Not surprisingly, civilian casualties infuriate Afghans. This was brought home clearly in May 2006 after an American military convoy on a road north of Kabul lost control and plowed into a group of Afghans, killing five. In the days that followed, mobs of Afghans attacked businesses and hotels owned by foreigners; at least 14 died and more than 90 were injured.
A report last September from the United Nations concluded that Western airstrikes were among the chief inspirations for suicide attackers within the country and that they engendered resentment against both the Afghan government and Western forces. The number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan went up six times from 2005 to 2006, to 136, and Taliban insurgents carried out more than 140 suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2007.
And so on. The numbers in 2008 are worse. The report Bergen is referring to is this analytical paper by C. Christine Fair, who is now a Senior Political Scientist at RAND. The primary argument is that, unlike suicide attackers elsewhere, in Afghanistan they tend to be poor, uneducated men so unskilled they usually only kill themselves. More darkly, however, is her argument that suicide bombers are motivated by a “sense of occupation, anger over civilian casualties, and affronts to their national, family, and personal senses of honour and dignity that are perpetrated in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations.”
That is not easy to fix. And, unlike Bergen’s formulation, neither NATO nor the U.S. deliberately target civilians. It is far more accurate to call the unacceptably high number of civilian casualties either sloppy targeting, or bad intelligence, or even the tragic, and unavoidable, exigencies of a rural counterinsurgency. Which goes back to his, and my, original point. Right now, current methods and tactics have become counterproductive toward our larger goals—which means new methods and tactics must be developed to account for this. It requires not just more boots on the ground but a better way of using them, and this last point is what seems to be critically missing from all the arguments over troops levels. GEN Petraeus seems to recognize that, but it remains to be seen how that will translate into action.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust