Estimates suggest US bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians
Seumas Milne
Thursday December 20, 2001
The Guardian
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.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
A fairy tale at Christmas
Coverage of this war has played down the civilian deaths and 4m refugees, feeding a new US doctrine of terror
Madeleine Bunting
Monday December 17, 2001
The Guardian
It's all settled then - this really does seem likely to prove a war that ends before Christmas. Any day now Bin Laden should be blown up in a cave, and then we can settle down to our turkey and Christmas pudding. We can send cards and sing carols about peace and goodwill without a chorus of daisy cutters in the background. Christmas is a time when, above all else, we like to feel good about ourselves; we give to charities, we give presents, we offer hospitality and we remember those lonely old relatives. If it works, the objective is to feel expansive, warm-hearted and generous. So all good wars must end before Christmas.
Indeed, this one is shaping up in every respect to having been a jolly good war. It is fitting all the criteria for what a modern war should be - very neatly. It's been short; it's been successful; and we've had right on our side. Not a day is going by without another al-Qaida bomb factory or terror manual being discovered; and now an Advent goodie, the smoking gun himself, Bin Laden, chortling as only an evil genius would do over his handiwork. Even the ascetic Mullah Omar comes in for demonisation as his vast compound in Kandahar allegedly exposes his corrupt egotism while his people suffered in poverty (worst of all, it appears, he had execrable taste in interior decor).
So this year, as we pull the crackers, we can happily reflect on the fact that those dear Afghans are now flying their kites and listening to their screeching music (though it's a mystery as to why they would want to) once again, thanks to us. To top it all, feeling really good usually requires some measure of feeling superior; so round off that seasonal glow with some gloating at the idiots who opposed this war.
All so neat, just too neat, and I don't buy it. The coverage of this war raises more questions than any other war I can remember (and I'm not even talking about the video tape). Of much more concern has been the way the coverage has been heavily skewed towards the military conflict: it's been a boys' war. We've followed planes and bombs, we've watched plumes of smoke from distant brown hills, we've seen picturesque Afghan fighters hanging about in mountain hideouts - and now it has culminated in a grand finale, a mountain shoot-out. It's been as gripping and as plausible as one of the black-and-white westerns we'll watch this Christmas, only fewer dead bodies. Very occasionally, we've glimpsed that people are getting killed - the images of the castrated Taliban fighter pleading for his life before he was shot, and the massacre at Qala-i-Janghi. But our sympathy for these near-feral wildmen is limited - they got what they deserved, they were Taliban after all.
What has been strikingly absent is the humanisation of this war. Unlike in Bosnia and Kosovo, our screens and newspapers have not been filled with the terrible trauma of recognisable individuals and their families. The cameras haven't hovered on the faces of shocked tearful children, and the impotent anguish of their parents and grandparents. On a few occasions, reporters have reached a bombed village, but it's hard to tell the rubble from the hovels, and estimates of the dead are always circumspect; there has been no sense of outrage about these atrocities. Yet the number of Afghan non-combatants reported killed (how many more do we not know about?) in this war is edging close to those who died in the World Trade Centre. The latter has provoked global outrage, the former is accepted with an astonishing equanimity as a necessary price to pay for two very uncertain prognostications - Afghanistan's peaceful future and ridding the world of the evil al-Qaida.
But the even bigger story that has barely surfaced in recent weeks is the huge dislocation the war has caused to the entire population. The World Food Programme estimates that as many as 3m-4m people have fled their homes because of the bombing. Médecins Sans Frontières claims that Maslakh - a name that should be on every newspaper front page - is the biggest refugee camp in the world. The few aid workers there haven't even been able to assess its population, which is believed to be somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 and growing; new arrivals have recently shot up from 20 a day to 1,200. It is one of five refugee camps around Herat, but the route there is too insecure for western journalists. They are largely sticking to the main cities and Tora Bora (there are a few notable exceptions, such as the Sunday Telegraph's Christina Lamb, who sent a horrifying report from Maslakh).
But it's not even those dusty, cold refugee camps that are the WFP's biggest headache, according to its Rome spokesman: at least it knows where they are. It is the refugees who have fled into remote rural areas, many of whom could die - or may already have died - a bitter death from starvation and cold this winter.
Part of the explanation for why we are not hearing this is the unprecedented danger of reporting this war, in which as many journalists as western combatants have been killed. Partly it's because journalists always depend for help on local participants in a war who want to use the western media to advance their cause. But the only Afghans helping western journalists are the Northern Alliance, and they have no interest in shocking a western public with the suffering caused by the bombing.
Meanwhile, the Taliban were hopelessly ignorant. They always buried the bodies too quickly for western cameras. Just compare them with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which ensured a storm of western moral outrage at Serbian ethnic cleansing by taking the cameras to remote villages to show them the dead bodies. Nor did the Afghans flee into Pakistan in sufficient numbers to provide the kind of disaster footage always inexplicably described as "biblical".
All of this has conveniently dovetailed with the west's pursuit of this war. So we've been left with a straightforward moral narrative: good triumphs over evil. It's been this kind of easy moralising that kicked me into the idiots' camp from the start. The US may have wanted to exact revenge, but it was never something anyone could claim to be morally right. The Americans have unleashed a principle of foreign policy - it is legitimate to fight terror with even greater terror - that is causing havoc in the Middle East, could cause more havoc in Kashmir and is being used from China to Zimbabwe to warrant brutal repression.
