How many Afghan civilians will die in Obama’s war?

[Karmadillo]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/pers-d07.shtml

7 December 2009
In the media coverage of Barack Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, one question goes unasked and unanswered: how many thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians will die as a result of US military aggression?

The dispatch of an additional 30,000 US troops, reinforced by at least 7,000 more from other NATO countries, means a colossal increase in the level of violence. By the time the Obama surge is complete, the size of the US military force in Afghanistan will be triple the number stationed there in the last years of the Bush administration.

In the cynical doublespeak of the Pentagon, the counterinsurgency warfare strategy developed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, is aimed at “protecting the population” and “degrading the Taliban.” What this means in practice is that those Afghans who resist foreign occupation will be considered to be Taliban and targeted for destruction.

The counterinsurgency doctrine developed in Iraq by McChrystal and the current head of the US Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, is not a military innovation, but rather the revival of the methods applied by American imperialism in Vietnam (as well as by France in Algeria and Britain in countless colonial wars). The largely rural population of Afghanistan is to be herded into large aggregations where they can be more easily controlled, especially in the country’s major cities like Kabul and Kandahar, and those who resist will be classified as supporting the insurgents.

McChrystal also envisions a major incursion of US troops into the city of Kandahar itself, which is patrolled by Afghan government forces by day but dominated by Taliban forces at night. This could well mean house-to-house, Fallujah-style fighting in a city of nearly 3 million people.

There is no doubt that as a result of the US escalation, the civilian death toll will skyrocket, although the American media is unlikely to report this honestly. Instead, those killed by American bombs, missiles, shells and other weaponry will be described as “Taliban,” “terrorists” or, in the latest parlance, “bad guys.”

<edit>

Up to now, there has been very little effort to account for the civilian death toll in the Afghanistan war. According to reports by independent monitoring groups, the systematic collection of data on civilian fatalities began only in 2007, six years after the US invasion and overthrow of the Taliban. The UN has created a civilian casualty database but does not make it accessible to the public. Official semi-annual reports from the UN have placed the death toll at about 2,000 in both 2008 and 2009.

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[kenny blankenship]

1. "We don't do body counts"

Time spent counting is wasted time you could be a-killin' instead. And what we don't keep figures on can't be used as evidence in trial against us.

[HamdenRice]

2. Who knows? How many would die in a Taliban drive to take Kabul?

Also unknowable, but probably comparable if the last Afghan civil war is any measure.

[sui generis]

3. Bait AND Switch

We're all blathering about Afghanistan, looking at the shiny thing, exactly as expected.

What is it we're not looking at?

For the moment I am with Obama on this particular call - but I still have a deeply unsettling feeling that there is a much more important thing we're not seeing on the foreign affairs stage.