Surge fails to curb Afghan civilian deaths - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Surge fails to curb Afghan civilian deaths

More than a year after the Obama administration sent tens of thousands of extra U.S. troops into Afghanistan, a population-centered counterinsurgency approach has failed to bring down civilian casualties in the drastic way that the troop surge in Iraq did, United Nations data show.

The dispersed nature of the violence in rugged, largely rural Afghanistan is complicating efforts to blunt the attacks that are killing civilians, much more so than in Iraq, according to military officials and analysts.

The U.N. released its mid-year report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan on Thursday. Observers found that civilian deaths were up by 15 percent in the first half of this year compared to the same time last year, with anti-government forces responsible for 80 percent of those deaths.

When President Bush poured troops into Iraq in 2007 as part of Army Gen. David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency strategy, civilian casualties began to dive almost immediately, according to data contained in the large cache of U.S. military documents released in October by WikiLeaks.

Even as the troop presence was still increasing in January 2007 and into the following month, the number of monthly civilian deaths, as described in reports by U.S. troops later leaked on the Internet, dropped from almost 3,400 to slightly more than 2,500. In December of that year, civilian deaths tracked by U.S. war fighters were down to 770 — a drop of more than 75 percent.

In contrast, 180 Afghan civilians died in December, up from 164 in the month that Obama announced the surge there.

In fact, the U.N. reported in June that Afghan civilian casualties in May were the highest on record at 368 — more than twice the number killed in May 2010, and almost 100 more than in May 2009. Observers tallied 1,462 civilian deaths in the first six months of 2011.

The outgoing commander of International Security Assistance Force Joint Command acknowledged this month that overall violence in Afghanistan is up slightly, despite what he called the “indisputable progress” of coalition troops.

Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the outgoing senior operational commander in Afghanistan, said July 6 that while overall violence indeed is up slightly compared with the same time last year, it varies from place to place.

“In places where we focused our energy, [violence levels] are down,” he said.

While noting that violence against civilians is not the only measure of progress, Rodriguez said violence levels are not dropping in Afghanistan as rapidly as in Iraq because the Afghan insurgency is more rural-based and dispersed than in more urbanized Iraq, making it more difficult to control.

“The violence [in Afghanistan] is now on the edges of the population center instead of the center,” Rodriguez said. “Also, there is a significant increase in direct-fire attacks that are very ineffective, and that’s what we’ll see continue as a trend … until [violence] starts to decrease sometime in the future.”

Rodriguez predicted violence levels should start to fall some time in the next year.

Retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor, who advised Petraeus during the Iraq surge and now teaches at Ohio State University, pointed out that violence in Iraq also started at a much higher level in the early phases of the U.S. surge, making it easier to see dramatic gains, particularly with the positive political factors that accompanied the surge.

With monthly Afghan civilian casualties now in the hundreds rather than thousands — many caused by assassinations and other small-scale attacks rather than the big car and suicide bombings that have plagued Baghdad — Mansoor suggested Afghan civilian casualties may be at a “baseline level of violence” for this type of conflict.

“It’s going to be very difficult to lower them any further,” he said. “Although attempts to minimize civilian casualties should be continued, we should not beat ourselves up too much, given that civilian deaths are actually at quite a low level given the intensity of the fighting.”

Mansoor suggested that a high number of civilian deaths could actually be a sign that control is transitioning from insurgent hands to the government.

“If the Taliban has control of a community — complete control — the death rate goes way down because nobody’s killing anybody,” Mansoor said. “As we gain more control of an area, the assassination campaigns, the overt brutality, might decrease … but then they’ll compensate by using car bombs and suicide bombers.”

The U.N. report released Thursday said improvised explosive devices have been responsible for a high number of civilian deaths this year.

“IEDs and suicide attacks, tactics used by [anti-government elements], accounted for nearly half (49 percent) of all civilian deaths and injuries in the first six months of 2011,” the report stated. “Civilian deaths from IEDs increased 17 percent over the same period in 2010, making IEDs, with 444 victims, the single largest killer of Afghan civilians in the first half of 2011 and causing 30 per cent of all civilian deaths.”

The report added that the vast majority of IEDs that kill civilians are designed to be triggered by the weight of a person, and often can be set off by a child.

The U.N. said that targeted killings of civilians by the Taliban also increased from 2010.

Mansoor said the Taliban may try to keep civilian deaths high so that the people don’t come to believe coalition troops offer a chance for peaceful existence. In fact, he said May’s spike in civilian casualties may have been a deliberate effort by insurgents to sway U.S. public opinion.

“The Taliban, like anyone, can read our newspapers or the Internet traffic,” Mansoor said, and may have stepped up attacks on civilians to “paint this as a quagmire the U.S. couldn’t win.”

Ethan Kapstein, a University of Texas professor who has advised ISAF on counterinsurgency, said success in Afghanistan ultimately will hinge on whether Afghans are too afraid of insurgents to work with coalition troops.

“You can look at a counterinsurgency campaign as an auction in which we’re trying to get information about the Taliban from the population,” Kapstein said. “Are we getting more information than [the Taliban] is able to suppress?

“I think it’s still an open question … how successful we’re being.”