Collateral Damage

It has been a rough weekend for American forces in Afghanistan. In two separate instances, U.S. forces engaged with Taliban and al Qaeda forces have killed approximately 19 Afghan civilians, according to the U.K. Guardian:

Two incidents involving American forces have left around 19 Afghan civilians dead since yesterday, prompting furious protests against the US and Nato. In the first incident, up to 10 civilians were killed yesterday as a convoy of US marines fled after being attacked by a suicide bomber in a minivan in eastern Nangarhar province.

Nine Afghan witnesses said US marines had fired indiscriminately on civilian cars and pedestrians as they sped away, the Associated Press reported.

The US military said it was unclear what had happened and militant gunmen may have been to blame for the deaths.

Then today Afghan officials said nine civilians had been killed after a Nato air strike hit a house during a firefight between US forces and militants, killing nine Afghans who lived there.

Civilians die in war. No matter how many precautions we take, no matter how careful we try to be to target only combatants, our enemies purposefully hide among civilians, dress as civilians, and use occupied civilian dwellings as impromptu fortresses.

It is because of this that I have some reservations about the nature of the protests levied again U.S. and NATO forces in the wake of these two incidents. While any civilian life snuffed out by terrorists is worth the same as those killed by NATO forces, few Afghan protests seem to value these deaths equally, or if those protests do exist, they unerringly fail to attract worldwide media attention.

That is odd, considering how this particular media account concluded:

The US-based Human Rights Watch has estimated that more than 100 Afghan civilians died as a result of Nato and coalition assaults in 2006.

A count by the Associated Press, based on reports from Afghan, Nato and coalition officials, puts the overall civilian death toll in 2006 at 834, most from militant attacks.

If the accounts from Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press are close to correct, the Taliban and al Qaeda kill more Afghan civilians than do coalition forces by a ratio of roughly 8-1. Despite this huge disparity, I cannot recall the last time I read a media account where the civilian death toll exacted by these Islamist forces led to widespread protests.

Do Afghan citizens simply not care when their friends and relatives are killed by the Taliban or al Qaeda? I find that rather hard to believe.

Could it be that the same civilians who chant "Death to America! Death to Karzai!" today, do so knowing that they will suffer no retaliatory strikes from Taliban spies in their midst, fearing that if they protested the murders caused by the Islamists, that they would suffer a far worse fate than usually visited by a bullet or bomb? I suspect this is the case to a certain extent, and find it rather uncritical of the professional media not to notice nor report on this discrepancy.

It is a shame that civilians die in war, but equally shameful that the media frames the accounts of what transpired they way they have.

The events around the Nangarhar incident are very much up in the air, but the Guardian is almost libelous in their purposeful neglect of detail in describing the airstrike on the house in Kapisa.

They state:

...today Afghan officials said nine civilians had been killed after a Nato air strike hit a house during a firefight between US forces and militants, killing nine Afghans who lived there.

The air strike came after militants had fired on a Nato base in Kapisa province, just north of Kabul.

Later a house was hit, killing five women, three boys and a man, said Sayad Mohammad Dawood Hashimmi, Kapisa's deputy governor.

The Guardian presents the story of this airstrike in such a way as to make it seem like the airstrike may have accidentally hit a house full of civilians.

This is not the truth.

After the rocket attack on the NATO base, armed militants were observed retreating into the Afghan home. In a defensive measure, U.S forces called in a precision strike that leveled the building where the Taliban terrorists had retreated.

It was the Taliban that brought fire down on the "five women, three boys and a man" by using that home as a fighting position. It would be nice for the "professional" journalists at the Guardian and other news outlets to reveal that fact, but apparently, such facts only get in the way of the story they prefer to tell.

Accuracy, it seems, is also "collateral damage."