Counting the civilians killed in Afghanistan.....

Some members of this list have asked for more information on the civilian casualties of the US military actions in Afghanistan. Here is the internet link to an article that might help shed some light on this, as well as a short excerpt from the article. Keep in mind that no articles such as this should be accepted as "positive proof" , but on the other hand, one can can decide for oneself based on other information about this war and "how the world works" to determine its usefulness. The article refers to US bombs; the casualty estimates presumably do not include those killed in ground fighting between different groups.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,770915,00.html

 

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Counting the dead

Attempts to hide the number of Afghan civilians killed by US bombs are an affront to justice

Marc Herold
Thursday August 8, 2002
The Guardian

When the US bombing of Afghanistan started on October 7 2001, an official "counting of the dead" was deemed unnecessary. The public was assured that American and British military planners would go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. The combination of newer, precision-guided munitions and the fact that bombing would take place in remote areas would mean that, in this war, only the "bad guys" would get killed. Subsequent events have proved these claims wrong. But how wrong? Everyone now accepts that civilians have died in American bombing raids in Afghanistan, but exactly how many is hotly disputed.

Given the lack of official interest, the counting of the dead fell upon interested individuals and non-governmental organisations. To date there have been nine studies, of which eight have been made public.The first study was my own, published in December last year. Relying on wire services, NGO and worldwide newspaper reports, I attempted to survey the bombing incidents to date and concluded that more than 3,500 Afghan civilians had been killed. A weakness of the initial study was some double-counting due to confused site names - the figure for the October to December period should have been between 2,650 and 2,970 civilian deaths.

Soon afterwards, a couple of cursory estimates were made by Le Monde and Reuters of about 1,000 dead civilians. At first sight, these seem considerably lower than my own, but this is because only a sample of bombings was examined. Reuters looked at just 14 incidents, which reportedly killed 982 Afghans. If one extrapolates out from the sample, the count broadly tallies with my own.

In February, the Wall Street Journal announced that ......... (click on the http: link above for the complete article)