Counting the dead

Marc Herold has penned a commentary for the Guardian today, putting his analyses of civilian casualties in Afghanistan into a broader context with some of the other studies conducted by the media and several NGOs. “In the eight months since I published my original study," Herold writes, "I have updated and corrected my database, and incorporated the civilian deaths resulting from British and US special forces attacks. My most recent figures show that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed between October 7 and July 31.” Apparently, he has completely backed off his first calculation of 3,767 killed between October 7 to December 6.

Herold goes on to conclude:

In war, counting is not value-free. To overlook or underestimate the civilian dead gives rein to the enthusiasts of precision-guided weaponry. It is an invitation to proliferation of war. The thousands of Afghan civilians who perished did so because US military and political elites chose to carry out a bombing campaign using extremely powerful weaponry in civilian-rich areas (the isolated training camps were largely destroyed during the first week).

For political reasons, it has been necessary to hide the human carnage on Afghan soil as much as possible from the western public. Given that many of the bombing attacks - such as those on civilian infrastructure (cars, clinics, radio stations, bridges) and those during November and December on anything rolling on the roads of southern Afghanistan - violated the rules of war, there are war crimes that need to be investigated. An inadequate count will make it impossible for the families of those wrongfully killed to get the compensation to which they are entitled. It will also impede international justice.

Herold’s original report came under heavy criticism once it was published. Proponents of the Afghan bombing, both liberal and conservative, excoriated him for denouncing the war but saying, in the words of Jeffrey Isaac, “nothing about how to protect the world from terrorism or secure the freedom of Afghans. He [Herold] voices concern for innocent civilians. But the alternative to the war is not the peaceful enjoyment of human rights by the Afghans.”

Flawed as his work was, it served a useful purpose in illustrating the point that nobody in the American media were at all concerned about reporting the effects of the war while the bombing was going on. Something’s very wrong when you have to turn to a relatively obscure professor from New Hampshire in order to get any sense of the casualties inflicted by our military campaign.

Drawing out the larger significance of the "Herold phenomenon" is not difficult. If we truly lived in an open society with a press remotely concerned with pursuing justice, and all sides of the story, then the information Herold tried to provide would have been readily available to anyone who kept up with the NY Times, Washington Post, or broadcast media. Instead, what we got was a media that actively lead the charge to war and seemed most concerned with whether the American flag was displayed prominently enough on their lapels, mastheads, and studios.