An alert reader sent me a UN press release and photos and interviews of injured Afghan civilians today. The links are at the right hand side of this page. Portion of the press release reads:
“The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) has called for a dramatic new response to civilian casualties and injuries in Afghanistan today after the United Nations (UN) reported a 24% increase in civilian casualties in the past six months. The causalities were caused by both Taliban insurgency and NATO-ISAF actions.
ICOS is calling on the International Community and NATO-ISAF, to immediately respond to the release of the UN report with a new three part policy response that aims to “Avoid, Aid and Compensate” civilian casualties and injuries.”
The detailed report goes on to say of the period 1 January 2009 through 30 June 2009 that “the armed conflict intensified significantlythroughout Afghanistan in 2008 and in the first six months of 2009, with a corresponding rise in civilian casualties and a significant
erosion of humanitarian space. UNAMA Human Rights recorded 1013 civilian casualties for the period 1 January to 30 June 2009. This represents a 24% increase in casualties from the same period in 2008 when 818 civilians died. Most of the deaths continued to occur in the
South, South East, East, West and Central regions of the country. According to UNAMA’s figures 595 (59%) of these deaths were caused by AGEs (Afghan guerrilla elements) and 310 (30.5%) by international and national Afghan forces (PGF). The remaining 108 (10.5%) could not be attributed to any ofthe parties to the conflict.”
I do have to question why ICOS didn’t call on the Taliban to respond to the release of the report with a three part policy as well. After all, the UN report did say that most of the casualties were caused by AGE actions, and the Taliban is the principle AGE.
My own experience in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 tells me that US forces make serious efforts to avoid causing civilian casualties and when we do, we are generally quick to offer medical aid and compensation. I am pretty sure that NATO and ISAF are taking similar precautions and measures as well. Still, if it’s your family member who is killed injured, our good intentions are likely small consolation.
Many experts believe that we will lose popular support for our efforts in Afghanistan amongst the locals, and thereby the war, because of civilians casualties and should be more careful, use less firepower, less air power. Still, this is a little like the “cap and trade” debate. Just as it matters little if the US caps green house gasses if the developing world doesn’t, it matters little if the Taliban, without air power and relatively little firepower, still continue to kill more of their own people (or at least other Aghans) than NATO and ISAF do.
Of course history tells us that local support, though nice, is not essential. There was precious little support for the Union Army in Georgia in 1864, but the United States won that war decisively, corralling Confederate states back into the Union and abolishing slavery. Likewise, after killing 800,000 German civilians with air power in World War II, Allied occupying forces were not greeted with flowers by the surviving German population, but they occupied with little if any violent resistance and saw that Germany was reborn as a flourishing democracy and a solid ally.
Still, like Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, I have a Christian soul that tells me the right thing to do is be careful with the lives of non-combatants. And as Luttrell’s own experience in Afghanistan shows, most Afghan people, like people everywhere, return kindness with kindness, even kindness towards Navy SEALs. (See link at right.)
Civil Affairs at PKSOI Blog 
August 2, 2009 at 9:00 pm |
One of the basic shortfalls in American efforts in pacification is that we merely scratch the cultural surface, and in our arrogance believe that we fully understand the populations that we will be dealing with. We further compound that mistake by not actually looking at the successes we’ve had in the past. As a result we are constantly re-inventing the wheel, which takes time, that politicians don’t have, which results in increased pressure on the military, which in turn prompts an instinctive kinetic response.
I would urge all interested to read “A NATION CHALLENGED: THE PHILIPPINES; Echoes of an Era: Pershing Was Here”
By JAMES BROOKE, which can be found on the net. A short paraphrased summary here:
“When the United States seized Spain’s collapsing empire in 1898, it inherited in the Philippines a nearly four-centuries-old conflict between Catholics and Moros, a term imported by Spaniards who colonized this Asian archipelago a few decades after driving the Muslim Moors from the Iberian peninsula. For the Spanish, a ”juramentado” was a machete-wielding Muslim Filipino who had taken an oath to kill as many Christians as possible.”
