In political and diplomatic terms, the US is keen to ensure its current military response is perceived as a precise, surgical operation. This conceptualisation of war is reinforced by a carefully selected glossary of terms including "guided" or "smart" munitions, "precision" bombing and target "neutralisation".
Soft-focus shots of glowing targets illuminated by their thermal or infra-red signatures accompany these terms in the print and electronic media. The language is high-tech, sprinkled with military acronyms and designed to elevate an imprecise and violent process to the realm of "science". Collateral damage, or civilian casualties, we are assured, will be kept to a minimum by US and British forces.
This sanitised version of war is being marketed for a specific purpose. Consistent with its long-term war aims is the requirement for the US administration to maintain the public and political will to prosecute this campaign. Central to this requirement is the role of the international media.
US military planners, mindful of the needs to win (and keep won) hearts and minds, have insisted on an extremely high level of target selection and acquisition. However, this level of target acquisition, required in order to prevent unnecessary civilian casualties is unsustainable over the medium to long term.
Now that the Taliban's air defence assets have been stripped, Afghanistan is quickly becoming a "target-poor" environment.
With daylight air attacks possible, the nature of the air assault will change with a new emphasis on the selection of "opportunity" targets.
This will involve forcing the enemy out into the open, or as President Bush stated, "smoking these folks out of their holes".
Unfortunately for the Afghan population, this will mean greater civilian casualties. The reason for this inevitable increase in casualties is two-fold.
The first is due to the inaccuracy of both guided and conventional weapon systems. Despite improvements in guidance systems and accuracy, weapon- performance profiling in the wake of the Gulf War and the Serb air campaign indicates a proven failure rate for supposedly smart weapons. Official statistics from the RAF in the aftermath of the 1999 campaign against the Serbs over Kosovo indicate that the accuracy rate of guided missiles was 40 per cent. The accuracy rate for some unguided or "dumb" bombs was as low as 2 per cent. Small wonder then at the litany of civilian casualties during the 78-day Kosovo campaign. These included most spectacularly, a stray missile strike on Sofia and the destruction of the Chinese Embassy.
The second reason involves pilot error and a growing pressure to engage opportunity targets. In a combat environment, even flying at subsonic speeds, it is difficult to distinguish between say, a convoy of military vehicles and a convoy of refugees. Such errors occurred during the Serb air campaign with the tragic bombing by the allies of fleeing refugees on April 14th and the infamous Varvarin bridge bombing of May 1999.
This track record on so-called collateral damage lends credence to reports of increases in civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Innocent civilian casualties will be an inevitable feature of the US and British military action.
This will bolster the Taliban's resolve to resist and will challenge President Bush's political resolve to continue the campaign. The Taliban regime itself will be keen to exploit the psychological and propaganda value of a civilian casualty "spectacular". Such an outrage, whether real or manufactured, would be of more use to the Taliban and al-Qaeda than any arsenal of out-dated weapons.
It would have the combined effect of inhibiting US air activity over Afghanistan and of advancing the cause of Islamic fundamentalism.
The US military is still haunted by the 1972 image of Kim Phuc running from Trang Bang in Vietnam with third-degree burns.
Used to maximum effect for propaganda purposes, this moving and tragic image gives pause for thought over the coming days.
Dr Tom Clonan is a former Army Captain. He now lectures in the Political Economy of Communications in the Institute of Technology, Tallaght