How many civilian casualties are too many? Nyier Abdou takes toll of civilian lives lost in the war in Afghanistan Talking about civilian casualties resulting from the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan is an elaborate game of "He said, She said." The players in this game trade barbs and accusations across continents, from Kabul to Washington, from Geneva to Kandahar. Pinning down a reliable estimate of civilian deaths since the US-led coalition launched its war on terrorism last October is thus a slippery business. No source is reliable, be it the Pentagon, Afghan tribal leaders or eager reporters scribbling down numbers offered by shell-shocked locals and filtered through a translator. Questions abound: was the convoy of vehicles destroyed by American forces on 20 December in the Gardez area filled with Al- Qa'eda leaders, as the US maintains? Or was it a group of tribal elders winding their way to Kabul for the inauguration of the new interim leadership, as locals insist? Was a US Special Operations Forces' AC-130 gunship responding to anti-aircraft fire when it strafed the town of Des Rawud, in the central Uruzgan province, on 1 July? Or did it act impulsively on faulty intelligence, mistaking celebratory gunfire at a local wedding for enemy fire? Eros Bosiso, spokesman for Asia at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the ICRC does not have any figures for the number of civilian casualties since US operations began last autumn. Bosiso stressed that it is "difficult to gain first-hand information," noting that seeking out the "right information" can be a wild goose chase. Asked if the US could be doing more to avoid civilian casualties, Bosiso emphasised the importance of holding true to the Geneva Conventions, the so-called laws of war. Bosiso noted that the US should only be attacking "clear military targets" and that the ICRC is concerned about the choice of targets. "Okay, sometimes there can be mistakes," says Bosiso. "But for us it's important to state it clearly." "The rules of humanitarian law require that those who plan an attack do everything feasible to ensure that the targets are not civilian," says Vienna Colucci, director of networks for the US branch of the London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International (AI). "When there's doubt, the presumption should be that the target is civilian." Colucci told the Weekly that, like the ICRC, Amnesty International has not put forward an estimate of the number of civilian casualties due to the US bombing campaign. "We are, however, concerned about the recent increase in civilian casualties caused by targeting errors," Colucci said. "We have called on the US government to investigate military attacks that have resulted in civilian deaths and to make those findings public." The Afghans say that some 50 civilians were killed in the 1 July attack in Uruzgan, while almost 120 were wounded. Of these, 25 of the people killed were said to have been at a wedding party. A report that ran in The New York Times on 21 July ("Flaws in US Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead") focused on accusations that the US depends too heavily on air power for fear of exposing American troops on the ground. Many feel that the US's squeamishness about American casualties has directly led to more civilian deaths, which are filed under the neutral and unemotional term "collateral damage". Sidney Petersson, an aid worker who has spent the last five years in the cities of Jalalabad, Kabul and Taloqan, in the north of Afghanistan, and who is currently the country director for the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA), based in Peshawar, Pakistan, has had a lot of experience with the human toll of US bombing campaigns, both in Afghanistan and in northern Iraq. Petersson stressed that his opinions were his own, and not representative of the SCA, before agreeing that it seemed the US was performing a grim calculus that valued a US soldier's life more than an Afghan civilian's. "During my time inside Afghanistan, when the civil war was going on and a lot of people were killed, you very seldom read anything about those victims," Petersson told the Weekly. "Now you sometimes read about the losses of Afghan lives, but I will say that you read more about one injured American than 10 killed Afghans." US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld has lauded the accuracy of the bombing campaign and insists that civilian casualties are relatively low. The US-based aid and human rights organisation Global Exchange has had a team in Afghanistan investigating civilian deaths for six months. So far, the group says it has recorded 812 civilian deaths. Although Global Exchange says the number is expected to climb as their teams reach more remote areas, this number still seems surprisingly low. Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defence Alternatives (PDA), at the Commonwealth Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the Weekly that a conservative estimate of civilian deaths would be between 1,200 and 1,400. "Most other estimates so far seem to fall in the 600 to 1,000 range, but none of these are comprehensive -- not even the recent Global Exchange figure, as all freely admit," says Conetta. Anatol Lieven, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, agrees that the Global Exchange figure of 812 seems rather low. "On the other hand, the figures of thousands of civilian dead which are sometimes bandied about are almost certainly far too high," he told the Weekly. But Amnesty International's Colucci argues that the number of civilian casualties is not the issue. "The US government is obliged under international humanitarian law to do everything feasible to protect civilians from attack. There are no circumstances under which it is ever acceptable to target civilians, either deliberately, or as the expected incidental consequence of an attack." It has been claimed that the US is too reliant on questionable intelligence from local warlords, who may have their own agendas and enemies. Acting quickly, and with tremendous force, on such intelligence, may be exposing civilians to enormous risk, as was clearly the case in the 1 July bombing in Uruzgan province. "Much of US intelligence derived from Afghan sources has indeed been extremely flawed, and often biased," says Lieven. "In some cases, the US commanders can well be accused of negligence in acting on such information." Aid worker Sidney Petersson is less diplomatic. "To ask the warlords where to bomb is to ask the devil to sit down and eat with you," he says. "Of course the warlords used the situation to kill their enemies. Civilians got killed and everybody blamed the Americans, who had to find out a plausible explanation." Asked what the US could do to reduce civilian casualties, Petersson had a straight answer: "Stop bombing and use ground forces to the greatest possible extent." One question raised by the nebulous issue of civilian casualties is who counts as a civilian? In all likelihood, the US's definition is very narrow. Would a Taliban civil servant be a legitimate target? What about the families of Taliban fighters? Is being a civilian "sympathiser" a crime punishable by death? The Carnegie Endowment's Lieven tucks this debate under the "eternal question in anti-partisan warfare". Noting that it is never easy to distinguish between "soldiers" and "civilians", Lieven says that every army involved in this kind of warfare has mistakes and crimes to their name. "But certainly, if the US thought that [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar or one of his lieutenants was attending the [Uruzgan] wedding party, and bombed it in an effort to kill them -- regardless of casualties among all the other unarmed people present -- that would be a war crime, akin to the recent Israeli crime in Gaza," Lieven suggested. "But we don't know that this was the case." An American investigation team, the second since the 1 July bombing fiasco, is currently in Uruzgan to conduct an in-depth investigation of the incident. A UN team, working separately, is reported to have produced a preliminary report that suggests a much higher civilian toll and indicates that US officials cleared the scene of crucial evidence not long after the incident took place. The report, leaked to London's The Times, makes it all the more dubious that the US team will produce a comprehensive and transparent report. Lieven says the only reason we can hope to see a thorough report is that the event's aftermath was so assiduously recorded by Western journalists. "If the US team produces a complete whitewash job, they will simply not be believed," Lieven said. "But they will almost certainly try to whitewash what happened as far as possible." The US's efforts to suppress the findings of the UN team and downplay reports of civilian casualties does an enormous disservice to the image of the US among the development and diplomatic community working to rebuild Afghanistan. Ten months into the US campaign in Afghanistan, many locals are beginning to see America as yet another occupying force. The SCA's Petersson recalls how, like the Americans, the Taliban was welcomed in 1996 for the order and stability they provided after years of civil war. When the Taliban "showed another face", support waned. Petersson says a similar dynamic is at work with the Americans, who have shown an uglier side, "ignoring the value of Afghan life". As the US chases the ghost of Al-Qa'eda, Afghan lives continue to fall to pieces, just as they did during the civil war and under the Taliban. "The Afghans I know, which is quite a lot, ask who gave the US the right to come here and do what they are doing just now," says Petersson. "I think it's a just question. In my opinion, the ordinary Afghan wants the Americans to go home."