The fact that it hasn't yet caused the kind of havoc feared in Afghanistan (such as a protracted guerrilla war) is small recompense when we choose to overlook that we are not getting anything like the full picture of the suffering it has caused in this most tragic of countries.
· Email m.bunting@guardian.co.uk
Destruction should not follow retribution
To insist that the most powerful countries respect international law is not to be an "appeaser", writes Michael D. Higgins, in response to Niall O'Dowd's attack on Irish critics of the United States's war against Osama bin Laden
As one of those who studied and taught in the United States, I am well aware of the generosity and rich diversity of that society.
I experienced it at first hand from as far back as the Sixties when I lived in the mid-west. Even then, at the height of the Vietnam War, it was important to draw a distinction between critique of US foreign policy and what was described crudely as "anti-Americanism".
It is the best gift of friendly nations to exchange opinions on matters of moral and political import with mutual respect for what is perceived and accepted as the common pursuit of shared values.
The appalling acts of terrorism of September 11th have been condemned unequivocally by all shades of political opinion in Ireland. One would need a heart of stone not to be moved by the hurt and loss of the relatives of those who died in New York and Washington.
Again the heroism of the firefighters and paramedics, hundreds of whom died in the line of duty, has been recognised. It is right that it should be so, that they should be honoured and admired.
What was most moving, however, was the statements of those relatives who stressed that the perpetrators should be brought to justice and that any retribution which brought grief and destruction, such as they were experiencing themselves, to civilians in another part of the world was not what they sought.
To describe those, however, who support the letter and spirit of international law, as appeasers who would have endorsed Hitler or who deserve a place in Dante's Hell as Niall O'Dowd suggests is outrageous.
The United States is entitled to defend itself. It is, however, important in such a defence that the principles of the United Nations charter, the protections of the Geneva Convention and the full range of securities applicable to civilians, be respected.
The United Nations is built on the principle of respect for International Law by the most powerful members of the UN as well as the weakest.
It is reasonable surely to ask that actions against terrorism not fall outside the parameters of international law. To ask that necessity, proportionally and external verification of military actions be observed as required by article 51 of the UN charter is not anti-American.
It is rather to vindicate what has been built up as our shared human alternative to war and militarism.
Ireland as a member of the Security Council of the United Nations, elected by the votes of 130 nations, has a special responsibility to be scrupulous in respecting that mandate.
We must be active in strengthening security by addressing the roots of terrorism in poverty, exclusion, absence of basic rights and the degradation caused by unfair trade and crippling debt.
This is not offered as an alternative to pursuing the perpetrators of terrorist actions, both civilian and state, and bringing them to justice. Are we not reasonable also to ask why the proposed international criminal court is not supported by the most powerful country in the world?
Are we to accept without question the conferring of immunity on those who serve in the military and the imposition of sanctions on those who would invoke the authority of such an institution as the International Criminal Court?
As we witness superior air power being chosen as an alternative to diplomacy in the Middle East is it not a time to make the case for international law and the dialogue of diplomacy however difficult?
To reduce the position in which we now find ourselves to trading simplicities is surely dangerous. The position of a country like Ireland on the Security Council is one of moral influence. It is surely not required that we suspend our critical awareness of the requirement of international covenants. To take such a position cannot be equated with being soft on terrorism.
There is of course a section of opinion that suggests we should just tell ourselves that small countries do not count, that we should just pull our forelock before the powerful. Such a view is not consistent with support for the United Nations which is now more necessary than ever.
Irish people are also anxious to be consulted when decisions are taken in their name. It is a basic requirement. The public ask for distinctions to be made between a Untied Nations force, a United Nations-led force and a United Nations mandated force.
The distinctions are not academic. The compliance with international law made possible in each case is different. Irish people are also anxious and willing to participate in public discussion of foreign policy.
We may indeed be at a crossroads in relation to foreign policy here. We can acquiesce and drift in an atmosphere of increasing militarism or we can be vigorous in seeking to vindicate and extend international law.
To choose the latter is an option also open to those who frame the foreign policy of the United States.
Indeed it is a most appealing prospect if the resources now committed to armaments - $864 billion in 1995 of world expenditure compared to $16 billion on the four preventable diseases - were released for the structural tasks of eliminating the basis of conflict.
If the most powerful countries commit themselves to the basic protections of international law and related institutions such as the International Criminal Court, it is surely our best guarantee of a world free from human loss and the destruction of war.
To believe in this is neither to be an appeaser nor to be crudely "anti- American". There are very many in the United States from whom we never hear on Sky television or CNN who support such values.
I can assure Niall O'Dowd of my sincerity in sympathy and solidarity with the victims of terrorism. This is not only entirely consistent but required by the values I have outlined.
Finally, I am also sure that I am not alone in expressing my revulsion to the idea expressed by a columnist in The Irish Times (An Irishman's Diary, Wednesday, December 12th) that war is a reality where "the rules binding civilisation together are dissolved, all shared commandments are suspended, all common civilities abolished, all declared decencies dissolved".
The Geneva Convention was brought into existence to protect us from such savagery. I know that there are many in the United States who will agree with such a view.
Michael D. Higgins is the Labour Party spokesman on foreign affairs