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NATO civilian deaths rising in Afghanistan - YouTube
So post your sources ...Soldar/Mazloom/Scimitar
You guys say that more Afghans die from suicide bombings than from US raids and bombings.
You quote NATO figures which are then passed on to the UN.
Although it is known that NATO does not give an accurate account of deaths. For example, they don't follow up on the injured who die later from severe wounds. In most cases even denies responsibility despite local witness claims. And even other cases have been found where US soldiers have taken bullets out of the bodies and the walls and washed the wounds with alcohol to make it look like the people were killed before they even arrived.
So you pretend to the paragons of truth and justice...so let it be so. You say that the Taliban kill more civilians than US. Why is that so?
Here is a transcript from 2008 press conference on UN's website:
Is this what we are arguing over? 5% difference?
This is what makes Soldat anti Taliban and pro-US?
Only a year before the spokesmen for UN stated something different:
What makes sense is that more people die from Air bombings than suicide bombings.
This is the effect of a US bomb:
How do you think a suicide vest compares?
So how many have died in total from suicide attacks?
pretty much 50:50 in terms of death rate ...right?
NO!
3500 Afghans were killed by Americans within 20 something weeks after 2001 and 3,755 killed from suicide attacks over 10 years.
Does the math add up?
So which is more evil? Can you quantify it...****mitar?
So post your sources ...Soldar/Mazloom/Scimitar
You guys say that more Afghans die from suicide bombings than from US raids and bombings.
You quote NATO figures which are then passed on to the UN.
Although it is known that NATO does not give an accurate account of deaths. For example, they don't follow up on the injured who die later from severe wounds. In most cases even denies responsibility despite local witness claims. And even other cases have been found where US soldiers have taken bullets out of the bodies and the walls and washed the wounds with alcohol to make it look like the people were killed before they even arrived.
So you pretend to the paragons of truth and justice...so let it be so. You say that the Taliban kill more civilians than US. Why is that so?
Here is a transcript from 2008 press conference on UN's website:
PAJHWOK [translated from Dari]: In this report, it was mentioned that this year saw a 24 per cent increase in civilian casualties. I would like to know the overall percentage of civilian casualties in the last year?
UNAMA [translated from Dari]: The number of civilian casualties last year, which were reported in the Secretary-General’s report released in March this year – cover the period from January 2008 to 31 December 2008 – is 2,118 people. Fifty-five per cent of these casualties were inflicted by anti-government elements through suicide bombs and roadside bombs. The rest of them have mainly been inflicted by air strikes carried out by national and international forces. And that’s why we welcomed the latest review of the air-strikes strategy by General McChrystal.
UNAMA [translated from Dari]: The number of civilian casualties last year, which were reported in the Secretary-General’s report released in March this year – cover the period from January 2008 to 31 December 2008 – is 2,118 people. Fifty-five per cent of these casualties were inflicted by anti-government elements through suicide bombs and roadside bombs. The rest of them have mainly been inflicted by air strikes carried out by national and international forces. And that’s why we welcomed the latest review of the air-strikes strategy by General McChrystal.
This is what makes Soldat anti Taliban and pro-US?
Only a year before the spokesmen for UN stated something different:
July 2, 2007 -- The United Nations says it estimates that about 600
Afghan civilians have been killed in insurgency-linked violence this year,
just over half of them by pro-government forces.
UN spokesman Adrian Edwards said today that the number of civilian killed in May was the highest in months. Edwards said that in June, those killed by national and foreign forces supporting the government appear to "largely exceed" those killed by rebels.Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today he delivered a "strong" appeal to military commanders in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties. Ban met the commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul on June 29.
Also, Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission says air strikes have recently killed more civilians than the Taliban. The group urged U.S. and NATO-led forces to cut back on air strikes and boost the number of foot soldiers in Afghanista
Afghan civilians have been killed in insurgency-linked violence this year,
just over half of them by pro-government forces.
