The gentlemen of a century ago, Porphyrogenitus explains, knew that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent:
Therefore, in order to de-incentivize certain forms of warfare, they did not extend the protections of international law given to lawful combatants to insurgents, terrorists, and the like. The Geneva Conventions did not cover those who did not themselves follow them. In that era, it was accepted as a given that it was necessary to give such persons less protection, to deter people from engaging in activities that would make conflict less clear, and thus more destructive and more prolonged. Thus the Geneva Conventions, for example, declared that such combatants could be shot when captured.It’s not controversial, but simply factual, to observe that today insurgents are extended more rights than lawful, uniformed enemy soldiers would be, and that the argument is whether or not to extend them even more. Most of the Alliance’s members send small forces to Afghanistan and compel them to operate under such restrictive rules of engagement that they are militarily useless, and indeed would be hostile to fortune if deployed in a combat zone, so they are kept out of harms way. Even those members whose forces are used in combat (primarily Anglosphere nations and the Netherland) operate under rules so increasingly constrained as to nearly, but not quite, tie their hands with an ever-tightening cobra. The enemy’s propaganda complaints of collateral damage are listened to, and thus they are encouraged to use that as one of their main weapons in the conflict to thwart the Alliance.
We are told we need to accept these constraints, less we lose the “hearts and minds” of the local population. But the enemy quite clearly does not have to operate this way. The intimidation tactics and outright brutality which insurgents use to cow the population is also one of their weapons. Why? Because the “hearts and minds” strategy concentrates mainly on the hearts of those sympathetic to the enemy, their collaborators, and not on the minds of those who oppose them or are otherwise innocent, simply wanting a better life than the Taliban offers, but afraid they’ll be left to die or otherwise suffer when we pack up and abandon the area, after concluding that our efforts are futile or even counter-productivly “alienating people”. This mindset involves listening primarily to the complaints of those sympathetic to the insurgents, rather than those who would be our natural allies. Again, mercy to the guilty becoming cruelty to the innocent.