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The Unknown Afghan Body Count
An unwillingness to track the number of Afghan civilians killed undermines attempts to gauge progress in the country
June was a terrible month for the war in Afghanistan. The milestone of the 300th British death was compounded by the most deadly month for the Nato-led mission since the start of the conflict.
The precise compilation of western casualties contrasts with almost criminal neglect in tracking the numbers of Afghan civilians killed since 2001. If Afghanistan is the "good war" then why are we not demanding to be accurately told how many skeletons there are in the Afghan closet?
In 2005 Donald Rumsfeld famously quipped that "death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war". The US defence department maintains documentation on US military personnel only, while the British ministry of defence "does not maintain records that would enable a definitive number of civilian fatalities to be recorded" - although it did confirm last month that payments to relatives of Afghan civilians killed in error by British forces have trebled over the past year. The Afghan government, characterised by massive levels of ineptitude and corruption, has failed to keep centralised records of civilian casualties which would enable it to issue annual estimates.
True to form, the International Security Assistance Force has also avoided releasing body counts - leaving it to an inconsistent patchwork group of NGOs and academics to correlate the numbers of dead Afghans. Although boosted by an occasional United Nations report, homemade body counts are largely unreliable, as they struggle to agree on a consistent methodology and are unable to keep up to date with the constant grind of killing. Perhaps the best statistics we have on the plight of the Afghans is the UN report on how for the past three decades Afghanistan has been the leading country of origin for refugees - with 2.9 million Afghans living across 71 countries.
How can any western official claim to have the best interests of the Afghans at heart when they don't even know how many they've killed? To understand the western presence in Afghanistan it is of critical importance to effectively and publicly track the lives lost as a result of both military and "insurgent" action.
In 2009 the head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "A high number of deaths inevitably makes you question what we are doing, how we are doing it. The conclusion one has to reach is, going right back to basics on this, that this mission is really important." Yet Dannatt is guilty of a moral triangulation that has typified the avoidance of a real audit into Afghan deaths.
Indeed, the constant repetition of the British death toll and fiscal expenditure is part of the "blood and treasure" argument that, in a country that supports its soldiers, places a firewall in front of any real debate on the war itself, typified by the consensus during the recent election campaign.
After sacking General Stanley McChrystal, President Obama announced that the personnel had changed, not the policy. Yet in the furore over McChrystal's attacks on the US civilian leadership, people missed how the Rolling Stone article highlighted that the former general was engaged in a battle with the military to reduce civilian casualties. McChrystal spoke of how "we've shot an amazing number of people", a reality that is most viscerally described in Sebastian Junger's account of the war.
Turning the US military into a more nuanced killing machine had been a struggle for McChrystal as soldiers saw their lives being placed at greater risk. While he was in charge, McChrystal attempted to avoid civilian casualties (known as Civ Cas) by reducing air and artillery strikes, the destroying of houses and dangerous US military driving styles. The recent Marjah offensive and upcoming Kandahar operations were highly publicised to allow civilians to leave the area. McChrystal explained to his men that "the Russians killed one million Afghans and that didn't work".
Our way out of Afghanistan, the McChrystal/Petraeus counterinsurgency strategy, emphasises protecting local populations, providing them with services such as schools and health clinics. Yet without proper tracking of the numbers of Afghans killed then the best Petraeus may be able to achieve, as he did in Iraq, is a narrative of success that ignores the far more complex and bloody reality.
24 Comments so far
Show All'An' you don't count the dead
When God's on your side'
was sounding in my mind this morning as the sad mindless self-congratulation of the country's national holiday began. And I'm sorry that there are many young people who were fooled into thinking that this business somehow equalled "protecting" or "serving" their country . . .
Fighting a war by drones or high-flying strike aircraft is a coward's war, but then why should we be surprised; most of the civilian decision makers are cowards. And that might actually be the nicest thing I can say about them.
Many recent presidents have demonstrably been cowards. It's now been three in a row. Clinton, George Wanker Bush and the present jerk stand out like the famous sore thumb.
Oh yes. One need only look at that smerking face of William Kristol talking about one or both of the big wars, and he/she will want to kick it into a bloody plup and then shout over his writhing body, stop the damn war.
Why would War Criminals tally their own counts of murder?
What a debate: the reason we are losing in Afghanistan is because it is not a freefire zone on all Civilians.
The USA has become stupider and more racist in the last decades. Muslims are considered dirt and violence is pleasure.
How long can such a corrupt nation stand under goddess?
In 2005 Donald Rumsfeld famously quipped that "death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war".
That's deep! That's really effing deep!
ours is not to question why, ours is just to do or die
mostly kill , and some of us die
While the puppet masters get rich
Of course it is unknown, the body count was unknown
in the war that i shamefully participated in.
