By Sarah Holewinski
Sarah Holewinski is the Executive Director of CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), a non-political organization working with warring parties to help civilians they have harmed in combat.
Seventeen thousand troops are set to enter Afghanistan. That may be necessary and will no doubt be the topic of much quarterbacking from Washington to Kabul, but if Obama is to really turn the tide he and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are going to have to make some changes in how those troops operate on the ground. The U.S. has lost a lot in Afghanistan, including respect and public support. A new ABC/BBC poll says Afghan support for foreign troops is down 12 points in the last year, not surprising as it was the deadliest year for civilians living in the midst of the fighting. The billions spent on military expenditures mean little if civilians feel their concerns are going unheard. As our researcher told me recently from Kabul, it only takes one death ignored by international forces to turn an entire community against their mission.
To its credit, the U.S. was the first country to provide its commanders with funds to pay “symbolic” (and thus not formal or legal) compensation to Afghan families. But that effort began two full years after the start of the war, and for eight years now too many similar mistakes have been made. The international coalition immediately denies harm, even while Afghans are burying their families. There is no coordinated compensation system. So if your mother was killed by U.S. forces, you may be in luck and receive a thousand or so dollars, but not if she was killed by troops from a country that doesn’t pay compensation. Troops don’t share data on casualties, among themselves or with anyone else. So they don’t know where the casualties are, what help they need, or what help they’re not getting.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates may be turning this old way of doing things on its head. The SecDef’s response to an insightful question about civilian casualties by Senator Lindsey Graham in a recent Congressional hearing is worth quoting in full:
[I]n terms of how we respond when there are civilian casualties, I think we’ve been too bureaucratic about it… And so the guidance that I provided is that our first step should be if civilian casualties were incurred in this operation, we deeply regret it, and you have our apologies. And if appropriate, we will make amends. Then we will go and investigate, and then we will figure out whether we need to do more or frankly, if — if we paid somebody we shouldn’t have. Frankly, I think that that’s an acceptable cost. But we need to get the balance right in this in terms of how we interact with the Afghan people, or we will lose.
When a U.S. airstrike recently killed 13 Afghan civilians and only three militants, the U.S. military dispatched a general to the western province of Herat to investigate. Could this be a sign that the U.S. will take more seriously the fallout from civilian harm? I am cautiously optimistic.
The civilians CIVIC has talked to in Afghanistan said they expect an apology and assistance when harm happens. That the U.S. appears to be doing just that is promising. However, it is not itself enough to undo the mistakes of the last seven years. No, the burden to turn this situation around should not be entirely on U.S. shoulders. Its allies in the ISAF (NATO’s International Security Assistance Force) have been slow to step up their own participation and resources to stabilize the country, making the U.S. fight against terrorism far harder. The problem from a civilian perspective is that Afghans understandably can’t tell the difference between U.S. and other foreign troops. When every foreigner is considered American, fair or unfair, the onus falls to the U.S. to lead and to lead the right way.
There are concrete, immediate measures that can and should be taken to win back Afghans. Put simply, it looks like this: avoid harm, investigate when it occurs, apologize, and provide compensation or other amends. While not easy, done properly, it will match the gravity of civilian suffering and the urgent pressure to address it.
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For more on this extremely important cause, and I cannot stress enough the incredible work that is being done here to address the all-too-neglected human costs of war, see CIVIC’s website and its report on Afghanistan, “Losing the People: The Costs and Consequences of Civilian Suffering in Afghanistan.”
— Michael Stickings