"A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting"
by
Professor Marc W. Herold
Ph.D., M.B.A., B.Sc.
Departments of Economics and Women's Studies
McConnell Hall
Whittemore School of Business & Economics
University of New Hampshire
Durham, N.H. 03824, U.S.A.
FAX : 603 862-3383
e-mail: HYPERLINK mailto:mwherold@cisunix.unh.edu mwherold@cisunix.unh.edu
December 2001
When U.S warplanes strafed [with AC-130 gunships] the farming village of Chowkar-Karez, 25 miles north of Kandahar on October 22-23rd,killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official said, "the people there are dead because we wanted them dead." The reason? They sympathized with the Taliban. When asked about the Chowkar incident, Rumsfeld replied, "I cannot deal with that particular village."
A U.S officer aboard the US aircraft carrier, Carl Vinson, described the use of 2'000 lb cluster bombs dropped by B-52 bombers: "A 2'000 lb. bomb, no matter where you drop it, is a significant emotional event for anyone within a square mile."
Mantra of the U.S mainstream corporate media : "the report cannot be independently verified"
"..shameful dependence on and uncritical acceptance of Pentagon handouts instead of substantial, critical coverage of the ground situation in Afghanistan. The US corporate media seems to be muting any talk of civilian casualties first by framing any such news with "Taliban claims that…." And then happily putting the matter to rest with Pentagon spokesman…" " [Joel Lee, Hyderabad, Znet Inter Active]
"When people decry civilian deaths caused by the U.S government, they're aiding propaganda efforts. In sharp contrast, when civilian deaths are caused by bombers who hate America, the perpetrators are evil and those deaths are tragedies.
When they put bombs in cars and kill people, they're uncivilized killers. When we put bombs on missiles and kill people, we're upholding civilized values. When they kill, they're terrorists. When we kill, we're striking against terror."
Abstract. What causes the documented high level of civilian casualties---3'767 civilian deaths in nine weeks---in the U.S air war upon Afghanistan? The explanation is the apparent willingness of U.S military strategists to fire missiles into and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan. A legacy of the ten years of civil war during the 80s is that many military garrisons and facilities are located in urban areas where the Soviet-backed government had placed them since they could be better protected there from attacks by the rural mujahideen. Successor Afghan governments inherited these emplacements. To suggest that the Taliban used 'human shields' is more revealing of the historical amnesia and racism of those making such claims, than of Taliban deeds. Anti-aircraft emplacements will naturally be placed close by ministries, garrisons, communications facilities, etc.. A heavy bombing onslaught must necessarily result in substantial numbers of civilian casualties simply by virtue of proximity to 'military targets', a reality exacerbated by the admitted occasional poor targeting, human error, equipment malfunction, and the irresponsible use of out-dated Soviet maps. But, the critical element remains the very low value put upon Afghan civilian lives by U.S military planners and the political elite, as clearly revealed by U.S willingness to bomb heavily populated regions. Current Afghan civilian lives must and will be sacrificed in order to [possibly] protect future American lives. Actions speak, and words [can] obscure: the hollowness of pious pronouncements by Rumsfeld, Rice and the corporate media about the great care taken to minimize collateral damage is clear for all to see. Other U.S bombing targets hit are impossible to 'explain' in terms other than the U.S seeking to inflict maximum pain upon Afghan society and perceived 'enemies': the targeted bombing of the Kajakai dam power station, the Kabul telephone exchange, the Al Jazeera Kabul office, trucks and buses filled with fleeing refugees, and the numerous attacks upon civilian trucks carrying fuel oil. Most recently, fleeing civilians in vehicles have become the Pentagon's "new targets of opportunity." Indeed, the bombing of Afghan civilian infrastructure parallels that of the Afghan civilian.
Feriba, a young Afghan girl, refugee in Pakistan :
INCLUDEPICTURE \d \z "file://C:\\My Documents\\Feriba in Quetta.jpg"
"I and all my classmates are very sad because of the situation in our homeland. When our teacher said in the class that many people have been killed in Afghanistan, I and my all classmates started weeping because everyone has relatives there. I expect America not to kill the poor Afghans. They are hungry and poor."
