A mass of secret military communications was leaked via the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks. While trying to handle the story, Obama said “these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.” Even is that is true the big problem has been that there really hasn’t been a robust public debate on the Afghan war in a long time, even since “The Runaway General” was published in late June. While responding to the article, most of the media spent their time focusing on the less-than-complimentary things McCrystal’s aids said about the civilian side of the counter insurgency strategy, instead of the fact that the strategy we are using in the war in Afghanistan is pretty much futile. I hoped that the leaked documents might focus our attention more on the war and how it is not working. Here’s the basic problem, as was indicated in the Rolling Stone article: our army isn’t really set up for counter insurgency. The article and the documents released by Wikileaks show that we are killing far too many civilians to win the hearts and mind of the Afghan people.

Our army is built to have a shoot first and ask questions later strategy. Add in spotty intelligence and drone strikes and it becomes easy to see why we have so many civilian casualties. The supposed point of our war in Afghanistan is to combat terrorism by winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. It’s hard to win the heart and mind of a boy after you killed his mother in a poorly executed drone strike. But we can’t really place all the blame for civilian casualties at the foot of the soldier pulling the trigger or pressing the button. This easy kill strategy makes sense. If you are in a place where it is hard to distinguish friend from foe, survival—your own or that of your fellow soldiers—becomes about shooting first. Americans can’t even trust the Afghan soldiers they helped train. Even with the best aim, the best intelligence, and the best allies we couldn’t avoid all civilian casualties. In war, people die. So then, who is to blame for the deaths of so many civilians?

We can try to blame Bush who sent the soldiers there, or Obama who sent more there, or the congress too chicken-shit to use the power of the purse to bring the troops home. But we voted them in. We, the people of the United States, didn’t do our homework, didn’t care, or didn’t put enough pressure on our elected officials to make decisions that would end the futile land war in Afghanistan. Most of us who don’t have a brother, son, sister, or mother with boots on the ground have tuned out and forgotten about the war. So in the end, it is we who are responsible for the civilian casualties.

Here’s the kicker: all those civilian deaths will, if we continue our strategies, lead to more war and more of our soldiers dying. When we kill a civilian over there, we spawn more terrorists. We make the population more susceptible to the extremist and their view that this is a war between the West and the entirely of Islam. More terrorists mean more attacks. So unless we, the civilians, step up and protect our soldiers from the ignorance, greed, ambition, or whatever it is that spurred our politicians to continue this war in Afghanistan—and start the in Iraq—then all we can do is sit back and watch as we send another generation of our young men and women into the meat grinder that is the Middle East.