OxBlog

# Posted 8:03 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

COLLATERAL DAMAGE: The civilian casualty issue going to come up at the OxDem panel discussion, so I thought I'd better be prepared. Here's what I've found so far:

Radical firebrand Marc Herold, a professor of the University of New Hampshire, has conducted an allegedly comprehensive study which concluded that Allied bombing resulted in the death of about 3,600 Afghan civilians. In an essay blasting the the "corporate" media's undercounting of Afghan casualties, Herold observes that

those who generate low overall numbers of civilian casualties stress the faulty intelligence provided by Afghans [they absolve themselves of responsibility], point to an alleged proclivity of the Taliban to inflate such figures, and uncritically accept that the new precision-guided munitions kill mostly the 'bad guys.'

Others like myself point to a very simple, powerful single explanation: The thousands of Afghan civilians who perished under U.S bombs did so because U.S. military and political elites chose to carry out a bombing campaign using extremely powerful weaponry having high margins of error and with huge killing and blast radiuses in largely civilian-rich areas."

Unsurprisingly, Herold goes on to demand that American officials be brought up on war crimes charges.

Frankly, I was surprised that Herold's casualty count was so low. Even so, I am inclined to place a lot more trust in a comprehensive study by the LA Times which put the casualty figure at somewhere between 1000 and 1200. (Sorry, no permalink.) According to author David Zucchino,

“The Times reviewed more than 2,000 reports of civilian casualties from US, British and Pakistani newspapers and international wire services. After eliminating duplicate accounts, the survey identified 194 incidents of civilian casualties from the start of the bombing until Feb. 28, when the air campaign was largely completed. The reported death toll, including estimates in some cases, was between 1,067 and 1,201. The Times excluded 754 civilian deaths reported by the Taliban but not independently confirmed, as well as 497 deaths that were not identified as civilian or military.

“These numbers suggest a very low civilian casualty rate compared with earlier Afghan conflicts. During battles among warlords in Kabul in the early 1990s, more than 50,000 civilians were killed according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. In the western city of Herat, an estimated 20,000 civlians were killed in a matter of days by Soviet air raids in March 1979, just a fraction of the estimated 670,000 civilians who died during the ten year Soviet occupation.”

Typical. The Soviets always have to do everything on a grand scale, just to show off.

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