One of the challenges the U.S.-led coalition faces in the war in Afghanistan is controlling the narrative surrounding its actions. Often, the accounts given by officials differ so sharply from those of local eyewitnesses that the coalition’s portrayal of events seems disconnected from reality. The recent bombing controversy in western Afghanistan is only the newest case. By examining how various stories diverged over the days after the incident, a clear pattern emerges: the coalition has a problem with damage control.
The undisputed facts are fairly sparse: in the early pre-dawn hours of Friday, August 22, a small joint American-Afghan force came under attack in a village called Azizabad, in the Shindand District of southern Herat Province. While offering support to the embattled unit, an AC-130 gunship fired into a cluster of buildings. Beyond this, the facts become murky, even contradictory.
On Saturday, August 23, Voice of America reported that, while Afghan officials complained that the strike had killed “at least 70 people, including women and children,” a U.S. coalition spokesman claimed that a battlefield assessment indicated only thirty Taliban were killed, and that a follow-up investigation was under way.
On Sunday, August 24, The Washington Post published a story noting that a U.S. military spokesperson maintained that thirty Taliban insurgents died during the fight. Local officials, including a spokesman for the western regional command of the Afghan National Army, claimed they found the bodies of sixty children and nineteen women among the dead.
This was a potentially explosive issue—civilian deaths in Afghanistan have led to violent riots before, most infamously the “traffic riots” in Kabul in 2006—so local and international groups traveled to the area to investigate.
By Monday, August 25, they were counting the dead in Azizabad: a local human rights group claimed “at least 78 people were killed” during the clashes and the air strike, while the Ministry of Interior claimed seventy-six people died, including fifty children under the age of fifteen. The Ministry of Defense adhered to the new U.S./NATO line of twenty-five dead militants and five dead civilians (probably a clarification of the initial count of thirty).
Meanwhile, Afghan president Hamid Karzai increased the anger in his public statements about the incident, upping the body count to a reported eighty-nine. He also fired two high-ranking Afghan National Army (ANA) officers for their involvement in the firefight.
The situation took an altogether different turn by Wednesday, August 27, when the U.N. announced that its own investigation revealed “convincing evidence” that at least ninety civilians, sixty of them children, had died during the Azizabad incident. They also directed stern words at NATO and the U.S. over the safeguarding of civilian lives during combat operations, though a Pentagon spokesman maintained that the U.S. strike was “a legitimate one, a Taliban target.”
By Thursday, August 28—six days after the initial incident—the Pentagon leaked its own version of events to The New York Times, claiming that photographs of the scene after the firefight revealed little evidence for a higher civilian death toll, the U.N.’s investigation was cursory, and other reports relied too heavily on the testimony of local villagers rather than physical evidence such as freshly dug graves or injured people in local hospitals. One U.S. military investigation repeats the claim of twenty-five dead insurgents and five dead civilians, but still proposes additional “joint” investigations of the incident—leaving one to wonder what, exactly, they are still investigating.
This creates an unfortunate case of he-said/she-said for outside observers. While a BBC Persian crew traveled to the area and interviewed locals who corroborated a higher body count, English-language news services have not yet completed their own investigations of the incident. This leaves everyone outside of Shindand reliant on the statements of the U.N., coalition media relations, and local activist groups—none of which are neutral or disinterested actors (the U.N. typically uses local stringers for investigations and surveys).
As politically incorrect as it is to mention the sub-human Taliban animals we are currently fighting travel with their families and if we have to kill the women and children who travel with their husbands … better that than more NATO soldiers coming home in body bags.
Posted by Carl Stevens on Fri 29 Aug 2008 at 09:11 PM
Carl, I sincerely hope you aren't in charge of anything important, like, say, policymaking for our government. That sort of gung-ho, kill-them-all-and-sort-out-the-bodies obviously makes you some sort of commando wannabe. There's a reason this supposed to be bad. When we kill innocent civilians, it seriously undermines our claim to be "the good guys." That is a key doctrine of counterinsurgency, that lethal action should be well-targeted. The most precise weapon is a soldier with an M-16.
Posted by Matt K. on Fri 29 Aug 2008 at 10:14 PM
Matt, I dont know if you have had the pleasure of dealing with the Taliban but just as the article suggests, they intentionaly surround themselves with civilians. Hand wringing only plays into the propaganda.
Posted by Carl Stevens on Fri 29 Aug 2008 at 11:05 PM
Hey guys, this is a good discussion, but I think I need to make something clear. The Coalition does not, and to the best of my knowledge, has never in this war, intentionally targeted civilians, even if they were being used as shields for Taliban or other militants. They have claimant procedures in place, and pay out reciprocity funds to aggrieved families precisely because they do not mean to kill any non-combatant, and wish to make amends when it happens.
That being said, the nature of this war means innocent people will get caught in the cross-fire. While that has received a lot of attention, the sad fact of the matter is that the Taliban and other militant groups can and have either claimed far more civilian casualties than actually were there, or they intentionally place civilians in the way specifically so they can be killed. That's not to excuse what happens, but they also have an interest in inflating numbers.
In this particular incident in Azizabad, we really don't know what happened. From where I'm sitting -- in the U.S., in a comfy chair, and my laptop -- the Pentagon's lack of transparency in conducting these investigations are harmful, precisely because the chorus of wildly different body counts makes it seem like they're not properly following up on their strikes.
That being said, it is entirely possible, even probable, that the Pentagon's original body count will stand: 25 militants, and five civilians, possibly family members. It is important to remember that even though an initial round of investigations has been performed, because they arrived at wildly divergent numbers the Coalition is undertaking a joint Coalition-Afghan follow-up investigation to more solidly ascertain the actual damage.
The facts are not all in, in other words. This article is merely discussing the way perceptions are being shaped in the media, and noting that the Pentagon is not yet playing the game very well. Since much in this war depends on perception, that is a critical failing that must be addressed sooner rather than later.
Posted by Joshua Foust on Sat 30 Aug 2008 at 02:28 PM
Wow, this is really profound...Admitting to the possibility of innocent casualties will not solve the IO problem. If anything, it gives more fotter for the Taliban to use in their IO campaign.
It appears you've already made your decision on what happened based on what you call hearsay accusations, imperfect information, and local Afghan analysts and journalists with what I would add, not completely unbiased agendas.
Your last paragraph completely throws me off as you slyly alledge the US killed a number of civilians. Should we assume that the local analysts the UN paid to do the site survey were completely unbiased?
I agree that we dig our own hole when we kill innocents like this since it gives Taliban easy IO to manipulate, but we have to be careful about what we admit to when we have imperfect information. Sometimes saying very little is better than sticking our foot in our mouth. The world measures our words when we say something (not like the Taliban) and the careful language used by General Conway is exactly what we need. People also want initial numbers and if we can't produce our initial estimates we look worse than the Taliban who claim 50 coalition deaths a day.
Ultimatley the real center of IO here is the village we hit and the areas around it in Herat. Those places will be lost for years if we can't recompensate whatever their perceived loss is. We need to conduct a shura in that village and offer what they consider a just payment for their loss. This could be done in accordance with the investigation. Hell, we could exploit the opportunity and counter the IO against our own FUBAR.
This is the real solution to the problem and will do much better than just saying we don't know what happened.
Posted by Matt P. on Sun 31 Aug 2008 at 07:39 AM