UN spokesman Adrian Edwards said today that the number of civilian killed in May was the highest in months. Edwards said that in June, those killed by national and foreign forces supporting the government appear to "largely exceed" those killed by rebels.Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today he delivered a "strong" appeal to military commanders in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties. Ban met the commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul on June 29.
Also, Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission says air strikes have recently killed more civilians than the Taliban. The group urged U.S. and NATO-led forces to cut back on air strikes and boost the number of foot soldiers in Afghanista
What makes sense is that more people die from Air bombings than suicide bombings.
Examining the first 20 weeks of US bombing of Afghanistan in detail reveals the following human costs of this attack:
Between 3,100 and 3,500 civilians killed directly by bombs and missiles;
Another 4,000-6,500 civilians injured, many requiring prostheses;
4,000-6,000 dead Taliban and allies; an additional estimated minimum 19,800 Afghan refugees dying of hunger, disease and cold in camps (Steele, 2002);
An additional estimated 5,000 war widows and thousands of orphans;
Destroyed animals and livestock;
The scattering of 49,000 BLU-97 cluster bomblets around the major bombing zones;
Long-term health effects from using munitions containing depleted uranium;
The further destruction of infrastructure - bridges, power plants, water supplies, roads, communication systems, hundreds of incinerated trucks, burned fuel storage facilities etc.;
Environmental costs in addition to the aforementioned unexploded ordnance, which causes loss of agricultural land and human injuries, including massive forest fires in Tora Bora, destroyed wildlife, altered migratory patterns, a resurgence of locusts etc.; and
Widespread psychological costs of being bombed - post-traumatic stress disorders, anxiety, irritability and loss of appetite. There 'is a real feeling of loss - loss of body, loss of money, loss of friends and family', according to Dr. Ghulam Rasool, a psychiatrist treating Afghan refugees in Quetta (Parry, 2001).
My research suggests that civilian deaths have been so high in Afghanistan not because of targeting errors, faulty intelligence or equipment malfunction (as argued by Conetta, 2002). [2] Rather, high levels of civilian deaths are the direct result of the decision by US military planners to employ highly destructive bombs upon what were perceived to be 'targets' located in areas populated by civilians, whether residential neighborhoods or villages. [3]
...
During the last two weeks of October, US warplanes made a concerted effort to hit Afghanistan's meager electricity generating capacity. The Afghan power system
consisted largely of isolated regional networks supplied by small power and diesel facilities. The two exceptions were Kabul (supplied by the Soviet-built 100 megawatt Naghlu dam near Darunta) and Kandahar (fed by the large American-built Kajakai 33 megawatt hydroelectric facility in Helmand province). My database lists five attacks upon Afghanistan's power systems:
10 October: US planes hit a small hydro plant outside Jalalabad; [7]
14 October: US planes hit high-power tension lines near Kandahar;
15 October: US planes hit the Naghlu power station northeast of Kabul;
18 October: planes bomb the Jalalabad power system;
31 October: a major bombing attack upon the Kajakai power station supplying both Lashkargah and Kandahar.
A report from US energy research group, Frost & Sullivan, noted 'this has led to major health and sanitation concerns as cities require electricity to pump water' (Thayer, 2001). On 3rd December, US planes bombed two bridges leading out of Kandahar.
US warplanes also bombed vehicles on roads and highways, creating thousands more craters and rendering the roads virtually impassable. The highways are now so badly damaged that it takes 2-3 times as long to travel between cities as it once did, crippling commerce in a land of traders (Baker and Glasser, 2002). Transportation costs soared and the bombing campaign aggravated an already dire refugee crisis by idling trucks laden with relief supplies. [8]
US bombs destroyed fuel depots, the downtown Kabul telephone exchange and radio stations. In both Serbia and then Afghanistan, US warplanes attacked national media outlets. NATO forces bombed Belgrade's leading TV station, Radio Television Serbia, in the early hours of 23rd April 1999, killing 16 civilian employees (see Holland, 2000). On the night of 8 October 2001, US warplanes bombed the Taliban radio station, Voice of Shariat, with a tower located on a hill in eastern Kabul and offices in downtown Kabul, killing 10 civilians (Reuters, 2001). Some days later, the US bombed a small one-kilowatt mobile radio transmitter station which the Taliban had set up (Salahuddin, 2001). US bombing of Afghanistan, as we document, consistently and egregiously violated the tenets of international humanitarian law.
