For the first time, the ISAF occupying force (yes, mainly American) in Afghanistan released its official tallies of civilian casualties. The numbers are important and significant—they are not only lives but a reflection of a disastrous scene in a war nearly a decade long—but many if not most commentators on the data released (via an article in Science magazine) have missed the forest for the trees. Which is a massively important point about transparency and how data is handled and interpreted, and how vital that interpretation is in lessening the impacts of war on a civilian population.

Note first that the Science article deals with not one but four sets of data all attempting to tabulate the same thing, civilian deaths and civilian injuries. The first set was released by Wikileaks last summer and consists of classified documents/reports from soldiers on the ground. The Wikileaks number for deaths turned out to be 93-percent of the official account of 2,537; it was generally “right,” but we are still talking about a difference of hundreds of casualties.

After the ISAF released its data set, yet even two more sets appeared. The first was from the UN and its number is staggeringly higher at 5,191 deaths. The ISOF doesn’t dispute the UN’s higher number and, moreover, doesn’t contend that its database is a complete accounting. “We only count that which we see,” says U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the director of communications for NATO based in Kabul.

Finally, there’s data from the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM), which provides comparatively high-res data on individual incidents collected by a network of 40 observers throughout the country. Unfortunately, its tally only runs from Jan. 2010 to June 2010: 1,074. And it’s nearly impossible to extrapolate from the that figure either: 2010 was a year of massive escalation with a significant amount of new troops and troop activity in March, with much, much more in June, when ARM’s data ends.

So. . . what? We have a vast amount of data and, hey, that’s better than nothing. But it’s a jumble. Effectively you have three competing organizations collecting this data, with no agreement. Everyone is collecting the data for the same reason: to figure out ways to make civilian deaths less. But, everyone is keeping their data a secret. Or was anyway.

What we’re left with is incomplete data from three agencies collected in three different ways. Where does that leave interpretation? The interpretation necessary to put data to good use.

Bohannon’s article ends with an example of how exactly that can happen, how data and good interpretation can lead to less civilian war causalities. (In saying that war can be done better, cause less harm, there’s no admission here that war can ever be OK. Just so we’re on the same page.)

Anyhow:

In the course of analyzing their casualty data, ISAF commanders noticed a trend. “What became very clear to me is that all the [civilian] fatalities occurred
between the 100-meter point and the 0-meter point” approaching a checkpoint, Wilson says. Beyond that range, a flare usually suffices to warn drivers to slow down. But if a vehicle has not slowed down yet, Wilson says, “this is where as a soldier you suddenly think, ‘I’m about to die because this vehicle is going to drive in here and detonate.’” The problem, he says, is that soldiers in that situation had no nonlethal options.

The new directive gave soldiers more options for warning drivers at a distance, Wilson says. These include laser dazzlers, paint ball guns, and even chalk bullets. “If you fire them at a vehicle,” he says, “they will ping off and make such a loud noise that, if they’re a genuinely innocent person, they’ll get the message.” The CIVCAS data put numbers to that narrative. Deaths due to escalation of force dropped by 50% in the 8 months after the April 2010 directive went out, compared with the same 8 months in 2009.

Imagine for a second if the data collection process was collaborative between ISAF military forces, the UN, and Afghan monitors. That data wouldn’t be perfect, naturally, but it would be leagues better than what three competing organizations are doing in secret, something at least enough for the three organizations to agree is “complete.” And then use it.

Which is one level of transparency—like a pretty basic common-sense level. And not to sound as horribly naive as I know this sounds, but if this information was all declassified, it seems that there’s a whole lot of potential for data interpretation, and problem solving, outside of the military. After all, what sense does it make for it to even be classified in the first place? That isn’t classified in Iraq because there are civilian observers there. Whereas, in Afghanistan, much of the observation is left to the military.

So this is all bigger than “Wikileaks was right” about the data they delivered, but it’s also Wikileaks being right about transparency.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.