The real world vs Obama’s imagery

On March 31, 2009, Jon Stewart, in his “Daily Show”, announced that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s mission of “Redefinition Accomplished” was in full swing.1 A new Orwellian vocabulary, more soothing and politically correct, has been invented and marketed to the American citizenry by Obama. But as Peter Baker of The New York Times noted, “For all the shifting words, Mr. Obama has left the bulk of [George W.] Bush’s national security infrastructure intact so far.”2 In the real world, average Afghans and Pashtuns in the Pakistani border areas experience this continuing brutality daily as I shall now document, but Americans are largely oblivious, remaining enthralled in the puffery of “Yes, We Can” and “Change We Can Believe In”. The phrase “civilian casualties” is non-existent in Obama’s vocabulary as a search of Google reveals. Dead Afghan and Pashtun civilians have simply been redefined as non-existent.
As Obama’s Afghan “surge” takes hold, more fighting and more civilian deaths are certain (as well as renewed efforts by the United States to redefine, omit and suppress reporting upon such). The U.S. mainstream media will mostly be a cooperative partner in the Pentagon’s news management. Many an Afghan sees no realistic prospect of peace as long as foreign soldiers remain in Afghanistan, and the Taliban have no incentive to compromise when they are in a winning position.3 An additional 17,000-21,000 U.S. troops – the Obama surge – means nothing in a country where military experts estimate that 400,000-500,000 foreign soldiers would be necessary to quell the resistance.4
While much continuity with Bush policies exists, some opportunistic changes in the execution of the Afghan war have been made. Most are inspired by the aim to better market “the good war” to the American public. For example, under Obama U.S./North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces are relying less upon deadly air strikes, which are 4-10 times more deadly for Afghan civilians than are ground attacks. As a consequence, the monthly total of Afghan civilians5 killed by U.S./NATO action has declined moderately at the same time as the monthly death toll of occupation forces has risen .
Whereas the Associated Press reported that during the first two months of 2009, “militants” had killed 60 people and U.S.-led forces killed 100, my data indicates that U.S./NATO attacks led to the death of 137-141 Afghan civilians.

As a result, the ratio of Afghan civilians killed per occupation-soldier death – a measure of the lethality of America’s Afghan war for Afghan civilians relative to that for U.S./NATO occupation troops – has been falling from above five during late 2008 to about 1.4 during March 2009. This ratio was 2.9-3.5 in 2008, 4.4-5.6 in 2007 and 3.4-4.0 in 2006.7 Combating the Afghan resistance with ground operations is simply much more dangerous for foreign forces than relying upon air strikes. By reducing air strikes, foreign forces kill fewer Afghan civilians per attack but suffer greater fatalities and injuries, which, in turn, fuels home country opposition to the war.
A case in point was in August 2008 when 12 French troops were killed and another 21 injured, which resulted in an outpouring of public questioning of France’s role in Afghanistan. Two-thirds of French citizenry already opposed any French involvement in the Afghan conflict.8
The U.S. astutely manipulated some NATO countries in 2004 into doing the heavy lifting of fighting (and taking casualties) in parts of Afghanistan, for example, the British in Helmand, the Canadians in Kandahar, the Dutch and the Australians in Uruzgan. Quickly, non-U.S. foreign troops’ casualties rose dramatically in both absolute and relative terms.