US planes targeted and sought to silence Afghan media as of the first night of bombing. The group, Reporteurs Sans Frontieres (RSF), described this action:
according to information obtained by RSF, the US forces struck the radio and television in Kabul, Kandahar [south of the country], Jalalabad [east], and Puli Khomri [north of Kabul] during the first days of the military operation 'Enduring Freedom' against the Taliban regime. On the first night of the strikes, the building and antennae of the official station Radio Shariat in Kabul were targeted and the programmes were cut off . . . the television installations, banned from broadcasting since 1996 by the Taliban, were also targeted. Following the strikes, programmes were suspended for more than three weeks. On 24 October the radio station that broadcasts mostly the Taliban authorities' press releases and religious prayers, started to broadcast again for no more than two hours per day. The Taliban used a mobile transmitter but on the night of 25 October the air strikes destroyed this installation (RSF, 2001).
But US bombs also hit the infrastructure of the Afghan mind. Between 10 October and 20 December, US bombs and missiles fell upon 12 different mosques in Afghanistan, killing at least 120 innocent civilians (Herold, 2002a). [9] Mosques were hit in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kunduz, Herat, Kandahar and Paktia.
'Proximity to Taliban was fatal!'
On 13 February, Peshawar's daily newspaper, The Frontier Post, got it more right than all the US media war pundits, headlining a brief article, 'Proximity to Taliban was fatal!'. The article described how: 'The bomb craters are like enormous footsteps a few hundred yards apart, marching in the direction of a Taliban radio transmitter. Along the way, four men died . . . a fatal proximity to a site considered militarily useful to Afghanistan's Taliban or Osama'.
Hundreds of individual stories exist, as yet mostly untold, of how the proximity of civilian populations to what US war planners deemed a military 'target' led to high
numbers of innocent Afghan civilians being killed. Ghulam and Rabia Hazrat, for example, lived on the outskirts of Kabul near a Taliban military base. One day, a US
missile landed in the family's courtyard and the neighborhood was showered with cluster bombs. Mrs. Hazrat remembers:
there was no warning. I was in the kitchen making dough when I heard a big explosion. I came out and saw a big cloud of dust and saw my children lying on the ground. Two of them were dead and two died later in the hospital (Gall, 2002).
Along with the decision of US military planners to bomb perceived military targets in urban areas, the use of weapons with great destructive blast and fragmentation power (see Figure 1) necessarily resulted in heavy civilian casualties. The weapon of choice during the first three weeks of the air campaign was the 500lb bomb, which has a lethal blast range of 20 meters; later, the 2,000lb pound became the weapon of choice and it has a lethal blast range of 34 meters. The JDAM (Joint Defence Attack Munition) technology consists of a $21,000 attachment produced by Boeing which transforms 1,000lb and 2,000lb conventional 'dumb' bombs into 'smart' bombs which rely upon the global positioning system. When global positioning updates are available the JDAM-outfitted bomb can strike within 13 meters [43 feet] of its target. When updates are not available due to jamming or other problems, it can 'still hit within 30 meters (or 98 feet)' (Thompson, 1999). The B1-B bombers flying out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean can carry 24-30 Mark 84 2,000lb JDAM bombs. Each bomb is 14-feet long and will destroy military targets within a 40-foot radius from the point of impact. Using only an inertial guidance system (INS), the Mark 84 bomb has a circular error radius of 30 meters,
but with a GPS guidance unit this gets reduced to 13 meters.
