Crawford lists the following research results for the period October 7, 2001 to June 2011. There is no distinction with regard to those responsible for the deaths.
Lowest number of each estimate for directly killed civilians (Table 1) (For the meaning of the abbreviations used, see the appendix.)
Year AR
181 See Neta C. Crawford, Civilian Death and Injury in Afghanistan, 2001-2011, Cost of War Project, Watson Institute for International Studies, Boston University, September 2011.
182 The figures for 2001 in Tables 1 and 2 diverge from Crawford’s figures, because Herold later on corrected his original data in a downward direction. In fact the problem was that the the origi-nal data were based on double-counts due to confusing website names (see Marc Herold,
“Counting the Dead,” The Guardian [online], August 8, 2002). These corrections then may also apply to Herold’s December 20, 2001, statements made to the German political TV program
“Monitor” (broadcast by the public broadcaster ARD), in which he corrected his estimate of 3,800 civilian deaths upwards to “probably 5,000” (see the German-language transcript of the program:
http://www.ag-friedensforschung.de/regionen/Afghanistan/opfer-monitor.html). The data in the tables for 2002 are taken from the August 8, 2002 Guardian article and are absent in Crawford’s study. In it, Herold gave an estimate of between 3,125 to 3,620 for the total period of October 7 to July 31, 2002. The numbers for 2002 indicate the differences to his numbers for 2001.
183 “Civilian casualties in the War in Afghanistan (2001–present),” Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%9 3present).
Highest Number of Each Estimate for Directly Killed Civilians (Table 2)
Crawford uses the data material to determine the mean value for each year. Using the extreme values for each year would result in a different picture:
Mean values and extreme values for directly killed civilians in Afghanistan (October 7, 2001 to December 31, 2011) (Table 3)
Year Lowest Number
Columns 1 and 2 yield a mean value of 14,963; the mean value of the right-most column is 14,527.
Assuming a conservative average value of 14,500 directly killed civilians, we get a number of 5.2 killed per year and 100,000 inhabitants if we estimate the total population of Afghanistan at 28 million. This rate of deaths would be slightly above the one for the United States for the year 2009 (5.0) and slightly more than twice above the low rate for individual homicide in Afghanistan, which the WHO put at 2.4 per 100,000 for 2008.184 Assuming the highest value of 20,323 would yield a killing rate of 7.25 per 100,000 and year. Even so, Afghanistan would be still well below the world average which UNDP put at a rate of 7.9 per 100,000.185 This would be vastly below the 2006 murder rates for Baltimore (43) and Detroit (48).186 But it is hard to imaginable that life in Afghanistan is so much safer than in those major U.S. cities. One reason is that since 2004, more than 27,000 sorties by the U.S. Air Force have wreaked enormous havoc among the civilian
184 2011 Global Study on Homicide: Trends, Contexts, Data, Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 2011.
185 Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), October 29, 2011.
186 Les Roberts at the hearing of the parliamentary group Die Linke (“Left Party”) at the German Bundestag, March 8, 2008.
tion.187 We just need to recall the air attacks against the fuel trucks in Kunduz and the numerous wedding parties that were annihilated by bombs (see the Introduc-tion by the Editor). Moreover and quite apart from the ground war, U.S. special units had carried out up to 40 round-ups per night; 2,900 in the 12 months before September 2011 alone. They had often endangered innocents, the reason why the night raids are despised by the civilian population, as a September 2011 report highlighted.188
The problem in determining the number of killed civilians is the “passive” search method itself. It can capture only a fraction of all cases. Only deaths re-ported from hospitals and morgues or by the media are registered. As a result of the custom usually practiced across Afghanistan to bury the dead within 24 hours, the number of numerous killed civilians will remain unknown. In order to get more reliable approximations, on-site research and scientific polls would be nec-essary. In Afghanistan, these do simply not exist.
However, there are studies about other countries that are based on such polls. It needs to be determined whether their results can be transferred onto the Afghani-stan case. A comparative study published in 2008 that looks at estimates of the numbers of war dead in 13 countries (without Afghanistan) between 1955 and 2002 concludes that on average only one third of the killed civilians are reported by the media.189 There is, however, a very large variation in this. There were dif-ferences from country to country that ranged from a factor of 4.64 to 0.7. Other studies showed substantially higher underestimates. Representative surveys on the victims of the Iraq War indicate that a factor of 12 could be closer to the truth.
Thus, there cannot be a definitive determination of a factor of 3 for Afghanistan, even though it also cannot be excluded. Yet another example may serve to under-line the uncertainty in this respect: During the “hot phase of the civil war” in Guatemala, only 5% of the killed were detected by “passive investigative meth-ods.” That would amount to a factor of 20.
Therefore, there is no generally valid factor – that could be used with some cer-tainty based on previous experiences – in order to calculate the total number of deaths from those deaths that could be determined.
Thus, for the time being, the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan remains unclear. 14,500 killed civilians constitute the absolute lower limit. Even assuming a number three times as big as suggested by the average factor found by Ober-meyer, Murray and Gakidou seems arbitrary given the concrete circumstances prevailing in Afghanistan. In addition their study is considered as inherently con-servative. Thus, it underestimates the number of killed adults. And the fact that their investigation in some countries determined even fewer war victims than those who had been registered also points to serious methodological flaws. Add to this that, compared to Iraq, where urbanization is more pronounced, and moni-toring by local and foreign media is more intense than in Afghanistan, the registra-tion of civilian deaths has been much more fragmentary. Given the fact that in
187 See U.S. Air Forces Central Combined Air and Space Operations Center, “2004-2008: Com-bined Air Component Commander Airpower Statistics,” August 31, 2008; “ComCom-bined Forces Air Component Commander 2006-2011 Airpower Statistics,” December 31, 2011,
http://www.wired.com/2012/01/afghan-air-war/#more-65463.
188 Open Society Foundations & The Liaison Office (2011) The Cost of Kill/Capture: Impact of the Night Raid Surge on Afghan Civilians, Kabul, September 19.
189 Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray & Emmanuela Gakidou, “Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world survey programme,” BMJ, Vol.
336, June 26, 2008.
Iraq, only every fourth or fifth act of violence against civilians by U.S. soldiers was captured through passive methods (see the chapter above on Iraq, “Fragmentary Databases”), one has to expect at least an equal error rate for Afghanistan. More-over, an indeterminable number of civilians were wrongly put in the category of killed “Taliban” (see Chapter 2.4). This is an easy way for interested parties to hide the number of inadvertently killed civilians from the public. Thus, it is indeed possible that the real number of killed civilians is five to eight times higher than the lower limit of 14,500 civilian deaths. This would mean that Afghanistan has had to suffer between 72,500 to 116,000 civilian deaths.
1.1.2. Directly Killed NGO Workers
The numbers are taken from the quarterly reports of the Afghanistan NGO Safe-ty Office (ANSO) from 2005 to late 2011.190
Killed Aid Workers (Table 4)
Year 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Sum Killed NGO
Workers 2 12 24 8 24 15 31 19 37 31 213