The air attack on Kabul, Afghanistan began at 8:57 p.m. local time October 7th. The following day, Reuters carried an interview with a 16-year-old ice-cream vendor from Jalalabad who said he had lost his leg and two fingers in a Cruise missile strike on an airfield near his home:
" "There was just a roaring sound, and then I opened my eyes and I was in a hospital," said the boy, called Assadullah, speaking in Peshawar after being taken across the border for medical help. "I lost my leg and two fingers. There were other people hurt. People were running all over the place"."
INCLUDEPICTURE \d \z "file://C:\\My Documents\\assadullah.jpg"
16 yr old, Assaduleh, one of the first civilians hit by a U.S missile
[Reuters photo, at HYPERLINK hamilton.indymedia.org hamilton.indymedia.org ]
Mohammed Raza, an odd-job man, was not so lucky. At 8 p.m. as he was walking back home, near to the Jalalabad airport. A cruise missile targeted at a Taliban facility "a few hundred yards away", strayed and landed next to him. Shrapnel pierced his neck, grazing his spine, paralyzing him.
Three days later, a researcher at the Institute for Health & Social Justice, Partners in Health of Harvard University, H.J. Chien, confirmed that civilians had been killed in Jalalabad and elsewhere. On October 9th, the Pakistan Observer [Islamabad] daily newspaper reported on the first night, "37 Killed, 81 Injured in Sunday's Strikes." The casualties spanned four provinces : Kabul [20], Herat [9], Kandahar [4] and Jalalabad [4]. By October 10th, The Guardian reported 76 dead civilians. And by October 15th, the leading Indian daily, The Times of India was mentioning over 300 civilian casualties and that the US-UK bombing action was in violation of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter allowing the use of force in self-defense. On the following day [October 16th], the alternative U.S media noted that during the first week of bombing, 400 Afghan civilians had been slaughtered.
Yet, the mainstream western press only took note of civilian casualties on October 9th when a cruise missile destroyed the building of the United Nations land mine removing contracting firm, the Afghan Technical Center, in the upper class Macroyan residential district of eastern Kabul, killing four night watchmen. Tellingly, the day before, October 8th, twenty other Afghans living near the Kabul airport [in the Qasabah Khana neighborhood] and near the Kabul radio station were also killed. On October 10th, the Sultanpur Mosque in Jalalabad was hit by a bomb during prayers, killing 17 people. As neighbors rushed into the rubble to pull out one injured, a second bomb was dropped reportedly killing at least another 120 people [though I have not included this figure in my tally].
Fleeing the intense bombing in Kandahar, Mehmood, a Kandahar merchant, brought his family to his ancestral village of Chowkar-Karez, a village 25 miles north of Kandahar. His extended family, crowded into six cars, arrived at a village just about when it was attacked by U.S warplanes in the night of October 22/23rd. Ironically, the cars arriving in the night may have prompted the raid---as the Pentagon labels "a target of opportunity." Said Mehmood, "I brought my family here for safety, and now there are 19 dead, including my wife, my brother, sister, sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, my uncle. What am I supposed to do now?"
At 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 27th, a U.S bomb and missile fired from a F-18 hit the village of Khan Agaha at the entrance of the Kapisa Valley, some 80 kms northeast of Kabul. The U.S planes dropped 35 bombs in the area. Ten civilians were reportedly instantly killed said an ambulance driver who had gone to the village. A nearby hospital to which victims were rushed, run by the Italian relief agency, Emergency, said up to 16 people had been killed in Saturday's attack on Khan Agaha. Television photos taken by Britain's Sky News showed footage of the F-18 dropping bombs, hitting a mud and timber family home. The TV report said ten members of a family were missing under the rubble and another twenty were injured. A five year-old girl lay in a wheelbarrow with a bloodied face.
The U.S Bombing of Kapisa Valley Villages
Photo: Agence France Presse, October 28, 2001
On Monday, October 29th, citing Reuters, The Times of India reported from Kabul,
"a US bomb flattened a flimsy mud-brick home in Kabul on Sunday blowing apart seven children as they ate breakfast with their father. The blast shattered a neighbour's house killing another two children …..the houses were in a residential area called Qalaye Khatir near a hill where the hard-line Taliban militia had placed an anti-aircraft gun."
