As I read Azmat Khan’s brilliantly executed investigative pieces in the Times, I was repeatedly reminded of one of my favorite works of investigative audio journalism: Season 3 of the New Yorker’s podcast In The Dark by Madeleine Baran, which covered the Haditha Massacres of Iraq in 2005. Baran describes, through years of intensive investigative reporting in line with that of Khan’s, how U.S. Marines knowingly executed 25 unarmed Iraqi civilians in their homes and evaded responsibility after an inconceivably lazy accountability process employed by the American military courts. In some ways, I found Khan’s story even more insidious than Baran’s: the gamification of the loss of civilian lives through physical distance — airstrikes coordinated by those far removed from the reality of its aftermath and chat histories that resemble video game colloquialisms, for example — enabled a moral distance from the horrific realities of the civilians they brutalized as well. (I was especially disturbed by the term ‘squirters’, which referenced fleeing children in the aftermath of an airstrike.)

That theme of moral and physical distance from the horrors of war is a recurring one in all of this week’s readings. For the Afghans who flee state violence only to be met with the violence of a different kind in a new country or the children of Mosul like Mustafa Hakeem Abdullah, their suffering is reduced to statistics and concealed behind the bureaucratic veils of the West’s political and military world (I thought Valerio articulated these ideas on the declining trust against Western institutions very well in his blog post.) Since when did the West, a section of the world that lauds itself as the bastion of liberalism and democracy, start treating the lives of men (and children!) as collateral investments secondary to tactical advantage or political righteousness? Since when were American soldiers able to get away with deploying larger, more powerful bombs in civilian-occupied areas for the sake of convenience? Is better accountability in situations like these even possible?

It’s clear the U.S. has a responsibility to engage in warfare ‘better’. It’s also clear that they need a better system of checks and balances — one that involves third-party investigations into accusations of war crimes or military negligence (the conflicts of interest in the current military judicial system are quite appalling.) But I wonder if the U.S., too, has a responsibility to embrace tactical disadvantage for the sake of preserving civilian lives — or redefine the term ‘tactical advantage’ altogether. Does America truly advance a mission of peace, justice, and democracy in any efficacious way when it kills 1 ISIS recruiter in exchange for the lives of 20 civilians? I doubt it. When we read the term ‘military tactics’ as an action or strategy that advances a particular mission, perhaps good ‘military tactics’ come in decisions that put America’s democratic and liberal aims as an actual priority — even if it means deploying more soldiers on the ground or investing in technologies that enable more precise strikes.