America’s Afghan Victims
In May 2009, another devastating US airstrike, this time in Farah Province, killed as many as 140 civilians, according to an Afghan government inquiry. In its wake, CENTCOM commissioned a study to “analyze incidents that led to coalition-caused civilian casualties,” according to a formerly secret briefing obtained by The Nation via the Freedom of Information Act. It found that the 2008 ISAF directive “could have mitigated impact of the Farah incident” but was evidently not followed. The findings also called into question just “how institutionalized this tactical directive” was and found that the rules of engagement were not up-to-date and synchronized.
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Bob Dreyfuss
The study focused a great deal of attention on “fighting the information war.” Briefing materials note that while the International Committee of the Red Cross and Al Jazeera were on the scene of the Farah attack in twenty-four hours, it took three days for the first coalition representatives to arrive and sixteen days for ISAF to issue a press release. “As a result,” reads the secret briefing, “first impressions in the media were established by the Government of Afghanistan, local community interests, and possibly by the Taliban.” ISAF, the study concluded, had ceded “the narrative to those whose interests did not align” with its own. According to a closing summary, the secret report called on ISAF to “engage in the battle for the narrative” in order to minimize the public relations fallout.
General McChrystal issued another tactical directive in July 2009, and in 2010 ISAF issued directives to discontinue the practice of firing warning shots, to limit night raids and to drive in a more courteous manner. “Whereas before, the rules were focused on the problem we had, which was dropping bombs on residential compounds, now they’re focused on any area where there might be a civilian,” said then-Col. Rich Gross, McChrystal’s chief legal adviser (now a general himself). At the same time, the United States was about to lose another battle in controlling the narrative: Pfc. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning was about to put the lie to the military’s long-held refrain that “we don’t do body counts.”
In July 2010, military documents made public by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the US military secretly maintained files relating to 4,024 Afghan civilian war deaths between January 2004 and December 2009 (also known as the Afghan War Logs). For the first time, the public was privy to secret, internal military reports—unprocessed intelligence from troops in the field—detailing the carnage occurring across Afghanistan.
While suggestive, the documents included only cases from the military’s raw operational reports. Larry Lewis said his investigation of civilian casualty incidents from 2001 to 2008 found very incomplete data. “There’s really nothing good out there,” he told The Nation. “I have tried to pull together some numbers that go back to 2007, but I will say…they’re wrong. They’re definitely incomplete, because all I could do was to go to US Army investigations that were initiated because of civilian casualties and use that as a source. But I’m certain there were other incidents that never had an investigation.”
Separately, the Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell was by now logging data on noncombatants killed and wounded by coalition forces from reports sent in by units in the field to ISAF Joint Command. But these data, too, were “inconsistent in type and quality,” according to Lewis and Sewall’s Joint Civilian Casualty Study. As late as February 2010, in fact, the commander of ISAF “was still asking straightforward questions such as whether US-caused CIVCAS [civilian casualty] incidents could be correlated with particular units and/or with that unit’s length of time in theater, and not receiving answers.”
In 2009, ISAF created another investigative body, the Joint Incident Assessment Team, which deploys to sites of reported civilian casualty incidents to conduct separate inquiries parallel to ISAF’s standard investigations. “A JIAT is used to quickly determine the facts when we have an allegation of a significant event such as a civilian casualty,” Air Commodore Michael Wigston of the British Royal Air Force, former director of air operations for ISAF Joint Command, explained to The Nation. The Joint Incident Assessment Team, composed primarily of ISAF personnel with two “Afghan partners,” then compiles a “factual narrative of events…based on interviews with people involved in the alleged incident.” It is, however, only a fact-finding group and is specifically directed to avoid “any issues that are the purview of a formal investigation.” Like other ISAF investigation teams, JIAT reports incorporate no independent experts, receive no outside oversight and are not publicly released.
In 2011, ISAF created the Civilian Casualty Mitigation Team, with a mandate to provide ISAF leaders with “strategic assessments and recommendations to prevent and mitigate CIVCAS.” With a mission statement asserting that the command “takes every effort to prevent and if necessary assess and mitigate each and every CIVCAS event,” ISAF built what it calls a “CIVCAS community,” including the Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell, the Civilian Casualty Mitigation Team, the CIVCAS Mitigation Working Group (which holds monthly meetings with Afghan leaders to discuss relevant issues) and the NGO CIVCAS Working Group (which does the same with NGOs). Methods of investigation were also refined and systematized.
As it developed and expanded, the CIVCAS community largely operated behind closed doors until—in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures—ISAF uncharacteristically opened its civilian casualty tracking operation to Science’s John Bohannon. “They were very forthcoming,” Bohannon told The Nation. “They would always say, ‘Look at this, look at that,’ always with an eye toward reducing casualties.”
After some negotiation, Bohannon was granted access to the data, publishing an article in Science in 2011 and making portions of ISAF’s figures available online. “Our database is 100 percent transparent,” said US Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, NATO’s director of communications in Kabul at the time. But ISAF released data on civilian casualties only by region and month, not on specific events. “I pushed them absolutely as far as I possibly could,” Bohannon says. “What they offered up front, at the beginning, was even less detailed and extensive.”
Just before publication, jittery high-ranking military officials asked Bohannon to postpone the story, he told The Nation, but his article was published without delay and, he later heard, was well received in military circles. Within a year, however, ISAF would cut off his access to the CIVCAS community and its data, while providing less than satisfying answers about the change in policy. “Now you’re back in this Kafka castle,” Bohannon says. “You don’t even get reasonable answers. You don’t get coherent answers.”