The Afghan town of Charikar, 60 kms north of Kabul, has been the recipient of many US bombs and missiles. On Saturday, November 17th, US bombs killed two entire families---one of 16 members and the other of 14---perished, together in the same house.
On the same day, bomb strikes in Khanabad near Kunduz, killed 100 people. A refugee, Mohammed Rasul, recounts himself burying 11 people, pulled out of ruins there [ibid].
Multiply these scenes by a couple hundred and the reality on-the-ground in the Afghan October and November is approximated. This same reality is blithely dismissed by the Pentagon and the compliant U.S corporate media with "the claims could not be independently verified," whereas the military press calls reports of high civilian casualties as being "inflated by air." Another comments on the "humanity of the air war." Yet another, wails about too much press coverage of civilian casualties by a media unable to understand that some civilian casualties must occur but that "what IS newsworthy is that so many bombs hit their targets".
Little mention made in the U.S mainstream press. Even better, seven weeks into the war, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times could write without shame,
"…..although estimates are still largely guesses, some experts believe that more than 1'000
Taliban and opposition troops have probably died in the fighting, along with at least dozens
of civilians.""
Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands, as we shall document.
Apparently, the only real casualties noted are those either connected to a western enterprise or organization, or those "independently verified" by western individuals and/or organizations. In other words, the high levels of civilian casualties are simply written off to 'enemy' propaganda and ignored.
The American Afghan War---historically the Fourth Afghan War---is anything but a 'just war' as James Carroll has adroitly pointed out. First, the disproportionate U.S response of making an entire other nation and people 'pay' for the crimes of a few is obvious to anyone who seeks out the real 'costs' perpetrated upon the people of Afghanistan. Action should be based upon some measure of proportionality, which here clearly is not the case. Secondly, this war does little to impede the cycle of violence of which the WTC attacks are merely one manifestation. The massive firepower unleashed by the Americans will no doubt invite similar indiscriminate carnage. Injustices will flower. Thirdly, by defining these events as a war rather than a police action without providing any argument for the necessity of the former, the American Afghan War is un-necessary and, hence, not 'just.' As Carroll writes, "the criminals, not an impoverished nation, should be on the receiving end of punishment."
It is simply unacceptable for civilians to be slaughtered as a side-effect of an intentional strike against a specified target. There is no difference between the attacks upon the WTC whose primary goal was the destruction of a symbol, and the U.S-U.K revenge coalition bombing of military targets located in populated urban areas. Both are criminal. Slaughter is slaughter. Killing civilians even if unintentional is criminal.
In order to make the American Afghan War appear 'just', it becomes imperative to completely block out access to information on the true human costs of this war. The actions of the Bush-Rumsfeld-Rice trio speak eloquently to these efforts: calling-in major U.S news networks to give them their marching orders, buying up all commercial satellite imagery available to the general public, sending Powell off to Qatar to lecture the independent Al Jazeera news network, and lastly, when that failed targeting the Kabul office of Al Jazeera and scoring a direct missile hit on it. In mid-October, Duncan Campbell reported how the Pentagon was spending millions of dollars to prevent western media from buying highly accurate civilian satellite pictures of the effects of the U.S bombing. The Pentagon decision was taken on October 11th after reports of heavy civilian casualties from overnight [10/11] bombing of Darunta near Jalalabad. The Pentagon bought exclusive rights to all Ikonos satellite pictures from the Denver-based Space Imaging Inc. Lastly, as has been pointed out, the major U.S corporate media have devoted only sparse moments to the topic of civilian casualties, obeying the Bush-Pentagon directives.
Preventing the images of human suffering caused by the U.S bombing from reaching U.S audiences, creates precisely what the Pentagon and Bush seek : a "war without witnesses." The power of images in the age of global information is now clearly recognized. According to Gilbert Holleules of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Centre for Human Rights, images have begun to replace reality. It is only when we see moving pictures that we process events as an actual experience and only when we see real people suffering that we make a personal connection to them. For this reason, the Al Jazeera T.V news from Kabul posed such a threat to the Bush war.
