Tweet
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — You know what we’ve never had in Afghanistan? What ISAF has never claimed? What has never been the overriding metric here? That it’s sufficient to reduce ISAF-caused civilian casualties in the war. For one simple reason: it’s not!
If you were Afghan, and the U.N. had just found that civilian casualties had risen 31 percent over the previous reporting period, would you be satisfied with the rejoinder, “Yes, but you can see that ISAF is killing fewer civilians and the Taliban is killing way way more”? Perhaps you might simply focus on the fact that more civilians are dying while two consecutive ISAF commanders have pledged to protect civilian lives.
To be very clear and at the risk of sounding like a broken record: it’s significant that ISAF is responsible for fewer and fewer civilian casualties. That demonstrates ISAF’s commitment to discrimination in its use of force, a promise to Afghans, is real. But it’s more significant, by the expressed terms of the population-protection strategy in Afghanistan, that civilians are still dying in greater numbers. One way of understanding that comes from the brutality of the Taliban.
But if you combine all that — the falling rates of ISAF-caused civilian casualties and the rising rates of civilian casualties — what you get is a picture of a war that’s spinning out of ISAF’s control. Protecting the population can’t just mean protecting the population from you.
In any event, my homie Clayton Swisher frames it, I think, rather well.
Someone else clearly gets it, too:
“Every Afghan death diminishes our cause,” General Petraeus said. “While we have made progress in our efforts to reduce coalition-caused civilian casualties, we know the measure by which our mission will be judged is protecting the population from harm by either side.”
5 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
Thanks for writing about something that matters. Apparently it’s Warner Bros. Greatest Hits week in the media back stateside this week. Oh wait, that’s every week.
Certainly one could build from this a cogent argument for why what we have set out to do in Afghanistan is, in a word, impossible. If some of the primary metrics with which to determine our relative success are not within our control, but CAN be effected by our enemies, then one really has to wonder if the specified goals might be beyond our reach.
mikey
If some of the primary metrics with which to determine our relative success are not within our control, but CAN be effected by our enemies
The absolute version of this is not in evidence, and the qualified version is a given. Which is to say, it’s not demonstrated that this metric is entirely beyond our control, but it will never be fully within our control either. And the enemy will always have some ability to affect the rate, but at the same time, our ability to affect the size of that effect may go up or down. The trend is the issue, and the responsible occifers (ahem, Dave, you’ve got your work cut out on mTP, buddy) will have to speak to what is behind this number. But trends can be reversed (or not reversed) – indeed that is the essence of how wars are won and lost, is it not?
Mike
Also, did I say WB Greatest Hits Week? Sorry, I meant seventh grade.
Michael Cohen makes basically the same argument as mikey more indisputably simply by making it say the effort has failed thus far, which is I think obviously not debtable: http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2010/08/another-coin-myth-exposed-protecting-the-population.html As I said, Petraeus has quite a big job on his hands arguing that failure isn’t manifest. But if the argument is that it is impossible, that cn essentially be waved off and goes against the basic American mindset.