The documented Afghan civilians killed were not participating in war-making activities (e.g. working in munitions factories etc.) and therefore had not forfeited their
right to immunity from attack (Wheeler, 2001: 5-6). In effect, as an astute scholar has noted, I am turning Michael Walzer's (1977: 156) notion of 'due care' upside down: that is, far from acknowledging a positive responsibility to protect innocent Afghans from the misery of war, US military strategists chose to impose levels of harm upon innocent Afghan civilians to reduce present and possible future dangers faced by US forces.
The 14,000 tons of bombs dropped upon Afghanistan between October 2001 and February 2002 killed, at a conservative estimate, between 3,100 and 3,500 civilians upon direct impact (what I call 'impact deaths'). These do not include persons dying later from injuries, from the later explosion of cluster bombs, or from hunger or cold. Table 1 'counts the dead' during the US bombing campaign. From the data available, about 70% of these casualties were women and children.
Analysis of civilian casualty data reveals two other important characteristics of the US air war. First, most civilian deaths were registered in regions of high population
density (see Herold, 2002b: Appendix 5). Second, the elevated number of civilian deaths is the result of a very large number of small death tolls in many bombing attacks. This fits well with the fact that most fighter planes were carrying out 3-4 bombing attacks per sortie.
Phases of the bombing campaign
The US air war upon Afghanistan was played out in five phases, though without any overall grand plan. The air war was adjusted to the shifting realities on the ground. The five sequential phases were:
Bombing of perceived military facilities in urban areas, airports and outlying camps (7-20 October 2001);
The battle for the central plains area, the Shomali Plain campaign and the carpetbombing around Kunduz, Khanabad and Mazar (21 October-25 November 2001);
The bombing campaign around Kandahar and the southern provinces (26 November-10 December 2001);
The Tora Bora campaign (27 November-10 December 2001);
The bombing of selected sites believed to harbor Al Qaeda or Taliban leadership (20 December to the present).
Beginning in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, military and media propagandists began arguing that casualties among civilian populations do not, strictly speaking, count (pious public relations statements aside) if they are not premeditated. Since the US and its allies are (by definition) the 'good' guys, if they killed some innocent people, they did not do it on purpose. The 'bad' guys, on the other hand, are always portrayed as intentionally murderous. In Chechnya, while the war has taken the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, it is against Khattab and Basayev. In Iraq, while the trade embargo has probably taken hundreds of thousands of lives, the war is against Saddam. In these two instances, argument over the amount of 'collateral damage' rages, whereas the Taliban's bombing of Afghan civilians was (by definition) a fact of murder.
In Afghanistan, the war ('against terrorism') has been touted as a war not against Afghans, but against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. However, drawing on Herman's (1999) analysis of the bombing of Kosovo, a very different interpretation might read:
But where the likelihood of 'errors' in a bombing raid has a probability of over 90 percent, the damage is intentional even if the particular victims were not targeted. If somebody throws a bomb at an individual in a crowded theater, and 100 bystanders are also killed, would we say that the bomb thrower was not clearly guilty of killing the 100 because their deaths were 'unintended' and the damage was 'collateral'? The propaganda agencies reserve such purr word excuses for 'humanitarian' bombing (Herman, 1999). [10]
'Worthy' and 'unworthy' bodies and the asymmetry of reporting
A bigger factor is at work here. There is a stark asymmetry in the ways in which 'bodies count' in this new global War on Terrorism. After September 11th the personal lives of virtually every victim merited massive media attention. Enormous efforts were (rightly) made to uncover and identify every last body part from 'Ground Zero'. In Afghanistan, by contrast, the bodies of bombing victims have been nameless, invisible to the world and totally neglected. Sometimes, civilian victims are 'worthy' and other times 'unworthy'. Edward Herman (2002) argues that what gets counted is fundamentally a political question:
where there is an official and imperial demand for a high body count and great indignation, as in the case of Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 . . . the [ideological and propaganda] collective will be deeply concerned with civilian casualties, will pursue refugees relentlessly to get details of their suffering, and will search eagerly for dead bodies . . . on the other hand, where the imperial power and/or its proxies are doing the killing, as in Afghanistan from October 7, 2001 onward, or in Panama in 1989, or in Iraq in January 1991 to the present; or where client states like Israel, Turkey and Indonesia in East Timor are doing the killing, the establishment collective has little interest in civilian casualties . . . fails to pursue refugees to get their stories of suffering, and does not engage in any search for dead bodies. In fact, its members tend to be skeptical of stories of suffering and estimates of dead bodies made by others, in a direct reversal of their position on such stories and estimates for 'worthy' victims of 'another Hitler' (Herman, 2002).
