Another Cost of War — Not Knowing How Many Civilians Have Died and Not Knowing How Many More of Our Own Troops Are Being Killed under Rules of Engagement Meant to Prevent Collateral Civilian Deaths

© 2011 Peter Free

 

25 April 2011

 

 

With war a seemingly permanent fixture of generally misguided American foreign policy, civilian body counts become an aspect of politically-motivated distortions on both sides

 

Science magazine recently persuaded the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to publicly release its database of civilian casualties (CIVCAS) in Afghanistan.  The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Afghanistan Rights Monitor followed suit.  Science released the combined results here.

 

Not surprisingly, data from the alternate sources disagree.  Observers’ physical positions relative to the action and their sources of information affect data gathering.  War’s confusion does, too.

 

Data recorded by the International Security Assistance Force’s civilian casualty database differs from that collected by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan:

 

Throughout the war, critics have accused ISAF of undercounting civilian casualties, particularly those caused by their own soldiers.

 

Just last month, a battle in Kunar province on Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan generated conflicting accounts. According to villagers, ISAF killed 65 civilians, including 50 women and children. According to ISAF, only insurgents were killed.

 

The data provided by UNAMA do show far more casualties than those from ISAF. For 2009 and 2010, its data include 5191 civilian deaths, over 70% of them caused by “antigovernment elements,” 20% by “pro-government forces,” and the rest undetermined.

 

Compared with CIVCAS, they attribute nearly three times the number of civilian deaths caused by military forces, only a small portion of which are Afghan national rather than ISAF forces.

 

One of the most significant discrepancies comes from the 529 civilians that UNAMA claims were killed by “air attacks” in 2009 and 2010. CIVCAS shows only 136 civilians killed by jets and helicopters over that period.

 

According to . . . ISAF sources, the cause of the disparity in body counts is methodology.

 

© 2011 John Bohannon, Counting the Dead in Afghanistan, Science 331(6022): 1256-1260 (11 March 2011) (paragraph split)

 

Political motivations probably skew resulting totals.  So does an agency's purpose in collecting them.  U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, communications director for NATO in Kabul, told Science:

 

“The UN has a much broader mandate” to track civilian casualties, he says, “and the resources to do that.” Rather than creating a definitive record for history, the purpose of CIVCAS, he says, is “marking progress.”

 

© 2011 John Bohannon, Counting the Dead in Afghanistan, Science 331(6022): 1256-1260 (11 March 2011)

 

 

The take-home message is that no one knows how many people have been killed

 

Ignorance makes it difficult to calculate the full cost of war and probably the full extent of its negative psychological and strategic ramifications.  For example, there must be a public opinion difference in Afghanistan between a drone attack that kills five people in “only” one family and five to fifteen in five different families.

 

My guess is that the negative strategic ramifications of civilian deaths attributed to the NATO coalition, however they are totaled, are likely to exceed the Obama administration’s calculations.

 

On the positive side, casualty sources agree that a rise in civilian mortality in 2010 (as opposed to 2009) was almost entirely attributable to insurgents, not to the International Security Assistance Force.

 

 

A hidden cost of minimizing collateral damage— do restrictive rules of engagement kill more of our soldiers and Marines?

 

How many American and NATO military casualties are due to the restrictive rules of engagement that apparently successfully tilted the civilian casualty ratio against the Taliban?

 

 

A self-defeating war remains such, no matter how much one tries to pretty it up

 

A geopolitically self-defeating war is not saved from rational condemnation just because we substitute our own increased casualties (via overly restrictive rules of engagement) for the civilian ones we are trying to avoid.

 

It is bad enough to send our troops to fight a war that cannot be won and worse to restrain our troops’ combat demeanor in a way that gets still more of them killed or maimed.