Yes, American and NATO forces are air-raiding villages and killing civilians—and losing the war, as American and NATO commanders have been warning repeatedly since summer.
Civilian Casualties: Totaling the Tallies
According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which released the latest casualty figures on Sept. 18, 2008, There were 1,445 civilian casualties in the first eight months of 2008, an increase of 39 percent compared to the same period in 2007, when there were 1,040 conflict-related deaths.
Exactly 800 killings, or 55 percent of the total, are attributed to Taliban and other insurgent forces, with some 551 deaths attributed to suicide bombings and 142 to summary executions carried out by the Taliban. That leaves some 45 percent of the casualties attributable to American and NATO forces, mostly as a result of air raids. American forces are overwhelmingly responsible for those air raids, since airstrikes are primarily performed by US aircraft. America’s Central Command Airforces (CENTAF), reports that in December 2007, American forces conducted 87 airstrikes, compared with just seven by British forces and three by French forces.
Civilian Casualties: U.S. Air Strikes
According to the United Nations, 395 civilians were killed in operations involving air strikes during the first eight months of 2008 – over two-thirds of the total number of casualties inflicted by pro-government forces. “The most high-profile incidents include an air strike on a wedding party in Nangahar province on 6 July, that resulted in the death of 47 civilians, including 30 children – as well as the 22 August Shindand event, which is believed to have resulted in the deaths of up to 62 children.
The U.S. military at first denied that more than a few civilians were killed in the Aug. 22 attack. General David McKiernan, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, did not request an investigation until Sept. 7, even though the United Nations had established within days of the raid that civilian casualties had been high. In early October, a Pentagon investigation conceded that more than 30 civilians were killed in the raid.
McCain-Palin’s Attack on Obama Over “Air-Raiding Civilians”
In early October 2008, the McCain-Palin campaign released a misleading campaign ad, titled “Dangerous,” that claimed Sen. Barack Obama disrespected U.S. troops in Afghanistan by accusing them of "just air-raiding villages and killing civilians."
The ad lifted the line out of context in a speech Obama gave in August 2007, when he said: “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.” That’s the same message that American and NATO commanders have been delivering.
“We can’t kill our way to victory,” Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Congressional committee in September 2008. Mullen said: “Afghanistan doesn’t just need more “boots on the ground.” It needs more trucks on those roads, more teachers in those schools, and more trained judges and lawyers in those courts. Foreign investment. Alternative crops. Sound governance. The rule of law. These are the keys to success in Afghanistan.”
A British officer, Capt. Leo Docherty, warned that NATO forces couldn’t kill their way to victory as far back as 2006 when he said, “We’ve been grotesquely clumsy — we’ve said we’ll be different to the Americans who were bombing and strafing villages, then behaved exactly like them.”
Planned vs. Unplanned Air Strikes
Needless to say, American forces don’t set out to raid civilians. But in the debate over American military procedures and consequences, it’s important to make the distinction between planned American air strikes, which rarely cause civilian casualties, and unplanned air strikes.
As Human Rights Watch reports, “Planned attacks allow the US and NATO to use civilian risk mitigation procedures, including formal risk estimates to model and minimize civilian casualties. This includes a “pattern of life analysis,” which looks for civilians in the area for hours or days before an attack using “eyes on the target” ranging from ground observers to technical reconnaissance. According to NATO Judge Advocate General (JAG) staff, the US and NATO also require positive visual identification of the target during a planned strike, allowing the pilot to look for civilians and call off an attack based on those observations. Planned strikes also allow the US and NATO to develop a target over time, thereby using far more detailed intelligence to understand who is and is not in the target area.”
Civilian casualties have resulted mostly from unplanned air strikes—strikes called in by ground forces seeking tactical air support in the middle of an engagement with the enemy, or reacting to sudden and frequently unreliable tips by Afghans on the ground. Those tips have a notorious history, in Afghanistan, of being motivated less by fact than by personal acts of revenge peddled by local tribal leaders or warlords, who know that Western forces can sometimes be manipulated to their ends.
In a number of cases involving civilian casualties, however, Human Rights Watch reports that airstrikes sometimes are used “when forces are pursuing insurgents and are uncertain about the extent of civilian presence in the area,” suggesting that “the US is not taking all feasible precautions during prolonged battles, including using adequate forces to minimize civilian harm, employing low-collateral damage bombs, and positively identifying the locations of combatants and civilians.”
