Military database shows increasing Afghan civilian deaths

Casualty data released Thursday by the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan paint a month-by-month picture of an increasingly deadly war there for civilians.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led military coalition in Afghanistan has released its internal database of civilian casualties. In this visualization of the data, monthly casualties rise above the region of Afghanistan in which they occurred, from January 2009 to December 2010. Over this period, 2537 civilians were killed, and 5594 were wounded, with weaponry and perpetrator coded by color.

The International Security Assistance Force "CIVCAS" database provided to the journal Science, suggests insurgents, largely through bombs and executions, caused 80% of the 2,537 civilians deaths over the last two years in Afghanistan. The CIVCAS totals of civilian deaths are about half those of a yearly United Nations estimate released Wednesday, but the trend of increasing insurgent killings is consistent.

The Afghanistan war, "has become a counter-insurgency, where civilian casualties are the only game in town," says Science reporter John Bohannon, a molecular biologist who "embedded" with the CIVCAS team in Afghanistan last year. "If you can't get those down, you are never going to win the war."

ISAF began keeping the database's civilian death numbers in 2007, but only in the last two years has it systematically tracked civilian deaths by incident type, such airstrike or assassination. "We acknowledge that there are likely additional civilian casualties that we cannot track, but the trends between all organizations are very similar," says Colette Murphy, a U.S. naval officer with ISAF Public Affairs, attributing differences with UN and human rights group estimates of Afghan civilian deaths to methodology differences, primarily in use of media reports of casualties. "All point to the Taliban as causing the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties."

The release in Science magazine, agreed to after months of negotiations with ISAF, should help outside researchers analyze the conflict. An analysis of the CIVCAS data prepared by the magazine in collaboration with six outside experts finds:

•Civilian deaths increased 19% in 2010, with summer months and the Southern provinces around Kandahar the deadliest. The UN data shows a 15% jump.

•Airstrikes were the largest source of military-caused civilians deaths, 136 over the last two years, but they dropped 11% in 2010. UN numbers are much higher, 171 deaths in 2010 alone, but that was a 50% drop in air attack deaths from the previous year.

•Improvised explosives killed the most civilians, 777 men, women and children last year, with the Taliban increasing their use in the face of last year's U.S.-led military offensive that doubled troop numbers to 140,000.

"Clearly there has been an effort to address civilian casualties caused by ISAF, but this is only a snapshot," says economist Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway University of London, one of the casualty number analysts. The CIVCAS numbers nearly match data made public last summer in Wikileaks documents, he and others note. Science has made the database and its methodology available on its website. "ISAF has shown a greater willingness to be transparent in releasing monthly regional-level data," Spagat says. "An even greater degree of openness would be to release the incident-by-incident data."

Bohannon acknowledges that ISAF likely released the data because military officials view the story it tells as favorable for them. "(But) what is important is getting the data out," he says, to help public health researchers and analysts gain a more clear picture of the situation facing Afghan civilians.

Casualties in time and space. The seasonal rhythms and shifting battlefields of the war emerge in this view of the 8131 Afghan civilians killed or injured over the past two years, recorded in a military database called CIVCAS. (No data were available for the first 5 months of 2010 in the Southwest region.)CAPTIONGeorge Michael Browe

Although they have roughly similar populations, civilians deaths in the war in Iraq (roughly 100,000 deaths over the course of the conflict by one estimate) have outnumbered those in Afghanistan, which lacks the same crowded cities. "However, as the Taliban shifts its strategy to attacking Afghan government-related targets, which include school teachers and health workers, then it is inevitable that the trend in deaths among non-military personnel will rise," says Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, who has published estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths. "While much of Afghanistan does not overtly support the Taliban, the tolerance for deaths caused by the Taliban is greater than that for death of civilians by ISAF," he adds, by email.

From USAToday

Troops may remain in Afghanistan thru 2014

It sounds like the administration is starting the process of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan this summer, but when that process ends is anyone's guess.

The U.S., its allies and the Afghanistan government have agreed to end combat operations in 2014, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today that a residual force may stay beyond that date to help train Afghan forces.

"Obviously it would be a small fraction of the presence that we have today, but I think we're willing to do that," Gates told U.S. troops during a surprise visit to Bagram air field. "My sense is, they (Afghan officials) are interested in having us do that."

It should be noted that the U.S. still has troops in Europe and Japan, more than six decades after the end of World War II.

Gates made the trip so that he can assess his recommendation of how many troops to pull out of Afghanistan starting in July, a Pentagon statement said.

When President Obama announced the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December of 2009, he also said he would begin the process of withdrawal in July 2011.

That moment is fast approaching.

In his remarks at Bagram, Gates encouraged the troops.

"I know you've had a tough winter, and it's going to be a tougher spring and summer, but you've made a lot of headway," Gates said. "I think you've proven, with your Afghan partners, that this thing is going to work and that we'll be able to prevail."

From USAToday