Journal of Peace Research - Civilian Victims in Asymmetrical Conflict, Afghanistan (Benini &...

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http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/41/4/403The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0022343304044474

2004 41: 403Journal of Peace ResearchAldo A. Benini and Lawrence H. Moulton

AfghanistanCivilian Victims in an Asymmetrical Conflict: Operation Enduring Freedom,

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Human Suffering in War

How many victims did Operation EnduringFreedom cause among the civilian popu-lation of Afghanistan? This question is

relevant for reasons that go beyond thehuman suffering that came with the loss oflife and injury and beyond the consequences

that the magnitude of victimization has forthe path of unifying and reconstructing acountry devastated by a long series of wars.Shaw (2002), in a thought-provoking piece

reflecting on military and civilian deaths inthe 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 NATOintervention in Kosovo, as well as Afghanis-tan in 2001, contends that civilian victimestimates have played a part in the relegiti-mation of war. Although his major focusis on the wide disparity between the numbersof civilians and those of Western armedforces personnel lost in the war zones tothe tune of over 1,000 innocent Afghans

killed to one American (Shaw, 2002: 355) he speaks to two other important claims.Both have been used by advocates of, and

2004 Journal of Peace Research,vol. 41, no. 4, 2004, pp. 403422Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CAand New Delhi) www.sagepublications.comDOI 10.1177/0022343304044474 ISSN 0022-3433

Civilian Victims in an Asymmetrical Conflict:Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan*

ALDO A . BENINI

Global Landmine Survey

LAWRENC E H. MOULTON

Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University

Like other wars, recent Western military interventions have entailed loss of civilians in the affected coun-tries. As a result of the Revolution in Military Affairs, Martin Shaw makes two claims likely to recur indebates on such wars. The first is that those losses were much smaller than the loss of life as a result ofprevious misrule and oppression. The second is that during these interventions civilians suffered onlyaccidental small massacres. Using victim figures from 600 local communities exposed to hostilitiesduring Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the authors test Shaws claims. They model com-munity victim counts as a function of potential explanatory factors via zero-inflated Poisson regression.Several historic as well as concurrent factors are significant. Moreover, totals work out considerably higher

than those offered by previous researchers. These findings are important to several aspects of the newway of war: as a reminder that harm comes not only from direct violence but from indirect effects ofmunitions; underreporting of civilian losses as a likely systemic feature; and distributions of victims asmediated by histories of war of which Western interventions may be final culminations.

* The authors are grateful to the Vietnam Veterans ofAmerica Foundation (VVAF) for the Afghanistan data. Theviews expressed in this article, however, do not engageVVAF or any of its affiliated organizations. Matthew

Wood, VVAF, kindly provided the map. We are gratefulalso to Martin Shaw, University of Sussex, as well as to sixanonymous reviewers for several helpful comments on anearlier draft of this article. Software used for analysis

included SPSS v. 11.5 and STATA v.7. The data used inthis article can be found at http://www.prio.no/jpr/datasets.asp. Authors e-mail addresses: [email protected]; [email protected].

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commentators on, recent Western militaryinterventions, notably in Iraq in 2003, andare likely to become part of the ideologicalarsenal of future wars. Here, we briefly

present these claims, then translate theminto specific hypotheses that can be testedagainst our data on the communitiesaffected by Operation Enduring Freedom.Readers interested in its political andmilitary aspects are referred to Cottey(2003).

The first is that compared to the victimsof the former misrule and oppression, lossescaused by regime-changing military inter-

ventions are few. While Shaw himself is verycareful about such claims, Western poli-ticians and media publicized many such pro-

jections in the run-up to those wars, as wellas to the recent one in Iraq. In this latter case,for example, expected civilian losses werecontrasted, in almost routinized argument,

with totals from several past categories ofvictims, including civilian victims of internalrepression and soldiers lost to the war withIran, estimated to exceed 1 million. Thetopic endures; for a postwar example, seeFalconer (2003), who places mass murder inIraq prominently in the tradition ofRummels research in murder by states(Rummel, 1997).

The second claim is that the number ofcivilians killed in these recent wars is verysmall compared to the major wars that the

USA fought in the 20th century, namely, the World Wars and the wars in Vietnam andKorea (Shaw, 2002: 346). Much of this trendis credited to the so-called Revolution inMilitary Affairs. Modern precision

weaponry and improved intelligence resultedin better targeting decisions by Westernmilitary, reducing, if not eliminating, indis-criminate fire against civilians. Civilian mas-sacres, therefore, tend to be, in Shaws words,

small and accidental, albeit at the same timeaccepted and programmed into the riskanalysis of the war (Shaw, 2002: 349). In

ideological terms, they are, if you will, theprice of liberation.

