Afghan Civilian Casualties: Does Anybody Care?

In Monday's Guardian, Jonathan Steele wrote about the "Forgotten Victims" of Afghanistan. The subtitle of his report from Herat was, "The full human cost of US air strikes will never be known."

How very true, and perhaps purposefully so. Noam Chomsky predicted in December, in one of his best analyses since 9/11, that the actual number of casualties - mostly "silent casualties," from famine - will "very likely...never be known, by virtue of a guiding principle of intellectual culture: We must devote enormous energy to exposing the crimes of official enemies, properly counting not only those literally killed but also those who die as a consequence of policy choices; but we must take scrupulous care to avoid this practice in the case of our own crimes, on the rare occasions when they are investigated at all."

Getting back to the Guardian report, Steele notes that "as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention." After explaining the three main effects of the bombing - "massive dislocation," a disruption in "aid supplies to drought victims," and an "upsurge in fighting" which, subsequently, worsened the refugee crisis - he finally concludes with the obvious: "the nameless graves...will slowly be forgotten."