SOMETHING FISHY
By Harvey M. Sapolsky on June 22, 2009
Afghanistan is a country of 33,000,000 people that has been at war for 30 years, has a life expectancy of only 44 years, an infant mortality rate 151/1000 births, and experiences about 660,000 deaths from all causes per year. Life is hard, brutal and short in Afghanistan where the ethnic divisions are sharp and communications limited by harsh terrain and even harsher poverty.
Coalition forces are fighting a cruel enemy in Afghanistan who uses suicide bombers against civilians. I recall recent video of Afghan schoolchildren happily walking near a military checkpoint on their way home and being killed by in a bombing as a truck speeds into view and detonates. The Taliban threaten collaborators with public executions. Whole families have paid the price for the resistance of a few. The government is by all accounts corrupt. Americans who have had tours there report that they are struck by the culture of lying that pervades Afghanistan.
The UN has said that 2,118 civilians died in the Afghanistan war last year, more than 60 percent at the hand of the Taliban and its friends. Of the 829 attributed to coalition action 552 were said to be from air strikes. During that year coalition forces flew over 19,000 close air support sorties and dropped 3,369 munitions. Precision weapons and better procedures obviously limit the collateral damage of air operations in Afghanistan. In the Second World War allied operations, artillery as well as air strikes, killed 50,000 French civilians. In Vietnam the air delivered munitions vastly exceeded that dropped in all theaters in the Second World War.
And yet claims that over a hundred civilians were killed in air strikes on May 4th in distant Farah province made in support of engaged coalition forces are widely circulated and believed, and now have become the cause for policy changes. The Afghan government, soon to face elections, seemed to endorse the claims. Despite on site investigations that found the numbers significantly exaggerated (on the order of five times) and no serious fault in the operation, American leaders up to the highest level have apologized and offered compensation. The new commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, has just said that air operations will be further restricted.
Death is a frequent visitor in Afghanistan, mostly not because of war. Air power is our advantage especially in a country where our forces are spread thin and the distances are large. Precautions have limited greatly the number of weapons dropped and how air power is employed. But only a little deception apparently is needed to put this advantage in jeopardy. Soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan. If there is no will to inflict casualties then there should be no will in absorbing them. Try as we may to avoid it, war kills the innocent.
Tags: Afghanistan, civilian deaths
Tweet This
Share on Facebook
Digg This
Bookmark
Stumble
9 Comments
Can’t disagree – people get killed in wars – and it’s probably naive to assume that fewer people will be killed by concentrating on the deployment of ground forces as against air strikes.
As an aside – and this is a bit of a distraction from your main argument – if you’re going to point towards difficulties caused by a ‘culture of lying’ in Afghanistan, it feels reasonable to raise the truely ‘fishy’ decisions made by politicians from the US, Britain, Australia… etc. in the context of a broader War on Terror – and the really devastaing consequences these have had.
The very reason why Afghanistan is a hotbed of terrorism is because powerful nations have been meddling in it endlessly.
The recent War on Terror has been a source of great irony for me as the best way to prevent terror emanating from Afghanistan is to get the hell away from it. Instead it was invaded again, and a ridiculous puppet regime was installed, headed up by a western educated, ex oil company executive.
You couldn’t make it up.
And people think Obama is a source of change in American politics.. well he has just initiated a surge of American military and intelligence in ‘Afpak’. Personally, I cannot understand it.
Stephen – was there really any alternative post 9/11? The entire world expected the US to ‘do something’ in response to the attacks, and the domestic electorate demanded it. With Bin Laden based in Afghanistan, and the Taliban openly refusing to hand him over, it’s not like there were many options on the table. I think it would be naive to simply expect any country (but especially the US) to stand by after being attacked in such a way.
I have no objections to America going in to a country who is harbouring a terrorist who perpetrated a specific crime under American jurisdiction – in this case getting Osama who was based in Afghanistan. The problem is terrorism is not something that is solved by old fashioned war. Osama is nowhere to be seen and instead a 4th world country is now even more dangerously unstable for the world and for its citizens than ever before.
Terrorism is a law and order issue and in a country with no adequate law and order, such as Afghanistan, hot pursuit (for want of a better term) of terrorists is not something I’m going to argue with. Turning it into a protracted war, that crosses borders and seems to only have the purpose of fly swatting and propping up a puppet regime is where naivete stops and hard cold realisation begins. Bombing a stone age country to smithereens to smoke out a rag tag bunch of terrorists is not proportionate or rational. Its no wonder this event and the war on terror surrounding it perpetuates so many conspiracy theories!