Using detailed data on 600 local com-munities exposed to hostilities during Oper-

ation Enduring Freedom, we argue that the Afghan case lends qualified support to thefirst thesis: that civilian losses can be reducedas a result of the intervention. It does notsupport the small massacre claim once themotivation (accidental) is taken out of theequation and the actions of the opponentsare factored in. Some of the factors thataffected the distribution of civilian victimsduring Operation Enduring Freedom may

operate in other military interventions by theWest. If so, we may expect local communi-ties in countries other than Afghanistan tosuffer losses at such elevated levels that fewobservers will want to qualify them as smallmassacres.

Violence Against Civilians

We make three specific points, which wethen submit to testing against the Afghanis-tan data. First, attention to direct violencefrom the victorious Western forces under-estimates the total number of civilianvictims. Some of the estimates offered oncivilian losses in Afghanistan, for example,relied mainly on media reports as theirsource; the media, however, privileged inci-dents related to high-tech weaponry, to the

detriment of other causes of civilian deathsand injuries such as landmine and unex-ploded ordnance strikes, as well as non-

Western ground forces. When civilian-lossinformation is collected directly from theaffected local communities, the tallies will besubstantially higher than those made byobservers restricted to media accounts. Weshow this difference for our survey data vs.various non-survey-based earlier estimates.

Our second point is that asymmetricalconflict, as epitomized by the recent wars in

Afghanistan and Iraq, creates a highly

j ou rna l o f PEACE RES EAR CH volume 41 / number 4 / july 2004404

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unequal distribution of civilian victimsacross affected local communities. On oneside, a higher than expected portion of allcommunities that ever experience combat

come away with no civilian victims. On theother hand, a small but significant minorityof communities takes heavy losses. Some ofthese high-impact communities are places

where the defendants dig in and are met withmassive fire, and where civilians becomeentrapped in battles. In other places, civilianmassacres may be intentional, with passinglocal forces settling scores with opponentethnic groups or political adversaries. The

Afghan data document both extremes:numerous zero-victim communities as wellas many outliers on the high end.

Our third point can be called the back-ground noise of a violent universe. Thestructure of the pre-intervention violenceshapes the pattern of civilian victims duringthe war and, in fact, does so massively. Oneimplication is that communities with highnumbers of civilian victims in prewarperiods tend to be those again smitten hardduring the war. Some of this is expected,particularly in countries with massiveprewar landmine contamination (whereresidents, subject to numerous mine strikesearlier, may have to flee across hazardousareas). Other parts of the correlation may becontingent on entrenched rifts in societythat run parallel with both prewar and

current military frontlines. An example,known from war footage and borne out byour data, is the frontline between theTaliban and the Northern Alliance innorthern Afghanistan, which remainedstatic for quite some time after OperationEnduring Freedom was begun.

Our dragnet in Afghanistan, therefore, islarger than Shaws. It is larger in temporal,social, and technical aspects. Our sources

detailed local victims not only for the timeafter 9/11, but also for a one-year periodbefore the war. They did not discriminate by

any particular party to the war; all victims ofviolence were counted, regardless of whatparty was the source of the violence. Theyinclude victims both from direct violence

and from landmine and unexplodedordnance (UXO) strikes.Our plan is to place our broad victim

picture within some of the recent conflictliterature that speaks to persistent warsand/or Western military interventions. Wethen describe the Afghanistan data andthe method by which they were collected,the claims regarding civilian victims, and thelimits to their reliability. We will then

compare the overall tally from the 600affected communities to estimates offeredby other researchers, without a detailedreview of their methodologies. We will sum-marily describe demographic and war-related features of those communities andfocus on describing their numbers ofvictims. In the central part of our argument,

we develop a conceptual model of the dif-ferential numbers of local victims andestimate the significance of various factors,notably the influence of violence suffered inthe year prior to 9/11. We discuss variousfindings and place them in the perspectiveof future wars that the West may fight andof the research on civilian victims that these

wars, or the prospects for them, maymotivate.

Shaw in no way endorses the relegitima-

tion of war that he observes as a recent (post-Cold War) political development in the

West. In fact, he concludes that the legiti-macy of war, even its newly refined justifi-cations in response to terrorism (2002: 357),is fragile and liable to be reversed. Also, withregard to Afghanistan, he discusses indirectlycaused civilian deaths as a result of Westernaction (mainly reviewing Conetta, 2002).Our article is concerned with two specific

implications, not with questions of legiti-macy at large. Our data do not elucidate theindirect-victims question.

