UN
fudges Afghan casualties By
Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON,
KABUL - The number of civilians killed in United
States Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last
year was probably several times higher than the
figure of 80 people cited in the United Nations
report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan
published last week, an Inter Press Service (IPS)
investigation has revealed.
The report
also failed to apply the same humanitarian law
standard for defining a civilian to its reporting
on SOF raids that it applied to its accounting for
Taliban assassinations.
The March 9
report, produced by the Human Rights unit of the
United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan
(UNAMA) jointly with the Afghanistan Independent
Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), said a total of
80 civilians were killed in
"search and seizure
operations" by "Pro-Government Forces" in 2010.
But AIHRC commissioner Nader Nadery told
IPS the figure represented only the number of
civilian deaths in night raids in the 13 incidents
involving SOF units that the commission had been
able to investigate thoroughly. Nadery said the
AIHRC had received complaints from local people
alleging civilian casualties in 60 additional
incidents involving raids and other activities by
Special Forces.
"We did not include them
in the report because we were unable to collect
the exact figures for casualties, which takes
time," Nadery said.
The AIHRC is
continuing to investigate those 60 events,
according to Nadery, and will report on the
results in the future.
The March 9 report
refers to "60 incidents of night raids that caused
civilian casualties", but does not inform the
reader that only a fraction of the total
casualties alleged in those incidents were counted
in the total.
At least one of the 13
incidents investigated by the AIHRC was an air
strike called by an SOF unit. The 80 deaths from
at most 12 incidents or less would suggest an
average of at least seven civilians killed per
incident. If the sample of night raids
investigated is representative of the total of 60
incidents of SOF night raids about which civilian
casualty complaints were generated, the total
number of civilians killed would be around 420.
The UNAMA-AIHRC report shows a total 406
assassinations of civilians by "Anti-Government
Elements" reported for 2010.
But the
UNAMA-AIHRC report uses a strict humanitarian law
definition of "civilian" in regard to victims of
assassination by "Anti-Government Elements" that
was not applied to victims of US night raids. "If
Afghan soldiers traveling from one place to
another, on holiday, with no weapon and no
uniform, are killed, we count them as civilians,
and the same with policemen," Nadery told IPS.
Mayors and district chiefs, who participate in
military planning with North Atlantic Treaty
Organization military commanders, were also
considered as civilian victims of assassination,
according to Nadery.
A large proportion of
those killed as "Taliban" in SOF night raids,
however, would also qualify as civilians under
this definition.
Matthew Hoh, formerly the
senior US foreign service officer in Zabul
province before his 2009 resignation, was familiar
with the target list for SOF kill or capture
raids. He told IPS the list included Afghans
holding every kind of non-combat function in the
Taliban network, including propagandists and
workers who make improvised explosive devices
(IEDs).
UNAMA team leader Denise Lifton
conceded that the report had made no effort to
ascertain what positions had been occupied by
those who had been killed in US raids. "We have
not looked at the functions, per se, of those [who
are] accused of being Taliban and are killed," she
said in an e-mail to IPS.
Night raids
generally kill Taliban personnel in their own
homes, and thus outside the context of a military
operation. If the same humanitarian law criterion
used in counting victims of Taliban assassinations
were applied to the alleged Taliban targeted in
SOF night raids, the victims of killings during
those raids would have to be considered as
civilian casualties.
US Special Operations
Forces acknowledge only 38 civilian casualties,
including killed and wounded, as a result of night
raids, as reported by Reuters on February 24.
Sunset Belinsky, a spokesperson for the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF),
insisted in an e-mail to IPS that such raids are
"intelligence driven", and that "there is a
rigorous process involved in identifying targets".
But although Belinsky acknowledged to IPS
last September that the total of 1,355 insurgents
"captured" in the raids from May through July 2010
included "suspected insurgents", she was unable to
provide any figures on how many of those 1,355 had
later been released.
Belinsky did not
respond directly to a request from IPS this week
for the information on what proportion of
insurgents captured in 2010 had turned out not to
be insurgents. The continued refusal of ISAF,
under the command of General David Petraeus, to
release that information suggests that it would
reveal a very high proportion of the several
thousand Afghans killed last year as "Taliban"
were simply civilian supporters or victims of
misidentification or a malicious intelligence tip.
The remarkably sharp rise in 2010 in the
number night raids carried out by General Stanley
McChrystal, ISAF commander until June 2010, and
the even more spectacular increase in the raids
under Petraeus in the same year, raises serious
questions about how the US military could avoid a
massive increase in the killing of individuals
with non-military functions in the Taliban as well
as people with only tangential or no connection to
the insurgency.
According to a document
from the Afghanistan war logs released by
WikiLeaks last July, in October 2009 the target
list for SOF night raids, called the Joint
Prioritized Effects List (JPEL), included 2,058
names. That list provided the intelligence basis
for a pace of some 90 raids per month in late 2009
- a huge increase from the 20 per month just six
months earlier.
Significantly, at that
moment, Petraeus was warning the White House
against a strategy of relying on more SOF raids
and a smaller conventional force footprint.
"There's just a limit to how many precise targets
you have at any one time," Petraeus said,
according to the account in Bob Woodward's book
Obama's Wars.
But from May through
July 2010, according to ISAF figures, SOF units
launched 3,000 night raids - a 50-fold increase
over the rate of only a year earlier - in which
they reported killing nearly 1,100 Taliban
"leaders" and "rank and file".
A 10-fold
increase in raids, which implied a similar
increase in the size of the target list, could not
have been carried out without a dramatic
relaxation of the already very loose criteria for
including someone on the JPEL, according to
Matthew Hoh.
"Commanders are under
pressure to find targets for these raids because
it has become a metric of success," Hoh told IPS.
He likened that broadening of the targeting
criteria to the Central Intelligence Agency
getting much greater latitude on targeting of
drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan in early 2008,
expanding the target list from a handful of
al-Qaeda leaders to virtually anyone tangentially
associated with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Hoh said one result of the frantic effort
to expand the target list is bound to be an
increased use of intelligence tips from
individuals or tribal enemies.
That
appears to have been a factor in the killing of
President Hamid Karzai's cousin, Yar Mohammad
Karzai, in a night raid in the Karzai ancestral
home in Kandahar province, March 9. The raiders
also took his son away with a black bag over his
head.
Yar Mohmmad Karzai had told
relatives repeatedly over the years that he feared
that another cousin of the president's, Hashmat
Karzai, who had headed a large security firm for
years and then ran unsuccessfully for parliament,
would seek to arrange for a US attack against him
by planting false information with the Americans.
Shah Noori reported from Kabul.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian
and journalist specializing in US national
security policy. The paperback edition of his
latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of
Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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