South Africa's COIN war in SWA/Namibia/Angola

[ganulv]

For exactly the reasons you cite, I am attempting to use words with precision.

Ummm, okay…

For that reason, from a historical analysis of the South African Insurgency, did Mandela intentionally target or sanction the deliberate use of violence against civilians?

Anyone who is in doubt as to whether the ANC conducted attacks sanctioned by Mr. Mandela in which civilians died can have their doubt removed within 30 seconds with the search function on Google. But good luck with answering the question of whether any of the attacks sanctioned by Mandela intentionally targeted civilians or deliberately used violence against civilians. Part of the difficulty with such as that is the fact that state sanctioned use of force is guided (or not) by a definition of proportionality formulated by state actors. Non-state actors may point out they are not able to avail themselves of all of the resources available to their state actor adversaries. In addition, there is the question of whether the principle of distinction makes any sense in an existential conflict. In the context of a true life–or–death struggle (and some would argue that some or all of the parties to the struggle of which Mr. Mandela was a part were hyperbolic in referring to it as an existential conflict, so there’s another issue to grapple with in coming to anything approaching a clean answer to your question) some would say that nobody standing by is innocent.