Civilians are safer from harm in Afghanistan's decade-long conflict than at any time since before the U.S. troop surge, according to new United Nations statistics.
Last year, 2,754 Afghan civilians died and another 4,805 were wounded. That's the first time civilian deaths and injuries dropped since 2007, the United Nations mission to Afghanistan announced in a report released Tuesday, and a 12 percent drop from 2011. Insurgents are responsible for the vast majority of those casualties, 81 percent.
The report is sure to come as a big relief to the United States and its NATO allies. They're not the drivers of dead Afghans, thanks in part to sharp restrictions on air strikes since 2011. Only eight percent of civilian deaths and injuries are attributable to the actions of the U.S. and its allies. (Another 11 percent of casualties don't have a clear cause.) The biggest danger to Afghan civilians comes not from NATO air strikes but from homemade Afghan insurgent bombs. Some 782 bombing incidents in 2012 accounted for 34 percent of all Afghan civilian casualties.
In fact, the United Nations special representative warned the Taliban that placing bombs along transit routes used by civilians might be a violation of the laws of war. 'This is a war crime and people will be held responsible in the future for this war crime,' said Ján Kubi', the U.N.'s man in Afghanistan.
The report also has implications for the controversy over U.S. drone strikes. Civilian deaths, particularly caused by the U.S. from the air, are falling. Yet the U.S. military launches far more drone strikes in Afghanistan than it and the CIA launch in the undeclared battlefields of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. According to Air Force statistics released earlier this month, the U.S. fired missiles from its unmanned planes if Afghanistan 44 times in January 2013, more than twice the total drone strikes outside that warzone in the same period. A separate United Nations effort will soon investigate U.S. drone strikes, including those in Afghanistan.
U.N. officials first started to record a drop in civilian deaths in the first half of 2012. The death toll from the war is still somewhat higher in Afghanistan than the 2,118 the U.N. recorded in 2008. But back then, the U.S. was responsible for 39 percent of those deaths, with air strikes accounting for about two-thirds of them. Ever since 2009, when the U.S. military emphasized a counterinsurgency strategy that put a premium on protecting civilians from harm, the proportion of civilian casualties the U.S. has created has declined. Only in 2012, however, did Afghan civilians actually experience the lower levels of harm that the strategy promised.
The drop is perhaps a lagging indicator, arriving after the U.S. military backed away from counterinsurgency and put its back into handing the war over to U.S.-sponsored Afghan security forces. But the U.N. doesn't attribute the drop in civilian casualties just to U.S. actions. (Levels of violence, at least as of mid-2012, outpaced their 2009 levels.) Insurgents have shifted to a strategy involving less direct confrontation with U.S. troops and more toward assassinating key Afghan government and allied figures.
'Targeted killings' of notable Afghans rose 108 percent in 2012, accounting for 698 of the year's civilian death toll. Those killings focused on 'Government officials, religious leaders, tribal elders, off-duty police officers and persons supporting the peace process,' the U.N. found. That's a 700 percent increase over the previous year, which the U.N. report calls 'staggering.'
The Taliban assassination campaign is hardly the whole of its war effort. Only 14 percent of 2012's civilian casualties can be called targeted killings, according to the U.N. stats. But the drop in overall violence highlights the difference between fighting a war while trying to protect civilians and fighting a war by targeting them for death.
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