On December 10, Marc Herold, a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire, released a report about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Relying on news accounts from India, Pakistan and Europe, the study put the number of civilian deaths from US air raids at 3,767. Such a high toll, the report stated, resulted directly from the Pentagon’s tactics: the decision to rely on high-altitude air power, the targeting of infrastructure in urban areas and the repeated attacks on heavily populated towns and villages. The report, Herold asserts, documents “how Afghanistan has been subjected to a barbarous air bombardment which has killed an average of 62 civilians per day” since the war began on October 7.
Herold’s report has received wide coverage in Europe. An article in the London Times stated that while conservative estimates put the total figure of civilian deaths at around 1,000, “it may be considerably higher. One recent unofficial report by an American academic said that the death toll among civilians could be closer to 4,000.” Using Herold’s figures, some writers have asserted that more civilians have died in Afghanistan than did in the September 11 attacks, a development, they said, that undermines US claims to be fighting a just war.
In the United States, by contrast, the Herold report has received scant attention. The network newscasts, the newsweeklies and most top dailies have largely ignored it. More generally, they’ve had little to say about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. The New York Times, which in its “Portraits of Grief” has so carefully memorialized the lives of the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center, has run little about the innocents who have perished in Afghanistan. Rather, it has applauded the Pentagon’s performance in the war. In a front-page article headlined, “Use of pinpoint air power comes of age in new war” Eric Schmitt and James Dao wrote that the conflict in Afghanistan “will be remembered as the smart-bomb war.” As they explained it, “Satellites, electronic-eavesdropping planes and human ground spotters worked together more reliably than ever, enabling distant commanders to direct warplanes to targets with stunning speed and accuracy.” The “relatively small number of civilian casualties” that resulted, they stated, “helped the United States maintain the support of friendly Islamic nations.”
Such an analysis closely follows the Pentagon line. When asked about reports of civilian casualties, Donald Rumsfeld has vigorously denied them. “I can’t imagine there’s been a conflict in history where there has been less collateral damage, less unintended consequences,” he has said.
The US air raids do seem to have been remarkably accurate. But, in even the most precise campaigns, bombs inevitably go astray, and even those that do hit their mark can cause unintended damage. Hamid Karzai, the pro-American head of Afghanistan’s interim government, has himself expressed concern about the mounting civilian toll. And in early January, a UN spokeswoman condemned a bombing raid on Qalai Niazi, a village in eastern Afghanistan, in which, she said, fifty-two civilians had died. The Pentagon, citing intelligence reports, insisted that the village was full of Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders. When Edward Cody of the Washington Post went to investigate, he found wads of bloody hair and flesh pounded into the ground and children’s shoes scattered about the rubble of blasted-out houses. Based on this as well as eyewitness accounts, Cody concluded in a front-page article that many villagers had indeed been killed in the incident.
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In an admirably evenhanded account in the Post (one of the few papers to scrutinize the issue), Karen DeYoung, referring to the Herold study, stated that “many with long experience in such assessments are skeptical of any firm accounting.” However, she added, those observers “are equally skeptical of the Pentagon’s virtually routine denials, no matter what the source.” DeYoung went on to quote a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who said that the organization had buried “hundreds” of bodies around each of several battle sites, although it sometimes had a hard time distinguishing civilians from combatants. “Unfortunately, I fear that there have been quite a few civilian casualties from all sides,” the spokesman said.
Curious about Herold’s report, I downloaded it from the Web (pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold). Its twenty-seven pages include quotes from eyewitnesses, excerpts from news accounts, photos of maimed civilians and charts and tables laying out the day-by-day toll. Interspersed throughout is Herold’s own analysis, which immediately made me skeptical (he calls the US bombing “criminal” and accuses the “mainstream corporate media” of “lying”). But what about the substance of his report? In an effort to check it, I chose one incident from his list, an October 11 bombing raid on the village of Karam, west of Jalalabad. The Taliban, Herold relates, claimed that 200 civilians were killed in the attack; the Pentagon dismissed that as vastly exaggerated. Herold, relying on a half-dozen news sources, concluded that 100 to 160 civilians had been killed. Via Nexis, I found several clips on the incident, written by journalists taken to the village. They found convincing evidence that many civilians had been killed; exactly how many, though, no one could say. From this Herold’s estimates seem to be on the high side but substantial enough to warrant a closer look.
Why have American reporters been so reluctant to explore so important a matter? No doubt the remoteness of the sites in question has been a factor, but even more important, I believe, have been the Pentagon’s aggressive denials, plus the general popularity of the war. Back in October, as images of leveled villages began appearing on American TV screens, CNN chairman Walter Isaacson sent a memo to his staff ordering them to balance clips of civilian destruction in Afghanistan with reminders of the Taliban’s harboring of terrorists, saying it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” In a period in which a lot of video was coming out of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Isaacson told the Post‘s Howard Kurtz, “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Clearly, concerns about appearing unpatriotic continue to inhibit the press’s efforts on this score.
Even if Herold’s figures do turn out to be accurate (and he has since raised the estimated toll to more than 4,000), it could still be argued that given what the United States has accomplished in Afghanistan–the overthrow of the Taliban, the routing of Al Qaeda, the restoration of some freedoms, the start of a long reconstruction campaign–the price paid in terms of civilian casualties has been low. It could also be argued that as part of the rebuilding effort, the families of Afghan victims should receive special assistance, much as have the victims of September 11. At the very least, we need to know how many such victims there are.
