www.guardian.co.uk
The innocent dead in a coward's war
Estimates suggest US bombs have killed at least 3,767
civilians
The price in blood that has already been paid for
America's war against terror is only now starting to
become clear. Not by Britain or the US, nor even so
far by the al-Qaida and Taliban leaders held
responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York
and Washington. It has instead been paid by ordinary
Afghans, who had nothing whatever to do with the
atrocities, didn't elect the Taliban theocrats who
ruled over them and had no say in the decision to
give house room to Bin Laden and his friends.
The Pentagon has been characteristically coy about
how many people it believes have died under the
missiles it has showered on Afghanistan. Acutely
sensitive to the impact on international support for
the war, spokespeople have usually batted away
reports of civilian casualties with a casual "these
cannot be independently confirmed", or sometimes
simply denied the deaths occurred at all. The US
media have been particularly helpful. Seven weeks
into the bombing campaign, the Los Angeles Times only
felt able to hazard the guess that "at least dozens
of civilians" had been killed.
Now, for the first time, a systematic independent
study has been carried out into civilian casualties
in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics
professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based
on corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN,
eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news
agencies around the world, Herold estimates that at
least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between
October 7 and December 10. That is an average of 62
innocent deaths a day - and an even higher figure
than the 3,234 now thought to have been killed in New
York and Washington on September 11.
Of course, Herold's total is only an estimate. But
what is impressive about his work is not only the
meticulous cross-checking, but the conservative
assumptions he applies to each reported incident. The
figure does not include those who died later of bomb
injuries; nor those killed in the past 10 days; nor
those who have died from cold and hunger because of
the interruption of aid supplies or because they were
forced to become refugees by the bombardment. It does
not include military deaths (estimated by some
analysts, partly on the basis of previous experience
of the effects of carpet-bombing, to be upwards of
10,000), or those prisoners who were slaughtered in
Mazar-i-Sharif, Qala-i-Janghi, Kandahar airport and
elsewhere.
Champions of the war insist that such casualties are
an unfortunate, but necessary, byproduct of a just
campaign to root out global terror networks. They are
a world apart, they argue, from the civilian victims
of the attacks on the World Trade Centre because, in
the case of the Afghan civilians, the US did not
intend to kill them.
In fact, the moral distinction is far fuzzier, to put
it at its most generous. As Herold argues, the high
Afghan civilian death rate flows directly from US
(and British) tactics and targeting. The decision to
rely heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban
infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily
populated towns and villages has reflected a
deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots
and soldiers, not with those of their declared
Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians. Thousands
of innocents have died over the past two months, not
mainly as an accidental byproduct of the decision to
overthrow the Taliban regime, but because of the low
value put on Afghan civilian lives by US military
planners.
Raids on targets such as the Kajakai dam power
station, Kabul's telephone exchange, the al-Jazeera
TV station office, lorries and buses filled with
refugees and civilian fuel trucks were not mistakes.
Nor were the deaths that they caused. The same goes
for the use of anti-personnel cluster bombs in urban
areas. But western public opinion has become
increasingly desensitised to what has been done in
its name. After US AC-130 gunships strafed the
farming village of Chowkar-Karez in October, killing
at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official felt able
to remark: "the people there are dead because we
wanted them dead", while US defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld commented: "I cannot deal with that
particular village."
Yesterday, Rumsfeld inadvertently conceded what
little impact the Afghan campaign (yet to achieve its
primary aim of bringing Bin Laden and the al-Qaida
leadership to justice) has had on the terrorist
threat, by speculating about ever more cataclysmic
attacks, including on London. There will be no
official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no
newspaper obituaries or memorial services attended by
the prime minister, as there were for the victims of
the twin towers. But what has been cruelly
demonstrated is that the US and its camp followers
are prepared to sacrifice thousands of innocents in a
coward's war.
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