Matter of fact, we don't know the real body count
of American servicemen. . . . do you believe our government? a little over one thousand...
after almost ten years................
they sure got caught fudging the count in Viet Nam...
now have tighter press restrictions......
why would anyone believe anything our government tells us?
They finally made it against the law to report on the
oil catastrophe in the Gulf......
I believe I know why.......the BP live feeds are a fraud..
and the oil has been free flowing since the disaster started.
I really thought it was humorous what I saw on the
Skandi ROV II Jun 30 . between 17:30 and 17:40
while they adjusted a camera, they boo booed, and showed the
top plate for a second, HEY BP,, HA , HA HA, bet I am
not the only one that picked up on that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don't recall (although I was too young to remember) any casualty count in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos etc. No casualty count in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As other comments point out, an imperialist war criminal state needs to cover up its crimes so "we don't do body counts".
The terrible disgusting message is that US lives are superior, US interests trump all others and that anyone who stands in the way of US policy will be murdered with impunity, and the USA will not even bother to acknowledge the murders.
All the while the US postures as if it is a beacon of human rights, democracy and freedom. One of the premier advocates of lies and high hypocrisy more like it.
They did body counts of 'the enemy' in Vietnam. I remember them vividly. It's one of the things that Cheney & Rumsfeld decided they wouldn't do as they started their wars, which Obama has accepted & embraced, like the black sites, etc. 'We will never torture' -- but our 'allies' might . . .
Saint-Just remembers correctly. They used to drag Viet Cong and NVA bodies (except for the children) into a clearing, line them up like ducks after a good shoot and photograph them for the evening news. Life Magazine ran lurid photo essays, some showing how captured VC were tortured for information. These images fueled the anti-war movement and help make America disgusted with itself. The 20-1 body count was our way of scorekeeping - to show we were "winning." That 20-1 figure remained on the scoreboard the day we scampered away in defeat. It is not surprising they have redefined winning and suppressed images showing this so-called war for the cowardly slaughter it is.
They used to drag the same bodies from site to site so that the Journalists could take pictures of them.
voxclamatis
Your memory, as well as that of Saint-Just, serves you quite well. Susan Brewer has a photo of former General William Westmoreland in her most relevant book Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq, pointing to a chart while giving a briefing at the Pentagon on November 22, 1967 which revealed how many VC and NVA were being killed each month by American forces. Ms. Brewer writes of an interview that Westmoreland gave in November of that year in which he told CBS, in a rather stunning bit of candor that presaged McChrystal's interview in Rolling Stone, that the possibility of the Americans achieving "total military victory" before the presidential election in 1968 was "very unlikely" though Westmoreland, like many of the generals today regarding the situation in Afghanistan, then went on to assure the American public that the North Vietnamese will be "weakened" by "the pressure that we will continue to apply." What Westmoreland, like the top brass of today, refused to acknowledge, is that people in a Third World country will continue to fight, no matter how high the body count, until the invading force [which is usually the United States], is finally driven from their soil.
Also, the torturing of VC prisoners is what former Green Beret Donald Duncan wrote about, among other things, in an article that came out in Ramparts magazine in the mid 1960s entitled "It Was All a Lie!".
"In 2009 the head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "A high number of deaths inevitably makes you question what we are doing, how we are doing it. The conclusion one has to reach is, going right back to basics on this, that this mission is really important."
Pardon me while I throw up.
What logic that last sentence.
At least when parents steeped in the Bible beat their kids with the belt or whatever is handy, they can claim they are just following scripture: "Spare the rod, spoil the child." However, read the whole context if you are curious enough to do so.
Nothing is important about "the mission" other than Afghanistan has "stuff" and prime territory in a strategic location that the U.S. and some of the elder Western Colonial powers want and want to control for their own ends.
"The mission" is all about beating up others into submission to get the "stuff," control the strategic territory, and further the advance, especially for the U.S. now, of GLOBAL EMPIRE for the ONE WORLD government, governed by the "elite" and the Banksters and the Corporate moguls.
Thank you, David Rockefeller, for spelling it out so clearly in your "Memoirs" quite a few years ago now [excerpts of which I've often posted here]. It looks like we're almost there, and maybe you'll get a really great birthday present next year when you turn 96 or 97, and the real "MISSION" will have been completed to your satisfaction and to the satisfaction of all the rest of the members of the controlling global "shadow government" JFK alluded to, and more than suggested he planned to take on.
Oops.
Body counts of little brown, beige, black, yellow or red people or "uncivilized" poor people regardless of color, especially those practicing strange religions and harboring various ferocities of outlook regarding what is just??? Body counts of these countless, no-count people? In this still W.A.S.P/C world of the past centuries, you gotta' be kidding.
