NATO, Civilian Casualties and The Geneva Conventions

By Steve Hynd

Here's an important piece, likely to fly under the radar, from Open Democracy's Dave Lannen:

On any given day Nato hospitals in southern Afghanistan enter �condition black� � a status that alerts military tactical commanders that hospital beds are full and patients should be diverted elsewhere.  Commanders� options are limited however � in the south Nato has only two Role-3 hospitals � those that are capable of dealing with complex polytrauma that is a common result of IED blasts. 

It�s typical for a soldier to arrive from the battlefield with injuries requiring vascular, orthopedic, burn, and general surgery.  The most seriously wounded will stop at the British hospital in Helmand province or the US hospital in Kandahar province for stabilization surgery prior to the long flight to Europe for further care.  These hospitals are modern-day �trauma factories� dealing with scores of brutally battered patients daily, not all of whom are soldiers.  Many of the wounded are innocent Afghan civilians whose neighborhoods have become battlefields.  In fact, Afghanistan Rights Monitor (an independent and impartial Afghan rights group) reports that 1,074 civilians were killed and over 1,500 were injured in the first six months of 2010. 

And that�s where this gets complicated.  Even though the Nato hospitals will report condition black, they will always make room for Nato troops requiring care; there just is not another option.  Not so for the civilian casualties; in condition black Nato will either refuse to collect them from the battlefield, or deliver them to the poorly-staffed Afghan Army hospital near Kandahar � the only Afghan Army hospital in the entire southern region � and not capable of complex polytrauma surgery.  The result is that Nato is triaging patients based on nationality vice on medical need.

Although the Geneva Conventions require the warring parties to protect civilians and provide medical care to the wounded, the US chose to escalate the war knowing that civilians would increasingly be killed and wounded � without a proper level of trauma care in place.  While Afghanistan Rights Monitor attributes 60 percent of civilian casualties to the Taliban, they are not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and have no medical facilities.  Such is the condition of conducting a counterinsurgency � the burden lies with the nation states � US/UK.

When we're spending billions on what is supposed to be population-centric counterinsurgency this should be a no-brainer. Failing to do so exposes the sorry truth: it's always "force-protection centric" COIN with all that entails.