They Hate Us For Our Killing Them

By Steve Hynd

Ackerman at Danger Room has the news that a new study confirms -- as if anyone other than a few military morons doubted it -- that killing civilians does indeed create new insurgents.

�When ISAF units kill civilians,� the research team finds, referring to the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, �this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.� According to their model, every innocent civilian killed by ISAF predicts an �additional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next 6-week period.� In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two civilian casualties killed in ISAF-initiated military action leads to six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks.

...They examined the effect of over 4000 civilian deaths from January 2009 to March 2010 by looking at the sometimes-lagging indications of reprisal attacks in the same areas. To be clear, the team�s research is inferential, creating a statistical model to examine spikes in violence following civilian-casualty incidents, rather than interviewing insurgents as to their specific motivations.

But in their study, the researchers found that there�s a greater spike in violence after ISAF-caused civilian deaths than after insurgent-caused ones. �An incident which results in 10 civilian casualties will generate about 1 additional IED attack in the following 2 months,� the researchers write. �The effect for insurgents is much weaker and not jointly significant.� In other words, even if the insurgents possess a �total disregard for human life and the Afghan people,� as an ISAF press release reacting to this weekend�s insurgent bombings in Herat put it, Afghans effectively would rather be killed by other Afghans than foreigners.

That�s not all. The researchers found that ISAF-caused civilian casualties corollate with long-term radicalization in Afghanistan. Plotting reprisal incidents of violence in areas where civilians died at coalition hands, the data showed that �that the Coalition effect is enduring, peaking 16 weeks after the event. This confirms the intuition that civilian casualties by ISAF forces predict greater violence through a long-run effect.�

 But, being Ackerman, questioning the morality of accepting that a certain number of innocents will be killed just isn't on the cards, it seems. 

The most recent United Nations quarterly study of political and security affairs in Afghanistan found that civilian casualties caused by the U.S. and its allies dropped from 33 percent to 30 percent of total civilian casualties, a dip the U.N. attributed to measures resulting from �a reiteration of the July 2009 tactical directive by the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force limiting the use of force.� But the researchers suggest that Afghans aren�t going say, �Those Americans are OK! They only cause one out of three dead innocent Afghans!� � especially if, as the U.N. also found, civilian casualties in the escalated war are on the rise overall.

After all, if the goal is just to stop U.S.-caused civilian casualties, then the policy implications are clear: stop the war. If it�s to erode the influence of al-Qaeda�s allies in Afghanistan while reducing civilian casualties to the �absolute minimum� Petraeus describes in his letter, then getting the balance between fighting insurgents and protecting civilians wrong risks making the Afghanistan war counterproductive for its stated purpose. (Italics mine - Steve)

Duh, ya think?  Even leaving aside the moral issue, the sense of using well over 100,000 rotating troops to battle the less than 100 (possible zero) al-Qaida in Afghanistan and thus creating a hefty pressure for those people being bombed and shot to become and remain al-Qaida's allies is questionable wisdom at best. Especially when you consider that the U.S. military - and U.S. politicians - are still wrapped up in the force protection paradigm, no matter what the pretty think-tank papers may say about "population centric COIN". The main US killer of Afghan civilians nowadays is not airstrikes, but special forces raids. Those are on the increase and continuing to produce atrocities like this in Gardez in February.

Next, I expect another study to show that the positive effects on Afghan opinion of US aid and reconstruction in Afghanistan are far outweighed by the negatives of corruption, lack of self-determination and civilian casualties. Yet another thing they could have found out by asking any sales manager, all of whom know that bad news travels three times as far as good news.