This report sets the record straight: we shall document how Afghanistan has been subjected to a barbarous air bombardment which has killed an average of 62 civilians per day since that fateful evening of Sunday, October 7th. When the sun set on December 6thd, at least 3'767 Afghan civilians had died in U.S bombing attacks [roughly equivalent to about 38'000 U.S civilian or the equivalent of eleven World Trade Center attacks]. Detailed day-by-day data is presented in Appendix 4. We let the voices of Afghan refugees speak about the U.S bombings in Appendix 1, which present qualitative corroboration of our figures.
Naturally, skeptics will howl about how accurate data might be collected. I have relied upon official news agencies, major newspapers, reported first-hand accounts. Whenever possible, I have sought cross-corroboration [the idea being that if a couple major news agencies report the event, then it is more likely accurate]. I have avoided granting greater reliability to U.S or British sources---the ethnocentric bias. When greater detail---as for example, in witnesses' stories---was given about the specifics of a bombing attack, I lent it greater credibility.
I have used figures reported by official news agencies [e.g. from Agence France-Presse to Afghan Islamic Press, etc.], from news reporters who visited the scene, from eyewitness and survivor reports, from distinguished NGOs [like RAWA and Emergency Italia], from news stories published in reputable national newspapers. I have eschewed making judgements about the relative reliability of one nation's news agencies and reporters versus another's. My assumption is that reporters, news story editors, and national-level media outlets try to report as accurately as possible given the resources at their disposal. For example, if The Times of India, reports an incident, I am assuming that an editor judged the account to be accurate. Behroz Khan has provided outstanding detailed reporting on events on the ground for the Pakistan Jang newspaper's The News International. My belief is that casualty figures reported shortly after a bombing incident are a fairly accurate description of what occurred. Surviving victims who resided in the area have first-hand knowledge of the local demographics. Three additional factors argue for using reports immediately after an incident in Afghanistan: [1]. Locating bodies can prove to be very difficult [even in the developed United States as seen with the WTC attacks] and hence relying purely upon body counts compiled later will seriously underestimate the casualties; [2]. The Muslim practice of immediate burial by nightfall makes body counting difficult; and [3]. The out-migration of families in the wake of severe bombing leads to victim accounts simply disappearing. Lastly, I have assigned greater reliability to accounts where greater detail has been provided, e.g., names of persons, survivor accounts, description of bombing results, and the like. The great majority of U.S bombs fell upon or next to individual homes or upon villages, making it easier to develop accurate tallies [as compared to the 1000s working in a couple giant skyscrapers where initial casualties were greatly exaggerated]. Few of the hundreds of bombing incidents here reported resulted in over 30 civilian deaths. The high count of deaths per home is a result of the large number [@ 6] of children per woman.
Specifically, I have relied upon Indian daily newspapers [especially The Times of India, considered the equivalent of The New York Times], three Pakistani dailies, the Singapore News, British, Canadian and Australian [Sydney Morning Herald, Herald Sun] newspapers, the Afghan Islamic Press [AIP based in Peshawar], the Agence France Press [AFP], the South African Broadcasting Corp. News [ HYPERLINK sabcnews.com www.sabcnews.com ], Pakistan News Service [PNS], and Reuters, BBC News Online, Al Jazeera, and a variety of other reputable sources. It should be noted that the independent, private Afghan Islamic Press [AIP] agency in Islamabad, Pakistan reported consistently lower cumulative casualty figures than the Taliban: on October 13th, AIP reported 250 whereas the Taliban listed 300 civilians killed; on November 6th, the AIP listed 633 while the Taliban reported about 1'500 civilian deaths. The A.I.P. data listed 204 people killed in Kandahar, 163 in Nangarhar province east of Jalalabad, 92 in Kabul, and 79 in Herat. Many of the Taliban claims about civilian casualties are later confirmed by journalists on the scene, eye-witnesses, survivors, families of victims, U.N. sources, NGOs [like RAWA and Emergency Italy] etc..
My tabulation for October 31st enters a figure of 15 civilians dying in a bombing attack of a Red Crescent hospital in Kandahar. Three different assessments were made in the aftermath :
The Taliban claimed the raid killed 11people;
The Pentagon said the strike missed both the hospital and another Red Crescent building nearby, and commented "it was a legitimate terrorist target, intentionally struck.."
