Ghosts of Afghanistan: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths by Steele Jonathan

Author:Steele, Jonathan [Steele, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781846274329
Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd
Published: 2011-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

[8] WHO KILLED ASAQ?

“Interrupting most of the country’s international aid programs for three months only made matters worse.”

—WESTERN HUMAN RIGHTS ANALYST

NOT ONE AMERICAN soldier or pilot was killed in toppling the Taliban. Two months after launching his attack on Afghanistan, Bush was able to celebrate one of the most one-sided triumphs in the history of warfare.

Afghan casualties, by contrast, numbered in the hundreds, civilian and combatant. But how were they to be counted with certainty? Would an accurate figure ever be found? While the U.S. bombing was under way, the Taliban allowed only a handful of reporters into Kabul and Kandahar. They were too busy and insecure to do much research on the issue. Meanwhile, U.S. authorities were not interested in keeping a toll of the human destruction they were wreaking.

Only when the guns fell silent was it possible to begin to piece the story together. It seemed important to try. The Afghan campaign was the first attempt by a Western state to achieve regime change in a poor country without losing the life of any of its own ground troops. It relied entirely on techniques of asymmetric warfare, massive and sustained bombing raids from the safety of the air as well as missile strikes from distant ships and submarines. Designed to terrorize and destroy an almost completely defenseless enemy, this new type of killing in which the attackers operated in a largely risk-free environment had a sanitized video-game quality, with warriors firing missiles from remote aircraft cockpits or sitting in front of screens in comfortable offices on the ground and using their computer mouse to direct a pilotless attack drone.

The story of what happened to the other side needed to be told.

Reporters for Western news organizations tried to reach a credible death toll by visiting the sites of large-scale U.S. bomb strikes and interviewing hospital officials and bereaved family members in January 2002. Carl Conetta of the Project for Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute, a think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts, analyzed these reports and calculated that from October 7, 2001, to January 1, 2002, between 1,000 and 1,300 civilians were killed. On the basis of the amount of bombs dropped and missiles fired this meant the air campaign in Afghanistan was four times more deadly than NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999. Although the Pentagon boasted it had used “smart weapons,” Conetta argued that the campaign failed to set a new standard for accuracy because of the mix of weapons used, the unreliable nature of intelligence and the decision to bomb al Qaeda and Taliban leaders while they were at home. This meant that civilians died because either the house contained the al Qaeda or Taliban member’s family, as was to be expected, or the wrong house was hit.

Marc Herold, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, used similar methodology and sources but added death reports from NGOs and non-Western media. Taking the end date as March 31, 2002, he calculated that since October 7,

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