The zeal in uncovering bodies killed by Serbs, the recounting of the most horrific witness accounts, and the ensuing indignation, is precisely matched by the utter neglect, great skepticism, and ridicule towards any who might count the Afghan civilians who died under US bombs. Similar neglect was evident for the 1,000-3,500 civilians who died in the El Chorillos slum of Panama City in the 1989 US invasion. They happened to be overwhelmingly poor blacks living next to the Panamanian military headquarters. The US propaganda system simply made Panamanian and Afghan civilian victims 'unworthy' of note, unworthy bodies. Contrast this with Human Rights Watch's (1999-2000) report on Chechan victims of Russian atrocities, which depicted the Russian war on Chechnya as seen through the drawings of children in Chechnya.
Between 3,100 and 3,500 civilians killed directly by bombs and missiles;
Another 4,000-6,500 civilians injured, many requiring prostheses;
4,000-6,000 dead Taliban and allies; an additional estimated minimum 19,800 Afghan refugees dying of hunger, disease and cold in camps (Steele, 2002);
An additional estimated 5,000 war widows and thousands of orphans;
Destroyed animals and livestock;
The scattering of 49,000 BLU-97 cluster bomblets around the major bombing zones;
Long-term health effects from using munitions containing depleted uranium;
The further destruction of infrastructure - bridges, power plants, water supplies, roads, communication systems, hundreds of incinerated trucks, burned fuel storage facilities etc.;
Environmental costs in addition to the aforementioned unexploded ordnance, which causes loss of agricultural land and human injuries, including massive forest fires in Tora Bora, destroyed wildlife, altered migratory patterns, a resurgence of locusts etc.; and
Widespread psychological costs of being bombed - post-traumatic stress disorders, anxiety, irritability and loss of appetite. There 'is a real feeling of loss - loss of body, loss of money, loss of friends and family', according to Dr. Ghulam Rasool, a psychiatrist treating Afghan refugees in Quetta (Parry, 2001).
My research suggests that civilian deaths have been so high in Afghanistan not because of targeting errors, faulty intelligence or equipment malfunction (as argued by Conetta, 2002). [2] Rather, high levels of civilian deaths are the direct result of the decision by US military planners to employ highly destructive bombs upon what were perceived to be 'targets' located in areas populated by civilians, whether residential neighborhoods or villages. [3]
...
During the last two weeks of October, US warplanes made a concerted effort to hit Afghanistan's meager electricity generating capacity. The Afghan power system
consisted largely of isolated regional networks supplied by small power and diesel facilities. The two exceptions were Kabul (supplied by the Soviet-built 100 megawatt Naghlu dam near Darunta) and Kandahar (fed by the large American-built Kajakai 33 megawatt hydroelectric facility in Helmand province). My database lists five attacks upon Afghanistan's power systems:
10 October: US planes hit a small hydro plant outside Jalalabad; [7]
14 October: US planes hit high-power tension lines near Kandahar;
15 October: US planes hit the Naghlu power station northeast of Kabul;
18 October: planes bomb the Jalalabad power system;
31 October: a major bombing attack upon the Kajakai power station supplying both Lashkargah and Kandahar.
A report from US energy research group, Frost & Sullivan, noted 'this has led to major health and sanitation concerns as cities require electricity to pump water' (Thayer, 2001). On 3rd December, US planes bombed two bridges leading out of Kandahar.