Journalist later saw a large crater in the center of the clinic and hospital vehicles crushed by collapsed masonry. One doctor reported 15 dead and 25 seriously injured.
Faced with such discrepancies, to me the most credible source is the doctor: 15 died. The similar figure is also mentioned in The Times [November 1, 2001], The Independent [October 31, 2001], and in both Reuters and AFP reports, as well as in Pakistan's leading English daily, DAWN [November 1, 2001]. In Appendix 2, I present additional detailed analysis of discrepancies and the lying in the mainstream media.
The American air war against Afghanistan was played out in three phases as the U.S military readjusted its campaign to the changing situation on the ground. Each phase had different implications for Afghan civilians. During the first phase, U.S planes and missiles targeting perceived Taliban military facilities, often located in urban areas. The Taliban's facilities were widely dispersed. The weapons of choice here were fighter jets' JDAM bombs 'targeted' upon particular facilities, but whose explosive force and frequent mis-direction resulted in heavy civilian impact deaths during the first three weeks of the war. Once the Taliban anti aircraft was silenced, the lower-flying, slow-moving attack flying machines [AC-130s and helicopter gunships] were introduced, which engaged in heavy strafing and gunshot wounds. The second phase of the U.S air war was in the northern plains around Shomali, Mazar, Kunduz and Khanabad. Here, B-52s were employed in cluster bomb attacks upon front lines and exacted a severe toll upon Afghans. F-14 and F-18 fighter jets "hit" more selected targets. The areas around Kunduz and Khanabad suffered heavily. The first two 7.5 ton Big Blue bombs were dropped upon Taliban positions. The third phase of the air war was carried out in the south and east as Taliban forces retreated. Here, B-52 and B-1 carpet-bombing around Kandahar and in the mountains south of Jalalabad killed hundreds. Fighter jets dropped JDAM ordnance and engaged in fierce attacks upon "targets of opportunity" in Pentagonese jargon. Concretely, during the past couple weeks, this meant just about anything moving on the highways in Helmand, Kandahar, and other south eastern provinces. Numerous first-hand accounts describe the destruction of fleeing trucks, buses, taxis, etc..
Our tabulation represents a serious underestimate of actual civilian casualties : for many entries, no specific figures were given with note being made of "many", "scores", "dozens", or "countless" casualties ; and data is simply unavailable in many cases, e.g., no data available for November 3, 4,11 and 13, and for the effects of massive carpet-bombing by B-52s after October 30th. For example, on November 17th, massive carpet-bombing of Khanabad in Kunduz province, killed over 150 civilians. As has been amply commented upon elsewhere, the widespread bombing has also stopped truck traffic [carrying supplies] and has contributed to the utter collapse of Afghanistan's hospital system in the heavily bombed areas like Kandahar [as staff fear going to work]. No account is taken here either of bombing causing indirect casualties [e.g., from lack of water, power, medical care, etc.]. The Afghan hospital system had collapsed by late October under the bombing onslaught as hospital staff fled for safety. Those wounded able to, head off to clinics in Pakistan, while "those too wounded or poor to make the journey have been left to die in their homes in Kandahar" [ibid]. In Kabul's 300 bed children's hospital, supplies ran out and most of the staff fled.
The report raises trenchant questions about mainstream U.S reporting and official government claims, about the alleged accuracy of so-called 'smart' weapons, and about the revealed differential values put upon human lives by U.S military strategists and their political bosses. One thing which the mainstream press states and with which we do concur, is that U.S bombing 'works' to achieve its goal---defeat the opposition whether in the Persian Gulf War, the Bosnian air campaign, or Kosovo, and now Afghanistan.
A professor of religious studies points out that for years the U.S government ignored the Taliban's egregious human rights violations against Afghan civilians, and only turned against the Taliban when they were in some fashion connected with the loss of U.S lives. The differential value of lives is revealed. He goes on to pose a critical question: what is the 'price' for American 'success' in Afghanistan? How can we weigh the costs against the success?
"Yet few stop to ask the question of ends versus means. This dulling of conscience is another hidden price we pay for war. In Afghanistan, as in Serbia and the Persian Gulf, it all feels so effortless, so painless, and so right. Why bother to ask the moral questions? Since the price in U.S. lives is so small, why bother our consciences at all? Each war makes it easier to start the next war, with no questions asked and no bodies counted.
