Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) says the U.S. government should "do what’s right" and compensate Afghans who lost innocent family members to American bombs.

This strikes me, at first blush, as an excellent idea. While I think there is a distinction between U.S. bombs which accidentally killed innocents and Al Qaeda terrorists who intentionally murdered innocents, to the extent that the U.S. government knew in advance that there would so-called "collateral damage," it has a moral responsibility to try and make restitution.

The certainty of Aghan civilian casualties was one factor that initially made me uneasy about the war in Afghanistan, the other being my fear that the war would only create more terrorists in the end. But it’s clear that the war has been successful in disabling or at least significantly hampering Al Qaeda’s efforts, and taking the Taliban out of power was a nice side benefit.

But that still does not erase the U.S. government’s moral responsibility to make restitution to those Afghan families that were unjustly torn apart by the bombings.

Rohrabacher, head of a nine-member congressional delegation that visited Afghanistan, called the compensation a "legitimate cost of doing business." That seems a little bean-counterish, but it’s right. The government is supposed to protect our lives, and part of doing that job in Afghanistan involved the foreseeable, but ultimately unavoidable, loss of innocent Afghan life.

Compensation won’t make the victims’ families whole again, but it is the right thing to do. In addition, it won’t hurt American PR efforts in the region, though I suspect nothing would help so much as immediate American withdrawal from all areas not directly related to the war on anti-U.S. terrorist groups.

The only thing about this proposal that concerns me is preventing fraud. How do you prove that a family member was killed by by an American bomb and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban? And how do you check those facts before doling out the cash? It would be a shame to see such a well-intentioned program be badly administered, as so many are.