Costs of war: The civilian casualty issue

Unless US forces in Afghanistan are able to do better on the civilian-casualties issue, the war there will be lost, Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly said last month.

Testifying before Congress on the challenges facing the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates said: “I believe that the civilian casualties are doing us enormous harm in Afghanistan, and we have got to do better in terms of avoiding casualties … because my worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of the problem, rather than as part of the solution. And then we are lost.”

Gates said the issue “was the primary subject of my conversations with both [Afghan] President [Hamid] Karzai and [US commander] General McKiernan and his staff when I last visited Kabul.”

And last weekend, in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen called the trust of the people in Afghanistan “the coin of the realm.”

“Building it takes time, losing it takes mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective,” he wrote.

“It doesn't matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard,” he went on. “What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it … You cannot defeat an insurgency this way.”

Of course he is right. And that is why, if western forces are not actually losing in Afghanistan, they are not on the road to victory, either.

NATO and UN figures, disclosed by the whistleblower website Wikileaks last week, show that civilian casualties in Afghanistan rose by 40-46 percent last year.

The issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan was first highlighted by US aid worker Marla Ruzicka. CIVIC Worldwide, the non-profit she founded before her murder in a suicide car bombing in Baghdad in 2005, released a report this week which concluded that “The international coalition in Afghanistan is losing public support, one fallen civilian at a time.”

A poll released earlier this month by the BBC and ABC News backs up that bleak assessment. It found that support for US and international forces had plummeted - with civilian casualties a key cause.

The number of Afghans who believe US forces have performed well in their country has more than halved since 2005, from 68 percent to 32 percent. Confidence in NATO forces is little better. Just 37 percent of Afghans now say most people in their area support NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), down from 67 percent in 2006. And 25 percent now say attacks on western forces can be justified - nearly double the 13 percent who believed that in 2006.

The survey was carried out by the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research in late December and early January. Field workers conducted face-to-face interviews with a random national sample of 1,534 Afghan adults in all 34 of the country’s provinces.

It found that civilian casualties in US and NATO air strikes were a key factor in declining support. Seventy-seven percent of Afghans said such strikes were unacceptable, because the risk to civilians outweighed their value in fighting insurgents. And Afghans do not buy the US military’s contention that civilian casualties are the responsibility of Taliban insurgents because they operate from civilian areas. Forty-one percent of respondents blame poor targeting by international forces, whereas only 28 percent mainly blame insurgents for concealing themselves among civilians.

But despite all the talk about a new approach, and the fine words from Mullen and Gates, US officials continue to see the problem of civilian casualties primarily as a public relations problem, rather than an issue of tactics.

Gates put it this way in his testimony to Congress: “Let's take the usual case where the Taliban have used civilians as shields or mingled among them and civilians are killed in the course of a coalition operation. That information is all out on the internet and very widely distributed. And our approach in the past has been, well - it's actually been very American. Well, let's go figure out what the facts are, and then we'll decide what to do.”

A new approach was needed, Gates said. “Instead of arguing how many there were or whether there were any, we need to say if there were innocent civilian casualties, then we deeply regret this. And we will make appropriate amends. Then go investigate it. Then find out the facts.”

“We need to be out there faster than the Taliban in characterizing these incidents,” he concluded.

Indeed, Gates revealed that it was this aspect of the problem which had been the top of his agenda in his visit to Afghanistan. “What I told President Karzai the last time I saw him early this winter and what my guidance to General McKiernan was we've got to reverse the way we do this. The instant we believe there may have been civilian casualties, we have to be out there.”

Gates also criticized the efforts by Karzai to highlight the issue. “I don't believe that his rhetoric has been helpful,” he said.

But - as one Afghan official confirmed to ISN Security Watch - the reality is that Karzai only went public with his complaints after waging a long behind-the-scenes campaign. “After many negotiations, I finally raised my voice in protest against the civilian casualties,” he told the opening session of the Afghan parliament in Kabul. “Some of our allies didn’t like it but I didn’t do this as a hostile act rather it was just an effort to bring some reforms.”

But the most revealing - and damning - fact about the US approach to the issue is that military commanders do not intend to institute any changes in tactics to try and reduce civilian casualties, rather than change perceptions about them.

Mullen, at a recent press briefing at the Washington Foreign Press Center ruled out any change in the “rules of engagement” or ROE - the standing orders that determine when US forces can strike and what precautions they must take to avoid civilian casualties.

“We think we've got it about right right now,” he said.

Unless there is a change in this stubborn refusal to see that it is the reality of civilian casualties, not the perception of them, which is fatally undermining Afghan support for international forces, it is hard to see how the problem will be fixed - and hard to see how the US can avoid, in Gates’ words “going the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.”