You  remember all the fuss at the start of the year about Israel’s supposedly disproportionate use of force in Gaza, no? Well, unless you are a close student of Afghan affairs it may have escaped your attention that last Thursday Spanish forces killed 13 members of the Taliban without suffering so much as a scratch on their own side.

We know that they were members of the Taliban because there were independent NGO or ICRC people on the spot who checked and made sure that none of the dead were civilians who grabbed the family AK47 and stuck their heads outside when they heard the firefight start, don’t we? It’s inconceivable that the Spanish soldiers on the spot might have sought to avoid future embarrassing questions by making sure there was a weapon close to each dead Afghan, isn’t it? Even to hint at the possibility of such a thing would be to stain the honor of a noble army, wouldn’t it?

El País of Madrid is the newspaper that reports the story. If a Palestinian falls over and twists his ankle within sight of Israeli soldiers El País is quick to talk of the thirst for blood inherent in the makeup of the only army in the world that has mostly Jewish members. In this case, however, it reports the story in the most matter-of-fact way and makes no attempt to call into question the Spanish army’s version of events. Natalia Junquera and Miguel González, the authors of the report, even manage to give a humanitarian slant to the calling up of a Mangusta attack helicopter to assist the Spanish infantry by saying that it was called off when the Taliban took refuge in caves near to a village with civilian inhabitants. The Mangusta has a three barrel 20mm steerable cannon under its nose as well as a variety of other weapons mounted on pods. A 20mm cannon shell that doesn’t hit its intended target is quite capable of killing a person miles away. It can also penetrate light armor and the walls of domestic residences and kill anyone in the wrong place on the other side. How good that Junquera and Gonzaléz are so certain that nothing like this occurred in this case.

Gabriel Albiac has his say on the matter in ABC today. There follows an edited translation of his column.

“Disproportionate use of force” has become, for the current Spanish prime minister, the sacred litany of a profitable liturgy. It harvests votes by evoking two puppet show villains: anti-Americanism and antisemitism. There’s nothing new about that. Hitler and Stalin also made use, exhaustive and lethal use, of the same two-faced demon. “Jews and plutocrats”, was the oft-repeated totalitarian slogan of the 1930s. “We firmly reject the disproportionate use of force”, by Israel in south Lebanon was the joint view of Spanish socialist Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero and Islamist Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, as announced on the 7^th of July, 2006. That was the unforgettable summer when Zapatero was photographed wearing a Palestinian keffiye at a fervently anti-war, that is to say, anti-Israel rally. The “disproportionate use of force” mantra was repeated there too. A catalog of the ritual repetition of the same formula by Spanish socialists leads to Jenin, where more than one of them had no hesitation in raving about genocide or insulting the human condition by making comparisons with Warsaw and Auschwitz,  and all arising from a skirmish that left 52 dead on one side and 23 on the other, as a result of both parties’ “disproportionate use of force”.

How is it possible to measure whether the use of force is “disproportionate”? In military terms, by its effectiveness, measured by the ratio between enemy casualties and one’s own. There’s no other criterion. On Friday [Thursday], the Spanish army faced an Afghan guerrilla attack. The result was thirteen enemy dead and one wounded on our own side. [I think the reference to a wounded Spanish soldier is an error arising from a separate incident that took place in the same area] That figure is on the very limit of the optimum that military effectiveness requires. The “disproportion” between our own and enemy casualties tend towards infinity. […] The Spanish action on Friday [Thursday] was a model one, because the force used was sufficiently disproportionate to destroy the attacker without suffering more casualties than a single soldier wounded [see previous insertion on this point]. The name for this sort of thing is war. The Spanish prime minister and the Minister of Defense continue to treat the army as a sort of NGO and deny its merits in what actually happened: an efficiently massive and disproportionate use of force. Or, to put it another way; war. Because wars are either won or lost.