More Financial Aid, More Peacekeepers Needed Now
By Selig S. Harrison
Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2002
"It's a stupid and useless war. I have followed it with immense pain, and it would be better if it ended immediately. Now is the time for reconstruction" (1). The former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah of Afghanistan, did not know that a journalist was present when he gave this unguarded reply to the leader of an Italian aid mission who asked him what he thought of the fighting in his country. The king's words, largely ignored by the United States media, should be taken seriously. He is the most respected figure in Afghanistan, he will preside over the Loya Jirga (Grand Council) that will choose a new government in June to replace the interim government of Hamid Karzai, and may well become head of state. He has now made a triumphal return to Kabul from his exile in Rome..
Behind the king's words lies mounting Afghan anger over civilian casualties resulting from the US-led military operations. It is time to redefine US policy in Afghanistan before this anger hardens into a pervasive anti-Americanism that will undermine the pro-Washington Karzai regime and erode the goodwill the US earned for ousting the repressive Taliban regime. No one knows for sure how extensive civilian deaths have been. But one careful study by a University of New Hampshire economist, piecing together accounts of aid workers and reporters on the scene, presents evidence of 3,742 Afghan civilian deaths during the first eight weeks of the fighting - more than the 3,067 Americans killed on 11 September (2). A critique of this study, allowing for possible exaggeration, suggests 1,300.
At first the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, expressed his regrets over this "collateral damage" but he now no longer bothers to apologise. Conceding that 16 innocent civilians were killed in a raid on 24 January north of Kandahar, Rumsfeld said: "I don't think it is an error. It's just a fact that circumstances on the ground in Afghanistan are difficult. It's untidy. It is not a neat situation where all the good guys are here and the bad guys are there" (3).
After eight years of fighting the Soviet Army and 13 more years of civil strife, Afghans are hardened to the misfortunes of war. Some Afghans, interviewed by American reporters in the early weeks of the fighting, hesitated to criticise the US and acknowledged that everyone makes mistakes. But it is increasingly clear that Afghan patience is wearing thin and Karzai's popularity has been tarnished by the cavalier attitude toward Afghan suffering epitomised by Rumsfeld's comments.
In Operation Anaconda near Gardez where eight Americans were killed, initial reports show that US forces faced a relatively clear-cut situation in which there was a large concentration of "bad guys". But as Karzai observed, the Gardez area is "the last, isolated base of terrorists in Afghanistan." In their subsequent pursuit of Taliban and al-Qaida remnants, US forces are not likely to face similar "neat" situations. Even at Gardez, according to a New York Times reporter, John F Burns, a villager said that "American bombing has killed large numbers of civilians, something impossible to confirm or dismiss until the battle ends" (4).
A Financial Times reporter, Charles Clover, reported from Gardez that local support there for the US military campaign was "nonexistent. People are fed up with war in this region." While US commanders say that the enemy forces in the surrounding mountains have mostly consisted of hard-core al-Qaida, "the locals are adamant that they are Afghans, former Taliban fugitives who just wanted to be left alone," not to regroup to make more trouble (5).
In Afghan eyes, it is one thing for the US to kill al-Qaida "foreigners" - Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens - and another to kill Taliban fighters and their families who are Afghans. The governor of Paktia, Taj Mohammed Wardak, pointedly told Washington Post reporter Peter Baker that "there is a distinction between normal Taliban and hardline Taliban with links to al-Qaida" (6). Given the backlash against earlier civilian casualties, the repeated use of the type of heavy bombing assaults employed in the bloody Gardez battle in further operations against Taliban and al-Qaida remnants would intensify already-festering anti-US sentiment.
Karzai helped to restrain Afghan anger by remaining silent in the face of well-publicised civilian casualties at Karam on 11 October, Tora Bora on 1 December and Paktia on 20 December. But he went public with his criticism when US bombs hit a wedding party at Niazi Qala on 29 December, and demanded a probe of the 24 January raid that forced the Pentagon to acknowledge that it had inadvertently killed 16 civilians.
At Niazi Qala, as in the raid near Kandahar, the "good guys" were mistaken for the bad guys because Afghan warlords fed misleading information to US intelligence agents to get rid of local rivals. The estimate of 3,742 civilian casualties up to 6 December by the University of New Hampshire economist, Marc Herold, while not definitive, is based on a meticulous, heavily footnoted compilation of on-the-scene findings by United Nations officials in Afghanistan, nongovernmental relief groups such as Doctors Without Borders, and a wide spectrum of US and foreign journalists, including reporters from the US, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, India and Pakistan.
