So why on Earth are NATO, U.S. forces and Afghan allies killing morecivilians than the Taliban?

This tragic trifecta - a high number of allied airstrikes in Afghanistan, a growing gap

between Taliban-caused civilian casualties and those caused by pro-government forces, and

declining Afghan support for the international presence in Afghanistan - means that the

rules of engagement for NATO and the United States need to change.

Losing Afghanistan, One Civilian at a Time By Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann

The Washington Post Sunday 18 November 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/16/AR2007111601203.html

The road between the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad and the Pakistani border is one

of the busiest in the country, congested with gaily painted trucks, battered taxis, buses

packed to the rafters and Afghans riding bikes. One morning in early March, a suicide bomber

plowed a Toyota packed with explosives into the middle of a U.S. convoy patrolling that

road, killing himself and injuring a Marine. That was bad enough, but what may be the key to

Afghanistan's future was what happened next.

As pedestrians scattered in the resulting confusion and chaos, other Marines opened

fire as their convoy sped away, shooting at vehicles and pedestrians over the course of some

10 miles, according to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. They left at

least 12 civilians dead in their wake and injured dozens more. "They opened fire on

everybody," one wounded bystander told a reporter, "the ones inside the vehicles and the

ones on foot." A court of inquiry is scheduled to convene next month at Camp Lejeune, N.C.,

to determine whether the Marines acted improperly. Investigations by the U.S. military and

the Afghan human rights commission have already concluded that the American convoy was not

fired upon after the suicide attack. The incident near Jalalabad is part of a disturbing

larger pattern in Afghanistan. Last year was the worst year for civilian casualties since

the fall of the country's cruel Taliban regime, and 2007 is shaping up to be even worse. The

most alarming point: As of July, more civilians had died as a result of NATO, U.S. and

Afghan government firepower than had died due to the Taliban. According to U.N. figures, 314

civilians were killed by international and Afghan government forces in the first six months

of this year, while 279 civilians were killed by the insurgents.

So why on Earth are the NATO and U.S. forces and their Afghan allies killing more

civilians than the Taliban? One explanation can be found in the relatively low number of

Western boots on the ground. Afghanistan, which is 1 1/2 times the size of Iraq and has a

somewhat larger population, has only about 50,000 U.S. and NATO soldiers stationed on its

soil. By contrast, more than 170,000 U.S. troops are now in Iraq. So the West has to rely

far more heavily on airstrikes in Afghanistan, which inevitably exact a higher toll in

civilian casualties. Indeed, the Associated Press found that U.S. and NATO forces launched

more than 1,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2007 alone - four times

as many airstrikes as U.S. forces carried out in Iraq during that period.

The collateral damage here goes beyond even the tragic loss of life. A September report

by the United Nations concluded that Western airstrikes are among the principal motivations

for suicide attackers in Afghanistan. Sure enough, suicide attacks in the country rose

sevenfold from 2005 to 2006, to an alarming 123 attacks, and are already up by around 70

percent this year - at the same time that pro-government forces are killing more Afghan

civilians than are their Taliban foes.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has been blunt here, warning that the

mounting loss of civilian life in Afghanistan is eroding the support of the very people whom

Western forces are supposed to be protecting. According to a countrywide poll by the BBC,

the number of Afghans who believe that their country is headed in the right direction

dropped a precipitous 22 percentage points between 2005 and 2006, from 77 percent to 55

percent, while the number of Afghans who approve of the U.S. presence in their country

eroded from 68 percent to 57 percent. Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has

repeatedly urged NATO and the U.S. military to act with greater restraint. Lately, he has

become more impassioned. "Our innocent people are becoming victims of careless operations of

NATO and international forces," he said at a news conference in June. That could put the

entire Afghan mission in peril.

Of course, the fact that international forces in Afghanistan are causing an

unacceptable number of civilian casualties does not exonerate the Taliban insurgents. The

fanatics' tactic of using civilians as human shields in combat is well documented and

deplorable. But research by Brian Williams, a historian at the University of Massachusetts

at Dartmouth, shows that Taliban suicide bombers - unlike their Iraqi counterparts - have

been generally loath to target civilians, preferring instead to focus on Western and Afghan

military personnel and bases.

This tragic trifecta - a high number of allied airstrikes in Afghanistan, a growing gap

between Taliban-caused civilian casualties and those caused by pro-government forces, and

declining Afghan support for the international presence in Afghanistan - means that the

rules of engagement for NATO and the United States need to change. In July, de Hoop Scheffer

proposed a good first step, announcing that NATO is planning to start using smaller bombs to

reduce collateral damage and spare innocent Afghans. NATO is willing to wait for targeting

opportunities that don't put civilians at risk, he said: "If that means going after the

Taliban not on Wednesday but on Thursday, we will get him then." Moreover, last month,

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates urged NATO countries to put more of their soldiers on the

ground in Afghanistan. Should that call be heeded - by no means a certainty - the influx of

troops would also help lessen Western reliance on crude airstrikes.

All this makes good military sense. Indeed, Western commanders should literally take a

page from the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus. The new Army counterinsurgency

manual that he helped write contains sound advice for Afghanistan. An airstrike, the manual

notes, "can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation (HN)

government and provides the insurgents with a major propaganda victory." Petraeus also

points out that sometimes, the best response to an insurgent attack is "doing nothing."

After all, "often insurgents carry out a terrorist act or guerrilla raid with the primary

purpose of enticing counterinsurgents to overreact."

Let's hope that de Hoop Scheffer's patience and Petraeus's calm are woven into Western

rules of engagement in Afghanistan. We should fight at the times of our choosing, not the

Taliban's. And we should not fall into the old insurgent trap of provoking the occupiers

into callous, disproportionate responses. Making these changes could mean far fewer dead

innocents and a far more stable country.

The stakes are high. So far this year, more than 100 U.S. soldiers have died in

Afghanistan, the highest number since the fall of the Taliban six years ago. One obvious way

to lower the U.S. death toll there in 2008 would be to convince Afghans that they have more

to fear from their Taliban would-be oppressors than from the militaries of the United

States, NATO and the Afghan government. Tragically, today, that is simply not the case.

--------

Peter Bergen, the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know and Holy War, Inc., is a senior

fellow at the New America Foundation. Katherine Tiedemann is a research associate at the New

America Foundation.

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There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at

http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html

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Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:

"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress

of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims, have been

born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,

and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it

does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor

freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the

ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the

awful roar of its many waters."

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be

both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a

demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly

submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will

be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words

or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those

whom they oppress."

---Frederick Douglass

Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of

Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,

1857; collected in pamphlet by author.

http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm

__________________________________________________________________

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