When the clock strikes thirteen, it will either be over or a new beginning.
Until this motley crew we call HUMANITY finishes playing out this era's collective "Play," we won't know.
And that's the way it is on Sunday, July 4, 2010, with the small-town marching band members playing their young hearts out one more time for John Phillip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever."
/cm
Pentagon and Washington have been lying about body counts, collateral damage , wounded , displaced innocents since day 1.
They have a huge PR budget to control information and the media,and have done a great job. There is a small percentage of Brain dead , non thinking Americans that still believe the venom that is spewed by hardcore war mongering profiteers.
General MyCrystal is a hero, he spoke his mind. And I believe that our elected officials and our military have a no clue about nation building in the middle east.They can sweep in and destroy a country, and thats what we expect of them in a real time of war, but to ask them to be the world police, is a fantasy of the greedy elite imperial greed masters.
And 9/11 is a huge hole of untrue events.
Our country has been hijacked by neocon imperial war mongers.
Greedy bastards who would sacrifice thousands of lies, fear monger to push draconian laws like in the patriot act, and would create one black flag event after another to keep its stolen powers.
Lets remember simple facts, neither of these country's attacked us as a declared state of war using a military.
We went into these country's based on lies and poor revengeful logic. Mostly manipulation to gain control of the middle easts oil.
Liberation,freedom and democracy my ass, hell, the patriot act is stripping us of those freedoms.
Thank you General MyCrystal , now General Petraeus, its time to get us out of these country's, get back to the states, and clean house over here, our country needs to to save the constitution. Our three branches of government have lost there way and forgotten their oaths.
Bet they remember their swiss bank accounts.
BornFreeMen , after being subjected to 24/7 , warrant surveillance by right wing Christian stazi network of gang stalking torture freaks and AA recovery bastards,for three years, I wont be celebrating the 4th tonight or anytime soon.
I wont celebrate the United Stazi of America.
But wait- who ever expected the military to give accurate
accounts of the civilians they killed?
you could try consulting Marc Herold, who has at least tried to keep track- he also gives the names.
i don't know if anyone else is doing this.
My favorite CNN headline that I saw today July 4,,
Horses stampede and kill one and injure 20 others..
The animals understand how ignorant humans are !!!!!!!!
The very fact that this thread has so few posts compared to more sexy topics such as economics and the oil spill undelines once again to me that the value of non-white human lives in the western world is low to non-existent. Many people here on CD claim to be liberals and progressives. But where is your outpouring in a 1000 posts the paroxysm of outrage that any nonhypocritical humane person would feel on the death of little children while holding their Mom's hand and playing near them, children who are black, brown and yellow. And this slaughter also brought about by largely white thug killing machines who are coddled as "troops" and "our boys" by the doting populace in America and Europe. This complete callousness in the "average Joe" in Amurka and Europe has always puzzled me about the West, which gave us the Enlightenment, Rousseau, Voltaire, Newton and Einstein. That is why I do not have much respect for the average Joe, since it invariably, by first hand experience and by observation over decades, brings to my mind the mental image of a fat, red-necked, rudy tea-party subhuman. Sorry, but stories of mass murder of children for no just cause at all do not help in erasing that image.
Here on CD, it is clear that this topic of kids dying by drone and bullets have absolutely no effect on the moral and ethical sense of the vast majority of the commentators, who are among the more informed among the general populace. How can anybody outside the western world can ever hope that whites in general ( with probably 10% exception) will ever come to terms with the new reality in the world today in which they form only 20% of the world's population but consume 70% of its output and resources. It is precisely to maintain that planet destroying consumption they are engaged in wars against the weakest peoples on 4 continents - - South America, Africa, Central Asia and Australia - - and the mass killings of innocents, especially angelic little children.
Now please do not try to be sophisticated and give me some stupid sound bite such as "shit happens in war" or that "wars are dirty, people get killed in them." Then some stupid white political scientist may remind me of a saying by that German Aristo-fascist Bismarck that "war is a continuation of politics by other means."
The sooner we bury these sound-bites of nonsense carried along by the literati in the west as great "wisdom", the better the human race will be.
In the final scheme of things, the white old codgers 50 and 60 years or over who are in charge of the decision making apparatus in the west should recognize the limitations of their knowledge, which is pathetically low about the things that count - - science, technology and mathematics - - (pun intended) - -, and they lack imagination to use these intellect resources for the betterment of humankind. They keep on trying to use tools and techniques taught to them by the political process and study of history written again by by historians who did not study any science, including geography, but honed their writing skills on literature, and who do not understand the simplest of economic issues or wealth and poverty and the possible elimination of the latter by wide circulation of money and knowledge of Nature.