US warplanes also bombed vehicles on roads and highways, creating thousands more craters and rendering the roads virtually impassable. The highways are now so badly damaged that it takes 2-3 times as long to travel between cities as it once did, crippling commerce in a land of traders (Baker and Glasser, 2002). Transportation costs soared and the bombing campaign aggravated an already dire refugee crisis by idling trucks laden with relief supplies. [8]
US bombs destroyed fuel depots, the downtown Kabul telephone exchange and radio stations. In both Serbia and then Afghanistan, US warplanes attacked national media outlets. NATO forces bombed Belgrade's leading TV station, Radio Television Serbia, in the early hours of 23rd April 1999, killing 16 civilian employees (see Holland, 2000). On the night of 8 October 2001, US warplanes bombed the Taliban radio station, Voice of Shariat, with a tower located on a hill in eastern Kabul and offices in downtown Kabul, killing 10 civilians (Reuters, 2001). Some days later, the US bombed a small one-kilowatt mobile radio transmitter station which the Taliban had set up (Salahuddin, 2001). US bombing of Afghanistan, as we document, consistently and egregiously violated the tenets of international humanitarian law.
US planes targeted and sought to silence Afghan media as of the first night of bombing. The group, Reporteurs Sans Frontieres (RSF), described this action:
according to information obtained by RSF, the US forces struck the radio and television in Kabul, Kandahar [south of the country], Jalalabad [east], and Puli Khomri [north of Kabul] during the first days of the military operation 'Enduring Freedom' against the Taliban regime. On the first night of the strikes, the building and antennae of the official station Radio Shariat in Kabul were targeted and the programmes were cut off . . . the television installations, banned from broadcasting since 1996 by the Taliban, were also targeted. Following the strikes, programmes were suspended for more than three weeks. On 24 October the radio station that broadcasts mostly the Taliban authorities' press releases and religious prayers, started to broadcast again for no more than two hours per day. The Taliban used a mobile transmitter but on the night of 25 October the air strikes destroyed this installation (RSF, 2001).
But US bombs also hit the infrastructure of the Afghan mind. Between 10 October and 20 December, US bombs and missiles fell upon 12 different mosques in Afghanistan, killing at least 120 innocent civilians (Herold, 2002a). [9] Mosques were hit in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kunduz, Herat, Kandahar and Paktia.
'Proximity to Taliban was fatal!'
On 13 February, Peshawar's daily newspaper, The Frontier Post, got it more right than all the US media war pundits, headlining a brief article, 'Proximity to Taliban was fatal!'. The article described how: 'The bomb craters are like enormous footsteps a few hundred yards apart, marching in the direction of a Taliban radio transmitter. Along the way, four men died . . . a fatal proximity to a site considered militarily useful to Afghanistan's Taliban or Osama'.
Hundreds of individual stories exist, as yet mostly untold, of how the proximity of civilian populations to what US war planners deemed a military 'target' led to high
numbers of innocent Afghan civilians being killed. Ghulam and Rabia Hazrat, for example, lived on the outskirts of Kabul near a Taliban military base. One day, a US
missile landed in the family's courtyard and the neighborhood was showered with cluster bombs. Mrs. Hazrat remembers:
there was no warning. I was in the kitchen making dough when I heard a big explosion. I came out and saw a big cloud of dust and saw my children lying on the ground. Two of them were dead and two died later in the hospital (Gall, 2002).
