but they really go to the core of whatever approach is taken to these violent non-state actors (irregular fighters and their supporters), whether that approach be solely kinetic (direct actions), or totally populace-centric (isolating the bad guys from the population via non-violent means), or a combination of both.

This discussion has been going on in the military law world since the JAG School published its treatise on irregular combatants in the 1959 JAG Treatise, A TREATISE ON THE JURIDICAL BASIS OF THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN LAWFUL COMBATANT AND UNPRIVILEGED BELLIGERENT (JAG School 1959).

Questions of law and ethics came to the fore in the GVN Pacification Program (1967-1972), which included CORDS and Phoenix. Brigadier General Tran Dinh Tho, author of "The Cambodian Incursion", Washington DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1979, earlier (1977) wrote "Pacification", which can be downloaded in its entirety here. Chapter 4 (4 RVN-US Cooperation and Coordination in Pacification (441 KB pdf) deals with Phoenix and related programs.

Contrary to popular belief, the Phoenix term "neutralize" (used of VC infrastructure) did not exclusively mean "kill". The program was a "kill, capture or convert" program, which during 1967-1972 had very close to a 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3 "kill, capture or convert" ratio.

The greatest problem with Phoenix was positive and reliable identification of who the VC infrastructure were. False IDs in a COIN situation are obviously counter-productive. The negative results in the program were used, of course, to discredit it and the entire CORDS effort.

You might consider reading these old resources, which dealt with very similar questions to those that we see now in Astan.