ALEX BRANDON/AP

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA speaking at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 17.

BURIED in the public relations blather of United States Marine legions “liberating” Helmand and Afghan (sham) “elections” as democracy restored¹ is an unspoken trade-off over who disproportionately dies in America’s modern wars in the Third World. Under President George W. Bush, U.S. politico-military elites chose to fight the Afghan war with minimal regard for so-called collateral casualties. But the soaring toll of killed Afghan civilians swayed world public opinion and stoked the Afghan resistance as grieved Afghan family members sought revenge.

Enter Barack Obama. Faced with the prospect of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces being withdrawn as restless NATO-country citizens mobilised against the war, the Obama war machine took the decision to trade off (mostly) lower-class U.S. “volunteer” soldiers from rural America² for fewer rural Afghan civilians killed. The decision had nothing to do with valuing Afghan lives and everything to do with a careful political calculation. In outlying areas such as in the Pakistan borderlands or in isolated rural areas of Afghanistan, Obama’s war machine cavalierly slaughters innocent civilians with the same impunity and at the same rate as his maligned predecessor did, as drone strikes in Pakistan and U.S. air strikes in Farah and Logar have demonstrated.

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

President George W. Bush, an October 2001 photograph.

What has also changed is the public face of the war as one might expect from a President skilled in diction and possessing the persuasive skills of a well-trained lawyer. On the other hand, behind the soothing words, the rationales are identical: in Phoenix recently, Obama reiterated the Bush of September 2001:

“This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. This is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defence of our people.”³

So much for the current U.S. rationale for war. So much for “Change We Can Believe In”.

AFP

U.S. MARINES CROSS a makeshift bridge in the Garmsir district of Helmand Province on July 12.

The Obama approach finds strong support amongst U.S. liberals, the U.S. corporate media and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). As I have documented elsewhere, the UNAMA coughs up statistics on Afghan civilian deaths which cannot be fact-checked and which conveniently grossly underestimates the carnage caused by U.S./NATO actions. Sadly, the superficial impartiality of the U.N. gives such “faith-based” data credibility in the international media, which widely cite them. Former President Bush must look on with envy at how the U.S. media, including such “liberal” pillars as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (for example, the McNeill Lehrer News Hour) or MoveOn.org, now toe the Pentagon line on Obama’s Afghan war.

Almost eight years ago, I pointed out a trade-off taken by the U.S. military in its original bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001:

“From the point of view of U.S. policymakers and their mainstream media-boosters, the ‘cost’ of a dead Afghan civilian is zero as long as these civilian deaths can be hidden from the general U.S. public’s view. The ‘benefits’ of saving future lives of U.S. military personnel are enormous, given the U.S. public’s post-Vietnam aversion to returning body bags…. But, I believe the argument goes deeper and that race enters the calculation. The sacrificed Afghan civilians are not ‘white’, whereas the overwhelming number of U.S. pilots and elite ground troops are white. This ‘reality’ serves to amplify the positive benefit-cost ratio of certainly sacrificing darker Afghans today [and Indochinese, Iraqis yesterday] for the benefit of probably saving American soldier-citizens tomorrow. What I am saying is that when the ‘other’ is non-white, the scale of violence used by the U.S. government to achieve its stated objectives at minimum cost knows no limits.”⁴

Years have since gone by and bodies and destruction have multiplied. The Taliban and its allies now control vast swathes of Afghanistan. The Afghan post-conflict regime planned at the U.N.-sponsored Bonn conference (December 2001) has shown itself to be nothing more than a fig leaf for a collection of rapacious warlords, corruption and the violence of daily life know no bounds, the status of Afghan women, which was never a serious Western consideration, has remained as before, some schools have been built and then blown up, a non-governmental organisation mafia has descended upon Kabul pursuing its own agendas, palatial villas have sprouted up and luxury hotels have mushroomed, and so on.⁵

All these are asides: today, the politics of making war (in Afghanistan) has reversed the killing trade-off. The obvious military failure of Bush’s seven-year Afghan war and the rising aversion amongst NATO countries’ public to what was increasingly perceived as an American-Afghan war, motivated the change. After 2004, the Bush administration very effectively pressured certain NATO countries to increasingly bear the costs in terms of human casualties of the Afghan war (Table 1).

As I shall document using data on Afghan civilian deaths from the publicly available Afghan Victim Memorial Project database and on U.S./NATO occupation soldier deaths from the website http://www.icasualties.org/oef/, the Obama regime by relying less upon air power and more upon ground forces is tilting the relative mix of who dies on the ground in Afghanistan. Table 1 presents annual data for 2005-09, whereas Table 2 gives monthly totals for January-July, 2009.

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP

LT. GEN. STANLEY A. McChrystal, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan.

What needs first to be clearly understood is that Obama’s Pentagon has been much more deadly for Afghan civilians than was Bush’s in comparable months of 2008.⁶ During January-June 2008, some 278-343 Afghan civilian perished at the hands of U.S./NATO forces, but for comparable months under Team Obama the numbers were 520-630.

For the month of July, the respective figures were 134-155 versus 47-56. We see the Obama trade-off kicking in as U.S./NATO troop deaths in July 2008 were 30 versus 76 in July 2009. The ratio of Afghan civilians killed per occupation soldier death fell from 3.7 during January-June to 0.7 in July 2009 (Table 1).