Along with the decision of US military planners to bomb perceived military targets in urban areas, the use of weapons with great destructive blast and fragmentation power (see Figure 1) necessarily resulted in heavy civilian casualties. The weapon of choice during the first three weeks of the air campaign was the 500lb bomb, which has a lethal blast range of 20 meters; later, the 2,000lb pound became the weapon of choice and it has a lethal blast range of 34 meters. The JDAM (Joint Defence Attack Munition) technology consists of a $21,000 attachment produced by Boeing which transforms 1,000lb and 2,000lb conventional 'dumb' bombs into 'smart' bombs which rely upon the global positioning system. When global positioning updates are available the JDAM-outfitted bomb can strike within 13 meters [43 feet] of its target. When updates are not available due to jamming or other problems, it can 'still hit within 30 meters (or 98 feet)' (Thompson, 1999). The B1-B bombers flying out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean can carry 24-30 Mark 84 2,000lb JDAM bombs. Each bomb is 14-feet long and will destroy military targets within a 40-foot radius from the point of impact. Using only an inertial guidance system (INS), the Mark 84 bomb has a circular error radius of 30 meters,
but with a GPS guidance unit this gets reduced to 13 meters.
The documented Afghan civilians killed were not participating in war-making activities (e.g. working in munitions factories etc.) and therefore had not forfeited their
right to immunity from attack (Wheeler, 2001: 5-6). In effect, as an astute scholar has noted, I am turning Michael Walzer's (1977: 156) notion of 'due care' upside down: that is, far from acknowledging a positive responsibility to protect innocent Afghans from the misery of war, US military strategists chose to impose levels of harm upon innocent Afghan civilians to reduce present and possible future dangers faced by US forces.
The 14,000 tons of bombs dropped upon Afghanistan between October 2001 and February 2002 killed, at a conservative estimate, between 3,100 and 3,500 civilians upon direct impact (what I call 'impact deaths'). These do not include persons dying later from injuries, from the later explosion of cluster bombs, or from hunger or cold. Table 1 'counts the dead' during the US bombing campaign. From the data available, about 70% of these casualties were women and children.
Analysis of civilian casualty data reveals two other important characteristics of the US air war. First, most civilian deaths were registered in regions of high population
density (see Herold, 2002b: Appendix 5). Second, the elevated number of civilian deaths is the result of a very large number of small death tolls in many bombing attacks. This fits well with the fact that most fighter planes were carrying out 3-4 bombing attacks per sortie.
Phases of the bombing campaign
The US air war upon Afghanistan was played out in five phases, though without any overall grand plan. The air war was adjusted to the shifting realities on the ground. The five sequential phases were:
Bombing of perceived military facilities in urban areas, airports and outlying camps (7-20 October 2001);
The battle for the central plains area, the Shomali Plain campaign and the carpetbombing around Kunduz, Khanabad and Mazar (21 October-25 November 2001);
The bombing campaign around Kandahar and the southern provinces (26 November-10 December 2001);
The Tora Bora campaign (27 November-10 December 2001);
The bombing of selected sites believed to harbor Al Qaeda or Taliban leadership (20 December to the present).
Beginning in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, military and media propagandists began arguing that casualties among civilian populations do not, strictly speaking, count (pious public relations statements aside) if they are not premeditated. Since the US and its allies are (by definition) the 'good' guys, if they killed some innocent people, they did not do it on purpose. The 'bad' guys, on the other hand, are always portrayed as intentionally murderous. In Chechnya, while the war has taken the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, it is against Khattab and Basayev. In Iraq, while the trade embargo has probably taken hundreds of thousands of lives, the war is against Saddam. In these two instances, argument over the amount of 'collateral damage' rages, whereas the Taliban's bombing of Afghan civilians was (by definition) a fact of murder.