I myself belong to that generation, which calls itself the baby boom generation, and it made claims to being progressive by adopting the hippie lifestyle and some luke warm protest at the Vietnam War. All this sanctimonius stuff they used to lecture their fathers has now been conveniently forgotten in their own reprehensible greed and callousness towards the weak and the needy, especially of skin hues other than pink. But I ask any of them and CD people reading this:
Are you sure that your children and grand children will not pay a very heavy price for your vileness?
Are you sure that the nonchallence you exhibit today, can be sustained, even in the near future?
By near future, I mean during the next 5-10 years. If the rich white population feels now that it is invincible and the status quo is eternal in which you can keep on consuming 70% of the world's resources, largely by stealing them at gunpoint with your militaries, and be only about 20% of the world's population, boy are you in for a very rude and painful awakening. Do not leave your grand children a legacy of extreme pain and death. Share now and give a hoot. Time is short for you.
I read Common Dreams because it is a progressive news organization where I can find people of logic, reason and knowledge. People who care about the victims of oppression and war. Many of the progressive people who write posts also have been human rights and peace activist for years doing everything possible to peacefully change the U.S. policy of aggression against people of other nations and America's neglect and injustice against U.S. citizens especially the poor, sick and incarcerated. There are many who realize that the oppressed include the troops and all Americans who have been enslaved by the lies of the government they trust blindly. Enslaved by the corporate controlled media lies and distortions. I am constantly being told that, " Freedom isn't Free" as a reason for sending troops to kill and be killed. My answer is that "Freedom isn't free, it is totally dependent upon truth and justice." We find the truth and a quest for justice and peace for all people including Afghanistan civilians at Common Dreams.
" There are many who realize that the oppressed include the troops..."
After reading up to this part of your post, I realized that a lot of Germans felt the way you do about the Nazi Wehrmacht and the SS. Try telling that to a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. You epitomize what I point out is wrong with the part of west that has not been enlightened by the Enlightenment. It includes too many phony "progressives" like you.
When is freedom worth a murder? For if the freedom one professes is taken at the point of a gun with a "maybe" future incident on the horizon? It is murder and 33 billion additional monies for the murderous endevour and nothing for unemployed citizens is the equivalent of Marie's "feed them cake" in France. Tony
Kucinich opposed the Afghan War almost all the way and Barbara Lee from the get go when there were still hundreds of Al Qaeda in the country. Today there are less than 100 by the Obama Administration's own admission. Is it time to end the war?
You have to remember that al Qaeda had training bases when NATO first invaded Afghanistan 9 years ago. NATO should have wrapped it up in 6 months - but the US wouldn't let them. I don't know of any Republican who ever voted against war funding, who ever apposed the war, or who appose the war now. Still, it is now Obama's war, he owns it now. As long as you have people in the US who are proud to have their children die in this benighted war or who support those who are proud to have their children die in it for nothing, it will continue. All the political powers of the nation's two winged party are too intimidated by those proud folk or folk who are proud of their proud folk to appose it. There is just an unstoppable machine of "God bless America", and "America love it or leave it", and exclusivity, and excessive consumption of what God gives them full right to, and imperial hubris, and American entitlement, and the "Promise Land of God Fearing, Christian Europeans" for these wars of empire to stop.
Have you ever seen pictures of Berlin after WWII. Prepare for a bumpy ride. By the way, support Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich, and Al Greyson.
People talk about "Supporting Our Troops!"
I support our troops wholeheartedly. I support them so much that I want the bases closed, the wars ended, and the "troops" (our kids) brought home to earn their pay by fighting the oil spill, rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, cleaning and maintaining our parks and public places.
By not having these endless bases and fortress embassies around the world we could trim the Pentagon budget, not to zero, but just take a trillion or two off the top and put it back into the nation that it stole from. That money could be used to relieve those who are now becoming homeless due to rapacious banksters. It could return the funds that were stolen by the government from Social Security and Medicare, thus reducing that lamented deficit. We could have a first class medical system in this nation instead of big Med's and big Pharma's congressionally protected greed. It could rebuild and fund our schools so the teachers are once more allowed to actually teach, not teach by-rote memorization of standardized tests. It could fund students getting a quality college education without going in hock for most of their working lives to pay off their education loans. People could again afford to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. It could be used to rebuild our own nation, bringing our manufacturing and other jobs home from where greed has outsourced them. It could be used to promote prosperity rather than austerity. Finally, millions around the world could live out their lives in peace.
There are a lot of things we could accomplish, if we really supported our troops.
Sigh.
" I support our troops wholeheartedly. I support them so much that I want the bases closed, the wars ended, and the "troops" (our kids) brought home to earn their pay by fighting the oil spill, rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, cleaning and maintaining our parks and public places."
I support your support, mate.