Afghan Lessons: Culture, Diplomacy, and Counterinsurgency

Civilian Casualties, II

90 twenty-two Civilian Casualties, II With each year’s first snowfall, the insurgents would head back toward Pakistan and the conflict became less intense. In the winter of 2008–09, however, things weren’t going that way, and many doubted that the old concept of seasonal conflict could be applied. Despite the bad weather, there continued to be numerous insurgent actions, especially with explosives, and the same was true for international forces operations, above all near the ring road. Following Shindand , there were no further high-profile civilian casualty cases attributable to international troops. ISAF and the coalition countries were doing everything they possibly could to reduce risks, but since it was impossible to eliminate them completely , we all knew that sooner or later there would be a recurrence. I had begun to raise awareness inside and outside the Atlantic Alliance on the issue of civilian casualties because the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that NATO had nothing to lose by speaking out and explaining what was going on. Everywhere I went, I raised the topic because others were going to bring it up anyway. At the University of Kabul, Afghan foreign ministry conferences, in international forums and NATO Parliamentary Assembly meetings, before the North Atlantic Council, with the Italian parliamentary commission, at press briefings. And every time, after speaking up, I felt people would think twice about a complicated issue like this and not jump to conclusions. the vast majority of civilian casualties in the Afghan conflict are due to insurgents: we must never forget that. Obviously, their deliberate acts aiming to kill civilians are one thing; errors made by the international forces are another. Of course this is no excuse, nor is it an alibi. It’s just 22-2423-0 ch22.indd 90 6/3/13 1:54 PM Civilian Casualties, II 91 an incontrovertible fact that the Afghans know better than anyone else because, unfortunately, they’re the ones paying the price on a daily basis. Each day, suicide bombing strategies and indiscriminate use of explosive devices continue to slaughter many innocent people who have nothing to do with the war: men and women going to work in the fields, waiting for a bus, just walking along the street, shopping at the market, or praying in the mosque. The Taliban typically make use of human shields and there are numerous witnesses to this: they just need to fire a mortar against an international military patrol from inside a house full of people and wait for a reaction, which will cause a massacre. Taliban propaganda was highly effective in blaming the international coalition and using every incident to discredit the Afghan government that tolerated this presence on its territory. Of course, facts were never ascertained because the insurgents were not bound to tell the truth, and all they had to do was speak in the first few minutes after an incident, then wait for the media grapevine to do the rest. I told anyone who rightly complained about the lack of information on incidents and their causes that it’s difficult to reconstruct the truth— mainly because the locations are often inaccessible or can be reached only hours after the occurrence. Moreover, to reach incontrovertible conclusions the investigations should be undertaken jointly by the international forces, the Afghans, and the United Nations, and unfortunately this rarely happens, and never with a real common objective. Every so often, the international forces and the Afghans performed joint inspections on the spot where civilian casualties were reported, and after ISAF was given an internal unit in the summer of 2008, it became an increasingly common practice. Nevertheless, it was practically impossible to get the UN involved in this type of activity. UN personnel preferred to operate alone, making use of their own sources of information and methods. This is one area where civilian and military worlds don’t communicate as they should, and my impression is that this is mainly due to ideological preconceptions. ISAF would have preferred joint investigations, but the United Nations always replied zilch, saying that it would be untenable (even dangerous) for a civilian worker from the international agencies to be seen around international military, whom the Afghans inevitably tend to blame for any incident. And maybe they had a point. 22-2423-0 ch22.indd 91 6/3/13 1:54 PM 92 Afghan Lessons Another thing...