Civilian casualties
These studies attribute the high level of civilian bombing casualties to three factors (7): the Soviet army built its military garrisons in populated centres where they could be most easily protected, and these became the Taliban fortresses that the US Air Force was attacking; the Taliban often attempted to hide its ammunition depots in populated areas; most important, the air force shifted from the laser-guided targeting used in the Kosovo war to less accurate
"global positioning" targeting linked to satellites.
The devastating impact of targeting mistakes has been enhanced by the fact that the US Air Force carried out carpet bombing over wide areas using B-52's and B1-B's carrying CBU-87 cluster bombs. The 1,000-pound CBU-87 mother bomb contains 202 bomblets, each equipped with a small parachute. When one bomb is dropped, it spreads bomblets over an area the size of two or three football fields. Each B-1
bomber can carry 30 CBU-87 bombs, and some 600 of them had been dropped by the end of January. Although the bombs are supposed to explode on landing, at least five percent do not, which suggests, says Herold, that there could be 6,000 unexploded bomblets littering the countryside, akin to landmines.
When Rumsfeld recently obtained a $10bn emergency advance from the US Congress to keep global anti-terrorism operations going, he said that US military operations in Afghanistan would continue until at least October 2003. But despite increasingly urgent pleas from Karzai and UN Secretary General Lakhdar Brahimi, he has blocked US support of an expanded UN peacekeeping force, arguing that it would divert funds and resources from the war effort.
An unusual open conflict has erupted in the media between US State Department and Pentagon officials over the issue of an expanded peacekeeping force. Now consisting of 4,500 troops confined to Kabul, the expanded force envisaged by the UN might rise as high as 20,000 and would be assigned to Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Mazar-i-Sharif, in addition to Kabul. Washington would be asked to contribute a token force of US troops and make US aircraft available to fly troops and supplies from other countries into and out of Afghanistan, provide intelligence and airlift peacekeeping troops to safety when they are endangered.
The Pentagon says that expanding the peacekeeping force would divert resources from direct US military operations. The new threat is chaos. Underlying the Pentagon attitude is ideological antipathy to multilateral military operations in which the US must share control and, above all, a desire to avoid America casualties. This attitude does not endear the US either to its coalition partners or to Afghans who have watched Afghan civilians being killed by bombs dropped by US pilots flying safely above the fray.
The White House, siding with the Pentagon, opposes US participation in a larger peacekeeping force, but says it might support expansion if the countries already participating will contribute the additional manpower. This has aroused resentment in the UK, which was planning to scale down its participation in April, and in Turkey, which is expected to replace some of the British troops. There is a great danger that support for the force will peter out unless the US contributes a small contingent of its own, sponsors the new UN resolution needed for expansion, and pushes other countries to join. The need for expansion is urgent, partly because the peacekeeping force will provide security for what could be a stormy session of the Loya Jirga.
Although the US says that it wants Karzai to succeed, the Pentagon has blocked the expansion of the peacekeeping force and also undermined the new regime by pouring arms and money during the war into the hands of warlords who are now strong enough to resist Karzai's authority. In Jalalabad and Gardez, where rival warlords are vying for power, the Pentagon is still supporting Karzai's opponents.
A stable central authority is needed to prevent the use of Afghanistan as a base for terrorism once again, curb the (growing) narcotics trade and to promote the economic reconstruction of one of the world's poorest societies. This means greater economic assistance and an expanded international peacekeeping force.
It will take many years, even with sustained international support, for Afghanistan to put itself together again. Direct US military intervention in Afghan civil conflicts during this protracted process would only add to the resentments now festering after the collateral damage already inflicted, further erode the goodwill the US earned for ousting the Taliban, and strengthen the Islamic extremist forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan that made the rise of the Taliban possible in the first place.
Notes:
(1) Off the record remark on 6 March during a meeting between Zahir Shah and Italian humanitarian organisations, La Stampa, 7 March 2002.
(2) Report by Marc W Herold, "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting", December 2001. Dr Herold teaches economics at Whittemore School of Business and Economics, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, US.
(3) Washington Post, 18 February 2002.
(4) New York Times, 7 March 2002.
(5) Financial Times, 9 March 2002.
(6) Washington Post, 6 March 2002.
(7) See, for instance, the study by Carl Conetta of the Project for Defence Alternatives which puts the direct victims of the bombing at 1,300: "Strange Victory: A Critical Appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan War", Project on Defence Alternatives, Cambridge, Mass, Research Monograph 6, 30 January 2002. See also "Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties", Briefing Report 11, 24 January 2002.
Selig S. Harrison is the author of "Out of Afghanistan: The Inside
Story of the Soviet Withdrawal," Oxford University Press, 1995, and
director of the National Security Project at the Centre for
International Policy, Washington DC
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Citation: Selig S. Harrison. "Afghanistan: in transition to chaos," Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2002.
Original URL: http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/05/03afghanistan
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