In Our Bedrooms After the War: casualties

In Our Bedrooms After the War

“It’s like a great darkness falling; it’s the beginning of forgetting.”

- Marguerite Duras

PART TWO: CASUALTIES

For just about as long as we’ve been at war there the recent and distant history of Afghanistan has been wrapped in a cloud of myth that’s worked hard to obscure the context of civilian casualties. And that means we’re all just going to have to be brutally honest for a few minutes. As it happens I have this really cool Great Aunt who turned 100 the other day, and she’s import to this next phase of the our discussion not because she’s my cool great aunt but rather because she’s the only one I know who even vaguely recalls a time when civilians did not account for the majority of casualties in war time. Yes you read that correctly. Ninety percent of the casualties in World War I were soldiers, but by the end of World War II, half of casualties were civilians and the ratios haven’t gotten better since.

Now that’s not me saying that we – as a society – should ignore the horror of those casualties, but rather that we all need to proceed from the something approaching the same conceptualization when we use a word like “war” – that there are no civilian casualty free wars. And if we’re going to go around having wars, we’re all just going to have to figure out a way to deal with that. What I mean is that if you’ve signed one of those “stop genocide in Sudan” petitions or something like one or bought into virtually any call for human rights based extra-state intervention—you are pro war—at lease given a certain set of provocations. So to properly evaluate the horrific civilian casualties chronicled by the War Logs we’re going to need to contextualize and even differentiate “horrific civilian casualties” [as all casualties are horrific] from “truly horrifying casualties.”

And that’s going to be tough – and fuck, it should be – but why don’t we start with six numbers. 1,000,000. 2,000,000+. 400,000. 1,000,000. 16,000. 40,000. Those are in order … The low estimate of the number of civilian deaths during the ten-year Soviet occupation. The high estimate of the number of civilian deaths during the ten-year Soviet occupation. The low estimate of the number of civilian deaths during the post Soviet pull-out Civil War [1990-2001]. The high estimate of the number of civilian deaths during the post Soviet Civil War. [note: in the anti genocide community, the 400,000 death toll is typically cited as the death toll in Afghanistan under Taliban “rule” rather than of the civil war in its entirety.] The low estimate of civilian casualties during the NATO war in Afghanistan [2002 – today]. And finally, the high estimate of civilian casualties during NATO’s war. Two further numbers might also be worth considering in this instance … 8,000 and 6,000. The number of Hazaras [Persian-speaking, Shia Muslims of Mongolian descent], Massacred by the Taliban on two occasions during the late 90’s when: “Young men over 16 were brought out of their houses into the streets and had their throats slit in a ritualistic killing. Younger boys had both hands chopped off at the wrist.” via Ahmed Rashid

Holga - Afghanistan

None of those absolve us of the blood on our hands. Our military has been responsible for at least 16,000 civilian deaths and we are hardly to be congratulated for having inflicted less in the way of horrendous death and destruction than the red army. Nor are we to be proclaimed innocent, holy or righteous for having murdered fewer innocent men, women and children than Mullah “fucking” Omar and his band. However, in order to have an intelligent and informed conversation about the nature of our war in Afghanistan; we need to come to grips with what the numbers reveal … a level of civilian security the people of Afghanistan haven’t had since 1979. Moreover, they reveal the welter of ethnic violence Afghanistan will likely fall back into once NATO departs.

Russians ambushed, Afghanistan, 1980s

Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but me, I can’t help but wonder how many petitions we’ll all be asked to sign demanding that the [insert name of president here] administration “take” action to prevent [insert specific atrocity here] in Afghanistan—And how much play, such efforts and the horrifying war crimes that prompt them will garner in the media spaces operated by anti-war pundits named Greenwald, Maddow, Sullivan, Huffington and Assange.

My rather uncharitable – but well informed – guess goes like: About as much as Chad or South Sudan or the “Democratic” Republic of Congo are currently getting on their “air.”

None.

Protest Against War On Afghanistan-Boston, Mass. 12-02-09