1,580 Canadian soldiers injured and killed in Afghanistan

Beerad: There’s no precise answer to your question. It’s not in the interests of the powers-that-be to count Afghan casualties. It’s clear though, that tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed and many thousands more injured as the war grinds on and on and on.

The late US historian Howard Zinn pointed out that in the First World War, there were 10 military deaths for every civilian killed; in the Second World War it was 50-50; but in Vietnam 70 percent of the dead were civilians. In the wars since, the proportion of civilian deaths has increased again to between 80 and 85 percent. That means that for every thousand who die in war, up to 850 are innocent bystanders.

So, if you apply Zinn’s ratio of 80 to 1, the 139 Canadian soldiers killed so far in this latest Afghan war would equal about 11,120 dead civilians.

On the seventh anniversary of 9/11, I wrote a Coast editorial quoting Ahmed Rashid’s book, “Descent Into Chaos” which described the effects of the initial American bombing of Afghanistan. (Keep in mind, that Rashid himself supported the post 9/11 American invasion of Afghanistan):

“The bombing caused massive dislocation as thousands fled their homes, the distribution of food aid to drought-stricken areas was halted and there were widespread revenge killings,” Rashid writes. “Up to 20,000 Afghans may have died indirectly as a result of drought, hunger and displacement. In the months to come, US aircraft were to cause hundreds more civilian casualties by targeting the wrong villages.”

Western journalists have not been able to convey the fury of the war in Afghanistan. Here is an excerpt from a piece by Howard Zinn in the Progressive magazine in December, 2001 less than two months after the US air assault began:

Zinn writes: A New York Times report: “The Pentagon acknowledged that a Navy F/A-18 dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on Sunday near what officials called a center for the elderly. . . . The United Nations said the building was a military hospital. . . . Several hours later, a Navy F-14 dropped two 500-pound bombs on a residential area northwest of Kabul.” A U.N. official told a New York Times reporter that an American bombing raid on the city of Herat had used cluster bombs, which spread deadly “bomblets” over an area of twenty football fields. This, the Times reporter wrote,”was the latest of a growing number of accounts of American bombs going astray and causing civilian casualties.”

An A.P. reporter was brought to Karam, a small mountain village hit by American bombs, and saw houses reduced to rubble. “In the hospital in Jalalabad, twenty-five miles to the east, doctors treated what they said were twenty-three victims of bombing at Karam, one a child barely two months old, swathed in bloody bandages,” according to the account. “Another child, neighbors said, was in the hospital because the bombing raid had killed her entire family. At least eighteen fresh graves were scattered around the village.”

The city of Kandahar, attacked for seventeen straight days, was reported to be a ghost town, with more than half of its 500,000 people fleeing the bombs. The city’s electrical grid had been knocked out. The city was deprived of water, since the electrical pumps could not operate. A sixty-year-old farmer told the A.P. reporter, “We left in fear of our lives. Every day and every night, we hear the roaring and roaring of planes, we see the smoke, the fire. . . . I curse them both–the Taliban and America.”

A New York Times report from Pakistan two weeks into the bombing campaign told of wounded civilians coming across the border. “Every half-hour or so throughout the day, someone was brought across on a stretcher. . . . Most were bomb victims, missing limbs or punctured by shrapnel. . . . A young boy, his head and one leg wrapped in bloodied bandages, clung to his father’s back as the old man trudged back to Afghanistan.”