Indeed, as I have reported, the relative lethality for non-U.S. foreign troops is higher than for U.S. soldiers.9 The lethality ratio (the lethality ratio is defined as soldiers killed per 1,000 in-theatre troops) for NATO occupation forces in 2006 was two to three times that for U.S. troops. The French seemed to have understood the dynamic and announced that by the end of 2006 they would withdraw their 200 Special Forces combat troops from southern and eastern Afghanistan (where they had been deployed since July 2003).
The level of lethality for U.S. occupation forces is actually much higher than the figures above suggest. This is because of the “long tail phenomenon” as applied to the U.S. military (the number of support personnel (the tail) required to support combat troops (the tooth)). The tail has also been greatly lengthened as the U.S. military has contracted out to private military contractors (for example, Halliburton-KBR, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Blackwater, Executive Outcomes, and so on) for support services (with all kinds of problems regarding lack of oversight, corruption, over-billing and so on). Such outsourcing has been driven less by cost considerations and more by a desire to reduce military casualties, which are politically costly in the U.S.
Deadly trade-off
As regards Afghan civilian casualties, a deadly trade-off is at work. Whereas fewer very deadly air strikes are taking place, more less-deadly ground raids by U.S./NATO forces are occurring. The number of U.S./NATO incidents in which Afghan civilians perished during 2009 is as follows: January: 11; February: 28; and March: 31. The total number of Afghan civilians killed in U.S./NATO actions during January 1-April 8, 2009, is 194-202. This number will rise markedly as winter passes and the fighting season begins in earnest, propelled forward by a doubling of U.S. occupation troops in Afghanistan under Obama’s “surge”. The number of civilians killed reported here is an underestimate for two major reasons: air strikes in remote areas, as in Kunar and Nuristan, go unreported; and Waheed Muzhda, a political analyst, also blamed the international forces for giving unfair reports about civilian deaths in Afghanistan. Muzhda said that there were several such incidents in which civilians were killed and the foreign troops said that they killed militants.10 Even Afghan officials have differed on many occasions with foreign troops’ reporting about civilians’ deaths, he added.11 The pattern has continued under Obama,
Each report follows a very similar pattern – U.S. forces report some number of militants killed, then a report from local authorities appears saying something like, “No, actually that was just a family in our village (or a wedding party, or a…), and we want answers.” Eventually, there’s a report that a U.S. officer has visited the village, handed out a check… and expressed our deepest apologies – and then a commander in Kabul issues a very serious statement about how troubling the civilian casualties are, and how we are now going to change our approach and take all sorts of steps to protect civilians. The most recent of such statements included a promise to coordinate all raids with local Afghan forces.

At a more general level, a thorough review of past counter-insurgency operations carried out by the Rand Corp noted that history tells us that increasing troop levels to fight an insurgency is not a winning formula. The Soviets learnt this after 10 years in Afghanistan; the French learnt it in Algeria, and the U.S. had its lesson in Vietnam. The larger the foreign troop presence in wars of counterinsurgency, “the worse the outcome tends to be”. That was the sweeping conclusion drawn in a 2008 study by the Rand Corp.13 Others have asserted that the presence of more foreign troops in Afghanistan today will raise the numbers of civilians killed. The huge footprint left by foreign forces in Afghanistan – whether by killing civilians, breaking and entering compounds, beating and/or abducting persons, hooding prisoners, acts of outrage such as photographing a captured Afghan man naked,14 and so on – has fuelled the Afghan resistance to the foreign occupier. Graeme Smith of The Globe & Mail reported on the night-time raids by foreign forces, which cause almost as much resentment as the more lethal air strikes.15
For example, in the January 24, 2009, raid in Laghman in which 22 civilians (18 children, two women and two men) were killed, Ghazi Gul, an intelligence officer in the Karzai military, lost his father, mother, two brothers, a cousin, a nephew and two nieces, who were killed by U.S. forces in the raid on the village of Garoch in Laghman province. On February 18, Gul told the Chicago Tribune, “If we talk about the Americans, they are my enemies. And if I can, I will hurt them.”

In an important recent essay on the Afghan war, the French scholar Gilles Dorronsoro was explicit,
The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban.16
Frederico Manfredi, adviser to the Belgian government, wrote recently about his trip to southern Afghanistan where he was introduced to a traditional community leader in a mud-brick village about an hour outside of Kandahar. Manfredi writes,
A gracious elder entered the room. He was tall and slender…he introduced his lineage, and said nonchalantly, “You know, half my family is Taliban.”…I listened carefully: “Here in the south, whenever people see foreign armies taking over, they want to fight them. I don’t blame those who join the Taliban. At least the ‘Taliban’ are Afghans, they’re Pashtuns, they’re kin…. I’m not a Talib. But I want the occupation to end.”17
The case of Logar province is very instructive here. The foreign troop presence in Logar before 2009 was minimal. Consequently, the Taliban held sway. Relatively little fighting took place and few civilians were killed or injured.
Then, the Americans – Task Force Spartan with 10th Mountain Division troops as part of Obama’s surge – arrived in early February 2009. Fighting picked up and civilians began dying: five killed in February, six killed in March, and seven killed in the first week of April. For example, on March 13, Abdul Rashid and his four sons were killed by U.S. soldiers, leading to public protests.18
Angry with reported innocent killing of five persons of a family by the U.S. forces in a raid in central Logar province, protesters besieged the building of Charkh district headquarters the next day. More than 300 protesting people, chanting anti-American slogans, called for an immediate trial of the killers.

