No doubt high-tech, precision air strikes reduce civilian casualties. However, no technology is perfect and no human operator is error-proof. In mid July a US air strike hit an Afghan wedding convoy, mistaking it for a Taliban force. 47 civilians died in the air strike, 39 were women and children.
The issue of civilian casualties is an emotive one in Afghanistan, feeding a common perception international forces do not take enough care when launching air strikes, and undermining support for their continued presence in the country.
When the battle is over minds and wills, this kind of scene [video] must be an anomaly, not a trend.
Last friday at 9:30pm local time, a Taliban suicide bomber detonated his vehicle at the gate of Kandahar city’s Sarposa prison. Following the blast, witnesses report 30 motorcycles entered the breach and blew a second hole in the rear wall of the prison. During the following firefight nine hundred prisoners escaped.
Colonel Thomas J. McGrath of the Afghanistan Regional Security Integration Command - South (ARSIC-South), attended a Department of Defense Blogger’s Roundtable this morning to discuss the aftermath of last week’s prison break in Kandahar. You can listen to the entire conference call here. Significant to this blog, according to Col. McGrath the prison break has had no immediate effect on humanitarian, MEDCAP, or PRT programs. That is good news, however I worry the increased Taliban presence in the region might disrupt the programs in the future. Nevertheless, Col. McGrath was confident in the ability of Afghan and Coalition forces not to be derailed by the prison break, “We are making a lot of progress here.”
We wish him luck.
Benini, Aldo A, and Lawrence H Moulton. 2004. “Civilian Victims in an Asymmetrical Conflict: Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan.” Journal of Peace Research 41(4):403-422. [Download Data Here]
This dataset on Afghan towns and villages exposed to hostilities after 11 September 2001 is the by-product of a landmine and UXO contamination assessment. The assessment, with a view to creating an inventory of freshly contaminated sites for rapid clearance purposes, was done by the Afghan NGO Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA) with the help of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF), an advocacy and victim assistance organization in humanitarian mine action (Benini & Donahue, 2003).
In spring and early summer 2002, MCPA interviewer teams visited all communities suspected to have been subject to airstrikes or ground operations during Operation Enduring Freedom. These communities - villages or urban neighborhoods - had been nominated by provincial administrations and by neighboring communities; moreover, MCPA had access to coalition airstrike imprints. The teams visited 747 suspect communities, among which exactly 600 were determined to have had at least one airstrike or ground operation. These affected communities were scattered in 102 districts in 25 of the 32 provinces.
In each community confirmed exposed to post-9/11 hostilities, a team would conduct an interview, using a modular questionnaire, with a small group of local key informants. These groups, variable in size and composition, would share information on dates and types of hostilities, prewar and current population, old and new contaminated areas and broad types of munitions, types and numbers of property damaged or destroyed, and finally, victims. Victim numbers were elicited, broken down in several dimensions - by age and sex, cause (direct violence vs. landmine and unexploded ordnance strikes), outcome (deaths and injuries) - as well as two periods of time. Counts were requested of all who had come to harm between 11 September 2001 and the date of survey - a 9-month period on average. Retrospective counts were requested for the period of 12 months prior to 9/11. No attempt was made to attribute the violence that caused these victims to any specific parties to the conflict. Before leaving the community, teams took GPS (Global Positioning System) measurements of the coordinates of a central location such as its mosque.
Canadian forces in Afghanistan have a new weapon: a GPS guided artillery shell called Excalibur. The shell is made by defense mega-contractor Raytheon and costs $150,000CA per shell. Ordinary high explosive shells cost $2,000CA.
Why use shells costing many times more than an average infantryman’s salary? Accuracy, argues Lt.-Col. Jim Willis, “It lands exactly where you want it to land”. The shells are accurate within 10 meters, current shells are only accurate to within 50 meters. The increased accuracy means one “smart-shell” can do the job of whole barrages with current shells.
The new shells might counter a trend civilian casualties in the Afghan campaign for three reasons. First, the GPS guided shells turn artillery batteries into low (relatively) cost precision airstrikes, capable of collapsing a single structure on demand rather than carpeting the area with impacts. Second, less rounds fired reduces the risk of introducing exploded unexploded ordinances into an area. Third, the shells reduce the need to use massive airborne ordinances. In instances when precision strikes are required the primary option currently available to Coalition forces is an airstrike. However, precision airstrikes typically use ordinances with hundreds of pounds of high explosives, much more than is often needed to eliminate the threat. The “overkill” of these large bombs increases the risk of civilian casualties. The Excalibur shells are smaller and carry less high explosives, reducing the risk of civilian deaths.
However, counterintuitively, there is a risk the new shells will increase danger to civilians. Currently using artillery against insurgents in dense population centers is not an option, since the barrage would likely flatten the entire population center. Commanders with access to the new shells might have more confidence in striking the target and thus be more willing to fire into population centers.
Hypotheticals aside, I (and I think everyone) prefer more accurate to less, fewer required to more, and smaller boom to larger. If those are our guidelines the Excalibur seems well worth the price to our pocketbooks.
Last March, IRIN reported that Taliban forces were blocking polio vaccination programs in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan. In one case, a government polio vaccinator, doing field work, was kidnapped by Taliban forces:
“They slapped my face. They held me for eight hours before releasing me,” the 35-year-old said. “They made me promise that I would not vaccinate any more children – threatening to kill me if I did.”
The targeting of health workers was confirmed by purported Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmad, stating “If [aid workers] won’t stop their work, we will target them, like we’ve targeted them in the past”.
Open warfare against health workers is a de facto acknowledgement by the Taliban that health services are a successful counterinsurgency strategy. Afghanistan is one of only four countries with endemic polio and, as such, vaccination programs can be an effective strategy for winning hearts and minds.
The concept of polio vaccination programs as a COIN strategy fits into a larger argument I have been developing, that health represents not just an indicator of success / failure in war, but is itself a front. That is, health in war is not simply an effect of battle but, in some circumstances, a cause of battle.
Health workers in war-torn countries often have the skills and wealth to leave their homeland for greener (or at least safer) pastures abroad. Iraq is no exception; according to some unverified numbers, half of Iraqi doctors have fled the country since 2003 and those remaining live in constant danger. Their fears are not unfounded. In March 2005, 115 people were killed outside an Iraqi health clinic in the city of Hilla. The victims were lined up outside the clinic to get medical tests necessary for jobs in the Iraqi government. In April, five health workers were kidnapped on their way to an IDP camp near Kandahar. After the incident, health workers refused to travel to the area until their security could be guaranteed. Regarding the kidnapping, Dr. Abdullah Fahim, the Afghan Ministry of Health spokesman said:
“If the security of our health workers is not ensured, then we cannot put more health workers at risk and we won’t be able to send more doctors to the camp”
In both examples, health workers were either directly or indirectly targeted by combatants because of their perceived connection to the government. In Iraq, the health workers were (amongst other things) screening recruits for the Iraqi security forces. In Afghanistan, the health workers were riding in a government vehicle.
To prevent the flight of health workers and preserve indigenous health services in conflict zones, a negotiated “health neutrality” must be considered. The lack of access to health workers effects both sides of a conflict, and thus by banning government health workers from directly assisting either side’s military operations (such as screening Iraqi Army recruits), their security could be better guaranteed. This model is not entirely new. The ICRC has been benefiting from a strict neutrality stance for more than a century.
Nobody disputes that the primary function of government health workers is to provide their services to all in need. Imposing a “wall” between government health ministries and government military operations would solidify the notion of the neutrality of health security between combatants and guarantee the protection of the health workers themselves, thus lowering the rate of “doctor drain”.