The number of Afghan civilians killed in armed conflict surged to a record 2,118 people last year as the Afghan war turned increasingly bloody, the U.N. said in a new report Tuesday.
Insurgents were responsible for 55 percent of the deaths, but U.S., NATO and Afghan forces killed 39 percent, the report said. Of those 829 deaths by the forces, 552 were blamed on airstrikes.
Civilian deaths have been a huge source of friction between the U.S. and President Hamid Karzai, who says such deaths undermine his government and the international mission.
I'll not hang my hat on the fact that in Iraq (with a smaller population) during the worst of the jihadi and death squad murder rampage during the 2006-2007 period, a couple thousand dead could be the toll of a few weeks. This provides some perspective on the scale of civilian deaths but does not address responsibility or impact.
It is responsibility that is the question. And here the UN does a great favor to the Taliban by placing the blame on them for just 55% of the deaths. The 277 deaths from small arms and artillery, presumably, and 552 airstrike deaths are assumed to be fully the fault of the United States and our Afghan allies.
The airstrikes especially are usually part of the enemy's propaganda campaign to silence our planes that devastate Taliban groups roaming the countryside. But when the enemy fights among innocent people, it is not our fault if our bombs kill nearby innocents when we target combatants. We are not obliged to hold fire against the enemy just because innocents are nearby. Nor is not our fault if civilians aiding the enemy are later proclaimed to be innocents by the Taliban when the UN teams and reporters come around with cameras and notebooks. These deaths properly should be apportioned to the Taliban for responsibility.
But the UN doesn't address this aspect of the war. An American or NATO bomb means the responsibility lies with our side, as far as the UN is concerned.
Look, I'm realistic. If the enemy has succeeded in portraying our airstrikes as criminal and the Afghan public is getting mad about it--regardless of whether the scale of killing was dwarfed by the Iraq experience--we have no choice but to hold our fire more often than not in these circumstances. Alienating Afghans will do far more harm to our war effort--and in the long run get more of our troops killed--than letting a particular group of Taliban get away for the moment. We would order our troops to charge through machinegun fire to gain an objective. We can expect our troops to hold fire when the public relations of killing even civilians helping our enemies will harm our cause. It isn't fair, but let's not start whining about what is or is not fair when the mission is to win the war.
Certainly, we must work to counter the accepted story that civilian victims of airstrikes are our fault and develop tactics that minimize civilian casualties. But until we do, we can't give the enemy this type of UN-sponsored propaganda victory.