General Pershing was assigned to the Phillipines twice, once as a troop commander, and later as a Provincial Governor. While General Pershing, as a troop commander, presided over the largest group of killings in a pacification campaign that cost about 15,000 Muslim lives, he is remembered differently in Zamboanga, and the surrounding provinces
In this city, where the general lived with his family, he is hailed for a series of public works projects: the municipal golf course, a 120-acre city park with a municipal swimming pool, several broad avenues lined with flowering acacia trees, and new wharves in the port.
Pershing is rated, to this very day, as one of the most brilliant of the American administrators — “he was the most knowledgeable and experienced,” said Josefina B. Lledo, a local historian, driving by Plaza Pershing, a central square that a grateful citizenry had renamed for the American, displacing a Spanish conquistador.
In addition to supplanting Spain as the guarantor of Christian rights here, the United States played a more nuanced role than that of military ”pacifier” in its relations with Muslims. The United States cut a deal with local sultans and traditional leaders. In return for their recognition of American power, the Americans would mandate religious freedom. ”The Americans were very tolerant of Islam,” said Hezekiah A. Concepcion, a Philippine history professor at Ateneo.
Photographs show that the first mosques to open in Zamboanga flew American flags. General Pershing appointed seven Muslim chiefs as deputy district governors and started The Sulu News, a newspaper published in Tausug, the main language of Muslims in the Sulu archipelago.
But with the political decision, from Washington, DC, to stress the imposition of American law over Islamic law caused conflict. The Americans imposed controls on weapons, encouraged girls to go to school, and moved to eradicate slavery, polygamy and kidnapping for ransom. Much as we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan today—more of “the American way is the only right way.”
”Kidnapping had been the core of the economy,” Mr. Concepcion, a Christian who grew up in Jolo, said of the hostage and ransom business that supported the Sulu sultanate through the 19th century. More recently, the Abu Sayyaf have financed their rebel activities over the last decade through kidnappings; as today opium is the cash crop of Afghanistan. Often, it sort of seems that total eradication is the answer; eradication of thought, word, deed, religion, and possibly even a race of people.
In the early 20th century, the Moro revolt was fueled by more than economics. The pride of unconquered peoples was at stake.
”The Aztecs, the Incas, and the Mayas fell before the swords of Spain, and their languages and institutions perished with their temples — but the Muslim religion in the South of the Phillipines has survived,” says one of the historical essays in ”Zamboanga Hermosa: Memories of the Old Town” (Filipinas Foundation, 1984).
However, with American rule prevailing, some Muslims petitioned Washington for formal annexation to the United States, a route followed by Guam and Puerto Rico. Presaging today’s secessionism in this 95 percent Christian country, many Muslims calculated that their best chance for cultural and religious survival was to become an American Islamic territory.
But the United States decided instead to strengthen the Christian government of the Philippines. Six months after General Pershing presided over the victory on Jolo, American military authorities declared the Muslim resistance over and ordered him to hand over the administration of this city and region to civilians; which caused a great deal more blood shed.
Although he was heavily criticized in some American newspapers for the killings, his victory here was seen as helping his career, setting him on a path that landed him a few years later in France as commander of the American Expeditionary Force.
For more in depth information about Pershing’s administration in the Phillipines I also recommend:
AUDIOBOOK
Pershing: The Great Generals Series
UNABRIDGED
By Jim Lacey
Narrated by Tom Weiner
I guess my main food for thought here is that pacification, and eradication by foreign force of arms is never permanent, nor is the American SOP of provoking instant change in a culture that has been in business far longer than most Western nations. Fixing all of that is a tall order, but perhaps the first step is to train that there are other alternatives other than using jinetics as a first response.
August 2, 2009 at 9:03 pm |
Sorry–typo “jinetics” = “kinetics.”
