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Wikileaks Data Was Right About Afghan Civilian Casualties

Gen. Tommy Franks famously told reporters in 2002, "We don’t do body counts.” And until last Summer, the public had no reason to doubt him. If you remember, that was when Wikileaks revealed a torrent of classified documents, including reports from...

93 percent right anyway

Gen. Tommy Franks famously told reporters in 2002, "We don't do body counts." And until last Summer, the public had no reason to doubt him. If you remember, that was when Wikileaks revealed a torrent of classified documents, including reports from soldiers on the ground of Afghan civilian deaths. There were numbers being tracked and reports being made, but the way the information came in left researchers at a loss for interpretation.

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But an article out in this weekend’s edition of Science details just how closely that data has been tracked since 2009 via something called CIVCAS, which records—by month, region, weaponry, and perpetrator—the injuries and deaths of Afghan civilians. After months of haggling, the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) provided the weekly journal with all of that data, providing for the first time, “the clearest picture yet of the human cost of the war.”

We’ve had fairly good estimates of civilian war deaths in Iraq simply because it’s a comparatively modern, urban country. It lends itself well to observation.

Afghanistan, however, is a mountainous and rural country. This makes the best and often the only observers of these casualties the military itself. In the piece, Science writer John Bohannon recounts:

Late last summer, a confidential source within ISAF informed me that the military was curating a database of civilian casualties. He described a dedicated military team that investigates civilian casualties and analyzes trends in the fi nal tally to help ISAF reduce the number. In a series of e-mail exchanges with Science, ISAF officials confi rmed that such a tracking system does exist and that its output is an internal database of civilian casualties called CIVCAS. In October 2010, ISAF hosted me in Kabul and Kandahar as an embedded reporter. I was given access to military personnel at every level of the civilian casualty–tracking system, from the collection and quality-checking of CIVCAS data to the analysis that leads to new combat directives. I was also able to tour medical facilities and interview medical personnel. What I was not allowed to do was take the data with me. ISAF officials were concerned that sensitive information associated with civilian casualty data—such as the tactics and movements of troops—could be
revealed. But after 3 months of negotiation, ISAF agreed to give the entire CIVCAS database to Science for public release.

The CIVCAS database shows 2537 civilians killed and 5594 wounded in between Jan. 2009 and Dec. 2010, with 80-percent of those deaths attributable to insurgent action. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, on learning that the ISAF was releasing its data to Science gave the journal its own data, which has 5594 deaths between 2009 and 2010, almost twice that of the military’s reporting. The UN attributes 70-percent of civilian deaths to insurgent action. Oddly enough, the UN reports a drop in deaths due to ISAF action while the ISAF itself reports an increase.

You can find the whole piece here, and it’s well worth a read for the transparent look at the process that goes into this kind of data collection, its analysis, and putting that analysis to use on the ground, e.g. killing less people.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.