, for the misery he's put Muslims worldwide through, and for disgracing Islam and the millions of peaceful patriotic law-abiding American Muslims.
IIRC he was suffering from failing kidneys in the late 90s, so unless they had dialysis machines in the caves I smell something fishy my own self. Personally I want to see the body. if we killed him there is a body, yes? let's see it.
Personally I think it is more likely he has been dead since 03 (after that you'll notice the only vids you got was his picture and a voice) and we probably just now found the body. Since there is no way in hell the military is gonna go "hey guess what?" and admit the guy had been DOA all that time and we were having our collective chains yanked, you shoot the body full of holes and say "got him!".
So I want to see the body, it ought to be pretty easy to tell if the corpse is fresh or moldy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Nothing at all.
The real question is why did you wait nearly a decade to question this?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
As a local living in that area, who would you call to report his location and collect your reward? Do you call the police, and hope whoever you talk to is not corrupt?
I know I'd be keen to collect on the reward, but I don't like being dead either...so I don't really know how I personally would have gone about doing it. Presumably you have to be identifiable at the time that you call in the tip, and that's the catch. (Well, maybe I can think of ways *I* would have gone about it, but the situation would likely be very different for most locals in Pakistan).
Look, for once could we let the partisan crap go? A bad guy is dead. That's cause for celebration. It's not an invitation for every partisan whackjob to whip out his pecker and start pissing all over everything.
We all know the drunk uncle who has to be invited to the wedding, but who can be counted upon to leave the reception cuffed in a squadcar. For today, could you try not to be him?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1) In war, the same rules don't apply. There are rules, but they are different. For the "world rules of war" you can see the Geneva Conventions, though that doesn't cover everything and indeed fighters like bin Laden that do not wear a uniform and attempt to disguise themselves as civilians aren't covered by many of the protections. For more specific US rules you can see the Rules of Engagement. Regardless, wartime rules are different than peacetime rules. You don't have to agree with that idea, but you can't very well claim it isn't how it works, it has been that way in every nation for basically all of history and is codified in national and international law.
2) To get your chance at a fair trial, you have to not shoot the people that come to get you. Apparently there was a firefight and it was one that bin Laden and his people lost. You shoot at troops, or at police, they'll shoot back. They take the Malcom Renoylds advice to heart: "Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back!" This is true in the civilian/police world as well. If the police come to arrest you for a crime and you and your body guards open fire on them, they'll fire back. They'll then bring in more heavily armed police, and if you keep shooting, they'll eventually kill you. You want your fair trial you need to surrender.
You'll notice that Saddam Hussein did surrender to US forces when found and he was brought in alive. He was either unarmed or threw down his weapons and surrendered. Per the rules of war, he was then captured and not killed. He got his trial, which of course did not end well for him.
You can't honestly say that US troops should have just sat there, gotten shot, and not shot back can you? You really think that they could or should be given the order "Go in and capture everyone alive, no matter what. Doesn't matter how many of you die, no lethal force, just keep going in until they run out of bullets and you can take them alive." Hell no, if they got fired on, they had a right to fire back and the idea that you can shoot someone to knock the gun out of their hand is pure action movie BS. You shoot to kill.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings alone took 150k-246k (mostly civilian) lives.
But this is a lost battle for me, so believe what you want to believe. Just the fact people need to discuss who kills more innocents should be enough to show neither side has much regard for human life.
This is Slashdot. Some scholars think the term "Great Satan" for America was actually coined *here*.
The giant was not sleeping. What reality are you living in? Or do you like to cling to this fantasy because it helps you think that you are on the side of right and justice? It's pretty convenient to believe that because it avoids a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The reality is more like the giant was hard at work sticking its thumbs in everyone else's pie. An example would be the very fact that Bin Laden was armed and trained by the USA back in the 80s when Bin Laden was a good guy because he was fighting the russkies for us. That's just 1 pie. There are probably 50 others you can use as an example for that period or after.
Nope, the giant's been pretty busy at work being an imperialist bastard.
The only difference between "terror" and justice or liberation or whatever misleading labels the propaganda industry uses on death and killing is who is committing it. When we do it, it's "liberation" or "intervention" or whatever and when they do it, it's terror.
Right to a fair trial (Guantanamo detainees).
Right to privacy (wiretapping).
Right to travel (indiscriminate no-fly listing).
The right of congress, not the president, to declare war (Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists - congress' own damn fault for signing this one away, still illegal though).
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Ok, here's the problem. Let's say that there actually was a successful raid which led to the killing of bin Laden.
First, the body was buried at sea, according to the US military, which means there's no proof he's actually dead. In other words, he's going to turn into the Elvis of Islamic terrorism. Either there is a conspiracy, and he's not dead, or conspiracy theorists will claim that he's still alive somewhere. We live in a world where (some) people believe that the President of the United States forged his own birth certificate with the collusion of the state of Hawaii; you think a 19-year-old terrorist recruit in Whatthefuckistan is gonna just take the word of the United States government that the leader of Al Qaeda was buried at sea?
Second, I guarantee that within two days a new bin Laden tape will be released. The guy had less value as a strategist than he did as a symbol, and I'll bet that there are pre-recorded tapes yet unreleased, and that there will be audio tapes with a "voice purported to be Osama bin Laden". Probably talking up Ayman al-Zawahiri as the operational leader of AQ.
Third, while there is potent symbolism for the West in killing bin Laden, keep in mind that he headed an organization which advocated suicide bombing as a tactic. Bin Laden's death is going to make him a martyr in the world of radical Islamic terror. While there may not be a single figure that can replace him right now, there are plenty of other affiliated groups, with plenty of other members, and a successful attack can be planned and carried out by an uncharismatic moron just as easily. For that matter, an unsuccessful attack can have a significant impact, too. Ask Richard Reed.
Fourth, to the West, this looks like the USA is still the baddest motherfucker around, and we always get our man. To people who live in Pakistan, the Middle East, and other, non-Western places, this looks like the only superpower in the world spent ten years and billions of dollars to kill one guy who pissed it off, in a campaign culminating in the use of clandestine intelligence and spec ops, in someone else's country. How's that for international diplomacy?
I'm not saying I'm sad the guy's dead, because I'm not. I think it's great. I just wish he'd gotten hit by a truck, or ate some bad dates or something. I have a strong feeling that this is not going to make our lives any easier.
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Bin laden was never trained or funded by the US in the 80's.
That's pretty much not true. Bin Laden, while he did use his own funds as well, was a Mujahadeen leader and it's pretty well established that the Mujahadeen were given vast sums of money and arms to fight the Russians (indirectly via Pakistan).
Google around to see that lots of people agree Bin Laden was a CIA asset at one point. That fact is politically embarrassing but plainly true.
Also, I stand by my definition that the weapon of the US government is terrorism. It's just not called that when they do it. They sometimes call it liberation or exporting democracy. (which is pretty ridiculous but what's more ridiculous is that the population buys it).
Who precisely are we supposed to declare war on? You declare wars on countries. Even when it was running Afghanistan, the Taliban wasn't even running the whole country and it had almost no recognition anywhere.
Declarations of war are courtesies between nation-states who maintain diplomatic relations and who actually attempt to negotiate with one another in good faith. For terrorist groups, you either ask the country that they are sheltering in to get them, or you ask permission to get them yourselves, if they can't pull it off. If there is no government, you just go and get them.
The OP point is still valid. These guys don't wear uniforms. If there was a government that could handle actual law enforcement, we probably would ask Afghan law enforcement to arrest them and turn them over. As it stands, the very idea of that is currently a bad joke and will be until we secure the country and the Afghans figure out how to not be corrupt and borderline useless in running their own country.
Killing civilians is a terrible thing, but the reason that they are dying is the one of the reasons that terrorists are so awful, even to their own people. Uniforms are worn so that the enemy knows who is fighting them, and who is not. If they did wear uniforms, and acted in an manner that followed various conventions and laws of war, they would probably be treated better when captured, and fewer of their own civilians would be killed.
Of course saying that the killed civilians are "their" civilians isn't even true. The terrorists don't care about anyone outside their own group. Their neighbors are just human meat shields for them. If those same meat shields were not ignorant of the Taliban or al Queda's true nature, they probably wouldn't have the sympathy for the terrorist groups that they do. In the end, there are probably more people alive today, despite the collateral damage, than there would be if people like the Taliban were allowed to keep running their own little patch of Hell. Neighbors are much more efficient at killing civilians than any military. Just look at some of the places we haven't launched Hellfire missiles in, like Sudan or Rwanda.