DEFENSE Secretary Robert Gates vowed to Afghan President Hamid Karzai that US generals will take action to stop the rising tide of Afghan civilian casualties, the most terrible being the recent slaughter of 90 wedding guests in the western province of Herat.
According to the United Nations, almost 1,500 civilians have died in the first six months of this year, 330 of them in August alone. Most of these casualties were caused by airstrikes. The tide of innocent death is clearly rising, as is the toll of foreign troops confronting the Taleban — 200 dead so far this year, more than were slain in the whole of 2007.
The death toll among Taleban insurgents cannot be assessed accurately. All armies exaggerate their successes. In Vietnam the Americans became obsessed with body counts. Indeed Washington at first insisted that up to 40 militants had been killed in the Herat attack. What the Americans attacked was a wedding party. With intelligence that bad, both before and after the airstrike, it is hard to place much confidence in official figures.
It must be certain though that many insurgents are being killed or wounded and of the latter many die of their injuries or are permanently maimed because of limited access to medical treatment and life-saving surgery. As is only to be expected, some coalition commanders claim that the Taleban are deliberately putting civilians at risk by mounting ground attacks near communities, in the expectation that when the predominantly US-flown NATO airstrikes come in, innocents will be killed and injured. The British assert one Taleban ambush was mounted from a school in the knowledge that pupils would be hurt when troops counterattacked the complex.
It seems likely that some Afghans have somehow been feeding false intelligence to the Americans to bring down a rain of fire onto innocent civilians. They may be acting at the behest of the Taleban. But why should the coalition commanders fall prey to such manipulations?
The key to stopping the rising tide of civilian dead rests in far better intelligence than is currently being collected and perhaps in better analysis and use of the information that is already available. As happened after their Iraq invasion, the Americans quickly began to lose the intelligence battle in Afghanistan. The reason was simply that foreign troops did not enjoy the trust of the locals who could have given them important intelligence.
They either did not trust NATO forces to protect them from Taleban reprisals or they did not trust the foreigners — period. This latter distrust stems from the abject failure of the international community to deliver on much of its promised aid. Life did not get better with the Taleban’s ouster. Indeed for many outside of urban areas, it has actually got worse. Thus until rural Afghan communities can believe in both the security and the development which is supposed to be at the heart of the NATO mission, they will withhold intelligence and so make themselves targets for US warplanes, which are too often fighting “blind”.