Predictably, the mainstream media led by the Associated Press spinned the new Obama approach as “new strategy restricting air power may be working”.^{7 8} As I have pointed out, the new approach does not involve reducing overall Afghan civilian deaths but merely shifts who causes them: U.S./NATO ground forces instead of U.S./NATO air power.⁹ But such “details” escape the mainstream press as well as some critics of the U.S. war.¹⁰

In late July, a spate of articles in the mainstream press surfaced seeking to minimise the number of civilians killed by U.S./NATO actions. AP led the way (as usual) claiming that (no details provided naturally which could be fact-checked),

“An Associated Press count of civilian deaths based on reports from Afghan and international officials shows that 453 civilians have been killed in insurgent attacks this year. The count also shows that 199 civilians have died from attacks by Afghan or international forces. An Afghan human rights group says an additional 69 civilians died during a U.S. attack in Farah in May, but the U.S. disputes those deaths.”¹¹

AFP

SEARCHING FOR BODIES under the rubble of destroyed houses in Garni village in Farah province on May 5. One hundred people were believed to have been killed in a series of U.S.-led coalition air strikes in western Afghanistan.

Other media with on-the-ground sources reported that 147 civilians had perished and provided names, gender and ages.

In other words, truth only comes from “U.S sources”.¹² In my Afghan Victim Memorial Report database (and in Table 2), I report 567-686 Afghans killed by U.S./NATO actions during January-July 2009; in other words, AP reports less than a third of the actual civilians killed by the U.S. and NATO.

FARZANA WAHIDY/AP

A woman casts her vote in the presidential and provincial elections at a polling station in Mazar-i-Sharif, northern Afghanistan, on August 20.

For its part, the UNAMA stated that U.S and allied forces had killed 265 civilians in the first six months of 2009. When compared with my figures of 520-630 (midpoint at 575), the UNAMA undercounts by 54 per cent. In service to General Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. military commander in Afghanistan.

The Obama administration has decided that the way to avoid outright defeat on the ground and to continue America’s Afghan war is to accept more U.S. military casualties in order to keep NATO in the fight. No exit strategy exists and the revealed preference of the Imperial City on the Potomac is for a long, low-burning conflict with tolerably low casualties and extremely high overhead.¹³

SHAUN CURRY/AFP

DEMONSTRATORS OUTSIDE THE prime ministerial residence on Downing Street in central London on July 13 after eight British soldiers fighting the war in Afghanistan were killed in 24 hours.

Should NATO’s Canadian and European citizens support such a scenario?

1. See Malalai Joya, “Why Afghans Have No Hope in This Week’s Vote”, CommonDreams.org (August 18, 2009) at http://www.commondreams.org/print/45964

2. "Rural Soldiers More Likely to Die in Iraq, Afghanistan", Associated Press (December 18, 2006) at http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=8690

3. From Christopher Dowd, "Where to Begin Rebutting the Afghan Blather?" Antiwar.com (August 18, 2009) at http://original.antiwar.com/christopher-dowd/2009/08/18/where-to-begin-rebutting/

4. See my widely cited dossier, "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting", ZNet (December 10, 2001) at http://www.zmag.org/herold/htm and also at http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm . I return to this theme of the different valuation of lives in my "The Bombing of Afghanistan as a Reflection of 9/11 and Different Valuations of Life", Cursor.org (September 11, 2002) at http://cursor.org/stories/heroldon911.htm

5. As I have amply documented in, for instance, "An Island Named Kabul: Trickle-Up Economics and Westernisation in Karzai’s Afghanistan", www.cursor.org (December 6, 2004) at http://www.cursor.org/stories/kabul.html and in "Pulling the Rug Out: Pseudo-Development in Karzai’s Afghanistan. Afghanistan as an Empty Space, Part Two", www.cursor.org (March 7, 2006) at http://www.cursor.org/stories/emptyspace2.html

6. As I have pointed out elsewhere, see "Deadly Change. Obama is more deadly for Afghan-Pashtun civilians than Bush. He represents a ’change’ Afghans should look upon with skepticism", RAWA News (February 2, 2009) at http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2009/02/02/obama-more-deadly-for-afghan-civilians-than-bush-in-jan-2009.html

7. "Airstrikes Kill Fewer Afghan Civilians. Six Killed in July; new strategy restricting air power may be working", Associated Press (August 10, 2009)

8. See my article, "Obama’s Afghan war, the U.S. media, and the United Nations: the new metric of civilian casualties"; Cover Story, Frontline, Vol.26, No.13, July 3, 2009 at http://www.thehindu.com/fline/fl2613/stories/20090703261300400.htm

9. See my article, "Obama’s Afghan war, the U.S. media, and the United Nations: the new metric of civilian casualties"; Cover Story, Frontline Vol.26, No.13, July 3, 2009 at http://www.thehindu.com/fline/fl2613/stories/20090703261300400.htm

10. For instance, Dave Markland who believes that truth comes from compiling data from LexisNexis, see his blog "For Fans of CSI", rabble.ca (August 7, 2009) at http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/davemarkland/2009/08/fans-csi

11. Alfred de Montesquiou, "Afghan, NATO Slam New Taliban Code of Conduct", Associated Press (July 30, 2009).

12. I have long been noting this. See my book chapter, "Truth about Afghan Civilian Casualties Comes Only Through American Lenses for the U.S. Corporate Media [our modern-day Didymus]", in Peter Phillips and Project Censored [eds], Censored 2003: the Year’s Top 25 Stories [New York: Seven Seas Publishing, 2002], pp. 265-294.

13. I paraphrase Christopher Dowd, op. cit.