But the question of ends and means will not disappear so easily. Should we carpet bomb every nation where human rights are violated? If so, we will be bombing -- and making enemies -- constantly, around the world. It is tempting to think every future war will be as easy as this one. Sooner or later, though, we will run into a seriously capable enemy, as we did in Vietnam.
If we will not go to war against every brutal regime, how will we know when and where to start bombing? The U.S. ignored the Taliban’s horrendous violations for years. Our government accepted and even aided their rule, despite the pleas of women’s rights groups. Apparently we will make war on brutal regimes only when something else is at stake. "
The high level of Afghan civilian casualties from bombing may result from different causes: (1). imprecise or malfunctioning missile and bomb guidance systems; (2). poor targeting by fallible human beings; (3). the close proximity of dense civilian population to 'military' targets; or (4). the enemy deliberately hiding its military hardware in civilian areas [the human shield argument]. The latter can be quickly dispensed with as reflecting the racism of those proposing such an argument. Moreover, in the 1980s, the Soviets centralized their military hardware in urban areas of Afghanistan as these were simply better protected. Many of the 'military targets' like government buildings, civilian radio stations, etc. were located in populated urban areas. For the sake of argument, I'll assume that the first two causes play only a minor role in explaining the high civilian casualties.
The third cause requires some discussion. When faced with the indisputable 'fact' of having hit a civilian area, the Bush-Blair team responds that a military facility close-by was the target. In man cases we can document, this turns out to be a long abandoned military facility. For example, in the incident where four night watchmen died when the offices of a United Nations de-mining agency in Kabul was bombed, the Pentagon said it was near a military radio tower. U.N. officials said the tower was a defunct, abandoned medium and short wave radio station that hadn't been in operation for over a decade and was situated 900 feet away from the bombed U.N. building. On October 19th, U.S planes had circled over Tarin Kot in Uruzgan early in the evening, then returned after everyone went to bed and dropped their bombs on the residential area , instead of on the Taliban base two miles away. Mud houses were flattened and families destroyed. An initial bombing killed twenty and as some of the villagers were pulling their neighbors out of the rubble, more bombs fell and ten more people died. A villager involved explained:
"We pulled the baby out, the others were buried in the rubble. Children were decapitated. There were bodies with no legs. We could do nothing. We just fled."
On October 21st, U.S planes apparently targeting their bombs at a Taliban military base---long abandoned---released their deadly cargo on the Kabul residential area of Khair Khana, killing eight members of one family who had just sat down to breakfast. A day later, on October 22, U.S planes dropped BLU-97 cluster bombs [made by Aerojet/Honeywell] on the village of Shakar Qala near Herat. Twenty of the village's 45 houses were destroyed or badly damaged. They missed the Taliban encampments located 500-700 yards away and killed -14 people immediately with a 15th dying after picking up the parachute attached to one of the 202 bomblets dispersed by the BLU-97. In Kosovo, the dud rate was 10%. A recent report argues that between 7 - 30% of the cluster bomblets fail to explode upon impact. The United Nations mine-clearing officials in the region, noted that 10-30% of the U.S missiles and bombs dropped on Afghanistan did not explode, posing a lasting danger. Such munition dropped in civilian areas poses a lasting danger. Fourteen thousand unexploded cluster bomblets littered the fields, streets and homes of Afghanistan by late November [for details see Appendix 3]. A UN official in Afghanistan estimates that live bombs and mines maim, on average 40 to 100 people a week in Afghanistan and half of these die before they get any medical help. On Monday, November 26th, after heavy U.S bombing in the preceding days of the Shamshad village in Nangarhar province, one or three Afghan children were blown up and seven wounded by a cluster bomb as they were collecting firewood and hard papers for burning fire at home. At 6:20 a.m. on November 24th, U.S bombs fell in the mountainous border area, 300 kilometers southwest of Peshawar, killing 13 in an attack aimed at a long abandoned Taliban training camp.
In many instances, U.S bombs fall on spots without any military significance. On October 25th, a U.S bomb hit a fully loaded city bus at Kabul Gate, in Kandah |
