Assessing the human cost of the war in Afghanistan

By Sarah Holewinski

Sarah Holewinski is the Executive Director of CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), a non-political organization working with warring parties to help civilians they have harmed in combat. This is her first contribution to The Reaction.

If the U.S. wants to turn around the situation in Afghanistan, it has to start winning the people. My organization – CIVIC – spent a year on the ground learning that the international coalition is losing them. The United Nations reports that 2,118 civilians died in the Afghan war last year, a 40 percent increase over 2007 and the highest number since the Taliban's ouster in 2001.

What the numbers don't tell us is how bad life really is for the Afghans left behind – the widows with no income, the children without parents, the families whose homes are rubble. Many of these war survivors never receive an apology or the help they want and deserve; those who do told us it was too little, too late. The overlooked are angry.

One man told us, "People believe ISAF [NATO's International Security Assistance Force] just pours salt in the wound, because of how they acted. People are angry because no representative from ISAF came to see what happened, or to apologize that it was a mistake." He watched 47 of his extended relatives and community members killed in a U.S. airstrike in July 2008. While Americans went to the polls in November to elect President Obama, more Afghans were burying loved ones killed in another US airstrike that hit a wedding party.

Harm like this is not intended by the U.S. or its allies. No soldier I've met wants to harm innocent civilians anymore than they want the anger and resentment that follows. But when good intentions fail and civilians are killed, what's too often left is a vacuum of lost dignity and little help for survivors in rebuilding their lives.

Despite consensus at the highest levels that civilians are key to counter-insurgencies, there is no office or senior person at the Pentagon responsible for carrying out the strategic (and moral) imperatives Secretary Gates laid down in his testimony. He should appoint one. And he should do so at a level high enough to match his statements about properly addressing the human costs of war. Such a post would assess that potential civilian cost before any shots are fired, study lessons learned once the fighting starts, maintain proper data on civilian casualties, and, finally, as we heard so many civilians wanted, ensure compensation for unintentional harm.

War's civilian victims deserve no less than this level of attention and American troops, now and in the future, deserve a strategy that avoids angering the civilian population they need to win.

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For more on this extremely important cause, and I cannot stress enough the incredible work that is being done here to address the all-too-neglected human costs of war, see CIVIC's website and its report on Afghanistan, "Losing the People: The Costs and Consequences of Civilian Suffering in Afghanistan." -- MJWS