During January 1 to April 9, 2009, the regions with the highest numbers of civilians killed by foreign troops were Laghman, the border areas of Pakistan, Helmand, Logar, Kapisa and Herat. In other words, America’s Afghan war rages in provinces close to the capital of Kabul, in the Pakistani border regions where Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drones do all the killing, and in the cluster of southern provinces (Uruzgan, Helmand, Herat, and Kandahar). Deadly CIA drone attacks within Pakistan have continued since Obama took command. Of the 60 cross-border U.S. drone attacks upon Pakistan between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009,
Only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the U.S. predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent. Figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities show that a total of 701 people, including 14 al-Qaeda leaders, have been killed since January 2006 in 60 American predator attacks targeting the tribal areas of Pakistan. Two strikes carried out in 2006 had killed 98 civilians while three attacks conducted in 2007 had slain 66 Pakistanis, yet none of the wanted al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders could be hit by the Americans right on target. However, of the 50 drone attacks carried out between January 29, 2008, and April 8, 2009, 10 hit their targets and killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda operatives. Most of these attacks were carried out on the basis of intelligence believed to have been provided by the Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen who had been spying for the U.S.-led allied forces stationed in Afghanistan. The remaining 40 drone attacks went wrong due to faulty intelligence information, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children. The number of the Pakistani civilians killed in those 50 attacks stood at 537, in which 385 people lost their lives in 2008 and 152 people were slain in the first 99 days of 2009 (between January 1 and April 8)…. Of the 14 attacks targeting Pakistan in 2009, three were carried out in January, killing 30 people, two in February killing 55 people, five in March killing 36 people and four were conducted in the first nine days of April, killing 31 people…. Of the 14 strikes carried out in the first 99 days of 2009, only one proved successful, killing two most-wanted senior al-Qaeda leaders – Osama al Kini and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan. Both had lost their lives in a New Year’s Day drone strike carried out in the South Waziristan region on January 1, 2009.19
In other words, in some 80 days in office, Obama managed to raise the monthly average kill rate achieved by Bush from 32 during 2008 to 45 a month (for February-March 2009).
Most of this has been omitted or misreported in the U.S. Totals are never published. Even if totals are published, as the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) did for 2007 and 2008 or as the Associated Press did, the figures are not credible as no disaggregated data is provided, thereby violating a basic premise of social science, namely, that all results should be reproducible. George Orwell would label all this a lie.
An analysis of the demographics of Afghan civilians who perished at the hands of the U.S. and NATO since Obama assumed the presidency reveals the following (Table 5). Women and children killed by U.S./NATO forces amounted to 63 per cent of the identifiable deaths (and men 37 per cent). This compares to figures respectively of 72 per cent and 28 per cent during January-August 2008.20 The difference is accounted for by the much greater reliance upon bombing strikes during 2008. In other words, first Bush, then Obama, and their NATO allies have been killing twice as many civilian women and children than civilian men in America’s Afghan war. Very little change in the relative proportion has occurred since Obama became Commander-in-Chief. My argument here includes men as civilians, thereby not falling into the essentialist trap of equating women and children with innocent civilians.21 The high proportion of women and children killed reflects the fact that U.S./NATO forces are assaulting domestic or home spaces.
What does the Obama imagery emphasise? Talking about the Obama surge we are instructed that, “These troops are going to help us counter Taliban territorial advances, deny safe havens and create security for Afghan civilians,” said a senior Obama administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly.22
The photograph on this page shows one of the 56 Afghan children killed by U.S./NATO forces since Obama became Commander-in-Chief.