In Afghanistan, the war ('against terrorism') has been touted as a war not against Afghans, but against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. However, drawing on Herman's (1999) analysis of the bombing of Kosovo, a very different interpretation might read:
But where the likelihood of 'errors' in a bombing raid has a probability of over 90 percent, the damage is intentional even if the particular victims were not targeted. If somebody throws a bomb at an individual in a crowded theater, and 100 bystanders are also killed, would we say that the bomb thrower was not clearly guilty of killing the 100 because their deaths were 'unintended' and the damage was 'collateral'? The propaganda agencies reserve such purr word excuses for 'humanitarian' bombing (Herman, 1999). [10]
'Worthy' and 'unworthy' bodies and the asymmetry of reporting
A bigger factor is at work here. There is a stark asymmetry in the ways in which 'bodies count' in this new global War on Terrorism. After September 11th the personal lives of virtually every victim merited massive media attention. Enormous efforts were (rightly) made to uncover and identify every last body part from 'Ground Zero'. In Afghanistan, by contrast, the bodies of bombing victims have been nameless, invisible to the world and totally neglected. Sometimes, civilian victims are 'worthy' and other times 'unworthy'. Edward Herman (2002) argues that what gets counted is fundamentally a political question:
where there is an official and imperial demand for a high body count and great indignation, as in the case of Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 . . . the [ideological and propaganda] collective will be deeply concerned with civilian casualties, will pursue refugees relentlessly to get details of their suffering, and will search eagerly for dead bodies . . . on the other hand, where the imperial power and/or its proxies are doing the killing, as in Afghanistan from October 7, 2001 onward, or in Panama in 1989, or in Iraq in January 1991 to the present; or where client states like Israel, Turkey and Indonesia in East Timor are doing the killing, the establishment collective has little interest in civilian casualties . . . fails to pursue refugees to get their stories of suffering, and does not engage in any search for dead bodies. In fact, its members tend to be skeptical of stories of suffering and estimates of dead bodies made by others, in a direct reversal of their position on such stories and estimates for 'worthy' victims of 'another Hitler' (Herman, 2002).
The zeal in uncovering bodies killed by Serbs, the recounting of the most horrific witness accounts, and the ensuing indignation, is precisely matched by the utter neglect, great skepticism, and ridicule towards any who might count the Afghan civilians who died under US bombs. Similar neglect was evident for the 1,000-3,500 civilians who died in the El Chorillos slum of Panama City in the 1989 US invasion. They happened to be overwhelmingly poor blacks living next to the Panamanian military headquarters. The US propaganda system simply made Panamanian and Afghan civilian victims 'unworthy' of note, unworthy bodies. Contrast this with Human Rights Watch's (1999-2000) report on Chechan victims of Russian atrocities, which depicted the Russian war on Chechnya as seen through the drawings of children in Chechnya.
How do you think a suicide vest compares?
So how many have died in total from suicide attacks?
Afghanistan has followed a similar trend: Between 2001 and 2004, six suicide attacks occurred, at the cost of 12 lives; in 2005 the number of attacks climbed to 17 (39 fatalities) and in 2006 it soared to 136 attacks (272 people killed).
One hundred and eighty-three people were killed in 116 suicide attacks in 2007; 725 died in 146 attacks in 2008: 140 attacks in 2009 killed 1,054 people; and in 2010, 1,141 people were killed in 140 attacks.
The first eight months of this year have brought 35 suicide attacks, and 329 deaths, with July and August particularly deadly months. The latest such attack, targeting a private security firm in Kandahar province, took place on Sunday.
The total for Afghanistan over the decade since 9/11 is 736 suicide attacks, and 3,755 lives lost.
One hundred and eighty-three people were killed in 116 suicide attacks in 2007; 725 died in 146 attacks in 2008: 140 attacks in 2009 killed 1,054 people; and in 2010, 1,141 people were killed in 140 attacks.
The first eight months of this year have brought 35 suicide attacks, and 329 deaths, with July and August particularly deadly months. The latest such attack, targeting a private security firm in Kandahar province, took place on Sunday.
The total for Afghanistan over the decade since 9/11 is 736 suicide attacks, and 3,755 lives lost.
pretty much 50:50 in terms of death rate ...right?
NO!
3500 Afghans were killed by Americans within 20 something weeks after 2001 and 3,755 killed from suicide attacks over 10 years.
Does the math add up?
So which is more evil? Can you quantify it...****mitar?
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