August 2, 2009 at 10:02 pm |
Follow On Comment- Afghanistan:
I truly do not believe, for one minute, that there is, or will be, a truly viable Civil-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan; anymore than there was an overall Campaign Plan for Iraq in 2003.
Why? Several reasons the OPTEMPO coming out of the Pentagon is far too pressurized and priority time sensitive to accomplish, even close, to any meaningful civil-military dialogue, let alone meaningful interaction on the ground.
The folks appearing to have the tasker for writing, gather forces and implementing an effective Civil-Military Campaign Plan, from within a very unusual office in the Pentagon, has a time frame of less than 16 months to accomplish that task. Everything seems geared toward having all of that completed by the 2010 Mid-Term Elections.
I do believe that the Army C2 wants to be able to demonstrate that they have made every reasonable effort to have a functionally successful campaign plan in place, but at the end of the day the primary tool for use it Afghanistan will be kinetic. They will simply have been forced to fall back on force. Once again the issue is in just not knowing what to do, as in Stability Operations, but knowing how to do it, and the U.S. Army C2 has no earthly idea how to do it. They have not come up with one viable STABOPS training concept that will overcome the 6 year training void for STABOPS. As a result civ-mil casualty rates will climb even higher in Afghanistan
August 2, 2009 at 11:25 pm |
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August 4, 2009 at 12:06 pm |
Thanks for the history lesson. Still, the larger problem is that you have Taliban killing more Afghans than NATO, US and ANA, and without the benefit of airpower. The Taliban built no parks, public swimming pools, or tree line boulevards, but were able to rule Afghanistan until 2001 through their own kinetics, not cultural understanding.
I am not sure what the answer is. I don’t think we can forswear kinetics ourselves, though it may be more important to protect Afghan citizens than simply kill Taliban. I think that the UN is pretty objective, and I think that its numbers show that even though civilian casualties are high, NATO and US are trying to do the right thing and are being careful with the lives of non-combatants. Compare civilian deaths in Afghanistan with the 7,000 drug-related murders in Mexico over the last two years, and remember that almost 60% of the civilian casualties are attributed by the UN to the Taliban.
August 5, 2009 at 12:56 am |
Sorry–History? I don’t see history in “ajp9 Says: of August 2, 2009 at 10:02 pm” above. I wrote about current events based on Pentagon briefings as recent as 09-10 JUL 09. Perhaps a better case might be made by Mr. RORY STEWART (Director, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University), in his NPR presentation “Afghanistan Policy Bound To Fail.” It can be found at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111480359
No one, especially me, is expecting the U.S. Military, especially the U.S. Army to “forswear kinetics,” but rather to simply practice its own doctrine recognizing “Offense, Defence, and Stability” to be on the same footing. Then to actively train for smooth and successful transitioning from Phase 3 to Phase 4-5 operations, and hopefully come home with real honor, and a local population capable of at least half way taking care of themselves; without costing the American people sons and daughters killed and wounded in action, and a great deal of money that could be better spent at home.
Had we stayed in Afghanistan to begin with, finished the War there, and not gone off chasing Poncho “Saddam” Villa through the deserts of Iraq, on the Great Iraqi Punitive Expedition we quite possible have had this war over with four years ago, with far less lives lost, money spent and the President could pay for a lot of his new programmes with out taxing the citizenry to death. No by all means kinetics does obviously win wars, but not kinetics wins the other side of the COIN—–Peace and Stability. Thaey are meant to be used “Jointly, ” with one leading to the other–then leading home. History? No I’m not talking history here. I’m talking about current events.
Finally it use to be plan your work, and work your plan. From what I’ve seen first hand there is no viable Civil-Military Campaign Plan. Once again this is not an unsupported historical comment, but rather real live current events.
August 7, 2009 at 12:21 pm |
Just Curious. Has anyone seen the Press Conference given by Admiral Mullins CJCS on Afghanistan?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/massmedia/grab/187365/
It’s a real morale booster for the troops. “Hey guys were going to invade Normandy. We’re going to lose big time, but go git em.”
Great stuff.