What was originally (2001-04) an American war (with “poodle” Blair tagging along) became a U.S./NATO war during 2005-08, but that is now changing. As has become apparent, Europe – especially Old Europe – is bailing out on America. They see Afghanistan as America’s war. Obama’s effort at the recent NATO meeting in Strasbourg to cajole and beg Europeans to do more fighting and provide more monies failed miserably.23 Patrick Buchanan lays out the European thinking clearly,
Because Europe sees no threat from Afghanistan and no vital interest in a faraway country where NATO Europeans have not fought since the British Empire folded its tent long ago. Al-Qaeda did not attack Europe out of Afghanistan. America was attacked. Because, said Osama bin Laden in his “declaration of war”, America was occupying the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, choking Muslim Iraq to death and providing Israel with the weapons to repress the Palestinians. As Europe has no troops in Saudi Arabia, is exiting Iraq and backs a Palestinian state, Europeans figure, they are less likely to be attacked than if they are fighting and killing Muslims in Afghanistan.24
The continuity by Obama of Bush’s policies is striking, the soothing rhetoric notwithstanding. Obama continues the troop build-up begun under Bush during 2008.
Drone attacks in Pakistan multiply. Foreign forces’ midnight raids upon Afghan homes continue. The hopeless effort to build up an Afghan police force persists, or “Afghanise” the war in a way the U.S. attempted in Vietnam and failed. Most importantly, Obama’s primary justification for the continuation and escalation of America’s war upon Afghanistan has reverted to precisely the one President Bush uttered after 9/11: the bombing and invasion is intended to deny a haven to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan where it might plan further attacks. Never mind that the 9/11 attacks were planned in Hamburg.

The Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan were very low-tech, primitive operations where the primary emphasis was upon physical training and discussion/education. Such activities can easily be carried out just about anywhere in the world; certainly Yemen, Pakistan, and the Sahara are prime locations. The effects of the U.S. bombing and invading Afghanistan have been to stir up hatred of the West and to decentralise radical Islamic groups, thereby creating a much more dangerous and hidden “enemy”. Obama is pursuing precisely a military tactical policy guided by the three dangerous or misleading propositions Gilles Dorronsoro warned against: “playing local”, “searching for ‘moderate’ Taliban”, and pressuring Pakistan.25
Obama’s military policies continue killing Afghan civilians. In the wee hours of March 19, 2009, a U.S. ground attack killed two civilians. A Reuters reporter, Rafeeq Shirzad, described what happened,
The early morning raid was aimed at disabling an al Qaeda cell of bomb-makers and planners in Bati Kot district in Nangarhar province… the U.S. military said in a statement. “Two armed militants engaged the force and were killed, a total of four suspected militants were detained,” it said. But district governor Khaibar Momand condemned the killings, saying the victims were civilians and that the operation had not been coordinated with Afghan troops. About 100 residents gathered to protest against the killings, saying they would not bury the bodies until they received an explanation. Four houses were also destroyed in the raid, residents told Reuters. “It is better to join the Taliban than be neutral and be victimised,” one resident named Rahmatullah said. “Foreign forces are not here for our security; they capture civilians in the middle of the night and kill them. The government is useless and we won’t ask anything from it. We can take our own revenge ourselves,” he said.26
But Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Said Jawad, would not understand. He recently proclaimed that all that the Americans needed to do after killing Afghan civilians was to apologise and all would be well.27 An “I’m sorry” will make revenge, so central to Pushtunwali, evaporate. From the safety and comfort of Washington, Jawad instructed his suffering compatriots back in Afghanistan, “This is a price that we have to pay if we want security and stability in Afghanistan, the region and the world.”
The Guardian’s one-time correspondent in Moscow during the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan, Simon Jenkins, summed up the future admirably,
As with the Russians so with the West: this poor, intensely private country will one day see off another invader who sought to reorganise its history with guns, bombs and money. It was never going to work. Painfully, we are now beginning to realise this.