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War by the numbers, and the humanity too

Thursday, August 12, 2010

THE WARS that started under President George W Bush were not – repeat not – to be reported by “body-count”.

That was proscribed as an obsolete metric from the Vietnam era. You may recall how adamantly General Tommy Franks told journalists, as the fighting had gotten fully under way: "You know we don't do body counts."

In effect, that mantra’s intent has been maintained since President Barack Obama inherited the wars and the more recent one (Iraq) wound down - toward the proclaimed “end of combat operations” by the end of this month - even as the first one (Afghanistan) ramped up again, toward a bigger international presence now, including nearly 100,000 US military personnel, than ever before.

[A draw-down of US troops in Afghanistan began in 2003, we should now recall, at a point when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced in words that now echo bitterly: “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization”. This was a partial justification, of course, for the military tilt toward Iraq as a new venture.]

Inevitably though, numbers do count - with the armed forces themselves, the politicians, the journalists and most of all with the citizens of the many countries involved, and it’s salutary to see (in a way we don’t see in too many wars) an international organization like the United Nations bringing out its yardstick for conflict, and reporting its grim statistical measurements.

This week’s UN assessment of the Afghan fighting reveals that civilian casualties have risen by 31 percent in the first half of this year. That’s 3,268 civilian dead and wounded, compared with about 2,500 in the previous six months. And most of them (some three-quarters of that total) were caused, the UN judges, by the Taliban and other insurgents. This is the wretched calculus that we must add to what American media already reported with emphasis as this month began – that July had been the worst month on record for American troop losses:  a total of 66 killed.

 

A simple conclusion, “the human cost of this conflict is being paid too heavily by civilian Afghans”, has come from the UN’s Chief of Mission, Staffan de Mistura (above left). It’s hard to deny, even taking into account the rising US military toll.

He points out also that deaths and injuries among children are occurring in disproportionate numbers - 55 percent up from the previous reporting period.

  

 

DE MISTURA, I KNOW, will have been paying special attention to those figures for young casualties.

This unusual civil servant of hybrid background, both Italian and Swedish, is like me a veteran observer of the Cyprus conflict. We were both on that divided island during the early 1970s, he on his first UN posting, and I reporting for British television - only to go back many times, much later with the UN myself sometimes. De Mistura went on to serve on UN missions in the Balkans, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Iraq before ending up in Afghanistan.

Those early beginnings of his career in Cyprus were marked - indelibly, I think - by watching helplessly as a child entered the no-man’s-land between the opposing Greek and Turkish sides, and was killed by a sniper’s bullet. He’s often talked of being impelled into continuing humanitarian work ever since witnessing “with my own eyes for the first time in my life a child being shot”. He calls his lasting reaction “a sense of constructive outrage” at the human cost of conflict. 

I’m glad he can feel constructive about it.

 

 

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THIS WEEK’S NEWS FROM THE NORTH of Afghanistan has been well-nigh impossible to formulate a constructive response to.

The 10 members of a medical aid group shot to death by the Taliban are - not surprisingly - being portrayed in news outlets as representing a new nadir in attacks on civilians in the nearly nine years of this war. Humanitarian aid workers have often, but sadly far from invariably, been given a wide enough berth by the insurgents to enable them to fulfill their mission of help for the civilian population. Until now.

As so often when a death occurs in a foreign land, it’s the local press – in the hometown of the dead – that can deliver the most piercing account of the loss. We hear it often enough from weekly papers and broadcast stations in military garrison towns throughout the United States.

This time it has been a civilian memorializing – like that for Tom Little, the optometrist from upstate New York. He’s been mourned by parishioners of the Presbyterian churches of Albany and Schenectady counties that supported his mission, as well as by his wife Libby Little (pictured above right with her husband in 2001). She's a fellow aid-worker of long standing in Afghanistan – they raised their children while serving there.

The Times Union of Albany reports that he won’t be laid to rest at a local church. Instead it will be in an Afghan churchyard. The family will fly there, and in his wife’s words: “He worked and died there, and that's where he'll be buried.”

 

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