Was there an alternative post 9/11 – sure there was. In fact, the Bush administration carried out the alternative in their second term when they reinvested in diplomacy and leaned towards a more balanced use of American power. America (or bush’s team specifically perhaps…?) over-reacted to an extraordinary event in the heat of the moment – who can blame them? But 8 years later to be entrenching further in a pointless occupation that only creates what it seeks to destroy (terrorism and regional instability in the most resource rich and vital geopolitical area of the earth) is insane.
Perhaps it is me who is insane….
What was the alternative for pursuing Osama though? It’s not like Bush could send the NYPD into Afghanistan? And the Taliban weren’t going to have US forces in the country without making a war of it. So what does hot pursuit mean exactly?
The characterisation of Al Qaeda as rag tag terrorists doesn’t really seem accurate either, perhaps – ‘one of the the most sophisticated terrorist organisations in the world’ works better?
And I don’t think any of the US administration planned to be in Afghanistan 7 years down the line (‘we don’t do nation-building’) – which was naive perhaps – but again, without the possiblity of engaging diplomatically with the Taliban (even if Bush had wanted to, domestic pressures and international realities dictated otherwise) and without the possibility of pursuing it as a law and order issue, i don’t see many alternatives.
It’s easy to criticise – viable alternatives are more difficult to come up with.
presumably, the answer now that the US is at war in Afghanistan, is to try and withdraw without horrendous losses, and with some kind of stable government in place.
At this stage, it’s hardly a clear choice as to whether that means a surge of more troops to stabilise things followed by a withdrawal, or simply a straight withdrawal. Obama is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The issue of air power also isn’t clear – perceptions of its role in Afghanistan matter – the US has to be seen to care about civilians (hearts and minds…etc). If air power is a good option for minimising deaths of innocent people, as Professor Sapolsky seems to suggest, the US military needs to make that argument much more clearly than it has done so far.
Talking about these things always brings out the realist side of me.
criticism is easy, but then thats what academics do. Coming up with viable alternatives isnt what academics do unfortunately. They either build fantastic (and often very interesting) theorems that mean sod all to reality in the tangible here and now policy-making sense or they analyse events after the fact.
The alternative to pursuing Bin Laden was one that didn’t indiscriminately kill a ton of innocent civilians and lead two nations, and possibly soon a third (Pakistan) into full blown civil war as a result of the effects of hosting occupying forces leaving them desperately worse off than before. The Taliban did not carry out 9/11. The alternative was to use the intelligence services of which America and her allies have adequate provision of to hunt down and bring to legitimate justice those who committed 9/11 (and other) crimes. It wasn’t to hoover up random kids and stick them in a cage in cuba and drop bunker busting and cluster bombs and start an 8 year war with a deposed foreign government. Bush misfired. I expected that sort of bravado politics from him, but not from Obama. Perhaps Obama will prove me wrong, but as Condoleeza Rice’s speechwriter wrote in ‘foreign policy magazine’ this month, Obama has become ‘George W. Obama’ with regard to the War on Terror. Unfortunate. Whoever said change was the buzzword of that election? AS ever, foreign policy remains a constant across the partisan divide.
This issue is as divisive as ever, and I love having these debates as the whole war on terror politicised a whole generation and in that sense at least it had/has a very constructive use.
I think terrorism is a law and order issue despite the difficulties. “you cant go to war with a noun” I believe someone very famous said in 2002 (who was it darn it). And I dont accept that Al Q’aedia is anything close to a sophisticated or organised terrorist operation. 9/11 was sophisticated and organised… but we havent seen anything even remotely close to that in the years since. The people who ‘did’ 9/11 are dead. An ?unfortunate? consequence of suicide terrorism. I grew up with terrorism on my steets, bombs going off from time to time, soldiers and tanks on the streets etc… If britain decided to bomb northern ireland to deal military justice (revenge) to a few IRA members who bombed Manchester and London would that be viewed as necessary? (crap analogy but theres something in it surely). Was it not Robin cook who admitted ‘Al Quaedia’ was’nt even a cohesive group – but the name came from a codeword the western intelligence agencies had designated to cover an umbrella of unconnected and independent anti-western islamicists?
terrorism is a fact of life in all its forms and manifestations. an unfortunate and inevitable side effect of progress in an unbalanced and unfair world. You cannot ‘bomb it into the stone age’ (as Rumsfeld and co loved to say). ‘Sh*t happens’ in the parlance of our times.
Headlines like this aren’t going to help – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8115814.stm
I think the use of Drones incite especially emotive and angry responses because they’re perceived to increase the risk to civilians on the ground, whilst removing it entirely for US pilots.
Harry—I think the observation that the use of drones (UAVs)provokes special anger is on target. US and coalition forces have found a way to fight without risk to themselves. The particular case that I cite involved manned aircraft (F-18s and B-1s), but given their use of precision weapons they were likely flying at save altitudes. The use of UAVs is not a total bad for civilians because it does allow “pilots” more time to assess the targets than if they had to come in close and risk death or capture.