Aldo A. Benini & Lawrence H. Moulton VI CT IM S I N ASYMMETRICAL CONFLICT 405



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Operation Enduring Freedom inPerspective

The wars that have devastated Afghanistan

since 1978 form a series of civil wars that were internationalized to variable degrees,most openly so during the long Sovietmilitary intervention and in the fulminantOperation Enduring Freedom in 2001 andthe presence of Western forces since then.These wars created an internal dynamic withtwo important outcomes. In the long run,from 1978 to 2001, large numbers of

Afghans were killed. The deaths came in

waves that moved with the different stagesof war. Goodson (2001: 8788), whosedetailed analysis offers an eight-stage warhistory prior to 2001, collects various esti-mates assuming total war deaths in the rangeof 1.5 to more than 2 million (p. 93). Thesedeaths include combatants. To those he adds682,000 wounded persons, which he con-siders a low estimate (p. 94). Other esti-mates are consistent with Goodsons; forexample, the Correlates of War Project(Sarkees, 2000) uses 1.3 million as its totalbattle-death estimate for the period197892.

Second, the wars were persistent. Collieret al. (2003: 82) established an average ofapproximately 40 months for the duration ofcivil wars started in the 1960s and 1970s;this value jumped to 125 months for wars

started in the 1980s. The series of wars in Afghanistan have lasted for more thandouble that time. Although by 2001 theTaliban were in control of most ofthe national territory, they were still at warin the northern and eastern regions. As aresult, when Operation Enduring Freedom

was launched, there were basically two warsgoing on in parallel. The ground war wasfought between the Taliban and a Northern

Alliance boosted with Special Forces andfresh supplies. The air support, epitomizingthe Revolution in Military Affairs, marked

the short-run addition to the conduct of thislong-drawn conflict.

Some may find a parallel here with thetwo simultaneous wars that Kaldor (1999)

observed in Yugoslavia in 1999. On theground, Milosevics forces waged war againstthe Kosovar Albanians. From the air, NATOfought a spectacle war (Kaldor, 1999: 154)scripted by the Revolution in Military

Affairs. This pattern obtained in the 2003Iraq war in very limited degree. True, theKurdish Peshmerga were there as an armedopposition group, but hostilities betweenthem and Iraqi government forces had been

rare for the past ten years, and the Peshmergaplayed a minor role in the war compared tocoalition ground forces.

The varying importance that local armedopposition forces had for the Westernvictories greatest in Afghanistan 2001,modest in Kosovo 1999, slight in Iraq 2003 may ultimately make it difficult to charac-terize these recent interventions as acommon type of armed conflict. Forexample, Mueller (2003: 511, n. 7), whopostulates the contemporary obsolescence of

war and the need to police its remnants,expresses doubts about the neat limits of

Afghanistan and Iraq engagements; theirmessy aftermaths may ultimately make suchinterventions unappealing.

With this cautious note, Mueller joinsShaws conclusion that the justifications of

Western interventions remain fragile.Because some of these wars are so recent,none of these authors can say much defini-tive about their nature and prospects for rep-etition. There is greater agreement on someof the long-run and short-term effects in theaffected countries. A growing literature looksinto the excess mortality from the effects of

war other than direct violence. Deathsamong Iraqi children, attributed to poor

nutrition, sanitation, and medical care, werethe subject of intensive study after the firstGulf War; the estimates that Mueller (1995:




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105106) reports all exceed, by a multiple,those of civilian lives lost during the war. For

Afghanistan, Collier et al. (2003: 24) show a65% increase in infant mortality due to civil

war. These are effects that continue longafter the shooting stops (Ghobarah, Huth &Russett, 2003: 189).

Agreement on short-run effects seemsfirm as far as civilian victims are concerned.The estimates do not exceed 10,000 killedduring any of the Western military inter-ventions, by both sides to the conflict. TableI brings typical estimates together, with theIraq 2003 estimate as a running tally. It could

be argued that these death tolls are signifi-cantly smaller than the loss of civilian livesduring the precursory developments. Theseinclude the violent dissolution of the

Yugoslav federation, the atrocities commit-ted by the Iraqi government (in line withRummels thesis that undemocratic regimestend to kill their citizens in numbers exceed-ing the battle deaths; see Rummel, 1995,1997), and again, the immense death toll ofthe Afghan wars since 1978. However, oursubject is the civilian victims in Afghanistanduring the limited period of OperationEnduring Freedom, for which relatively lowestimates were offered. To comment onthese, we turn to our data.

600 Communities

Sample and Data CollectionThis dataset on Afghan towns and villages

exposed to hostilities after 11 September2001 is the by-product of a landmine andUXO contamination assessment. The assess-ment, with a view to creating an inventoryof freshly contaminated sites for rapid clear-ance purposes, was done by the AfghanNGO Mine Clearance Planning Agency(MCPA) with the help of the VietnamVeterans of America Foundation (VVAF), anadvocacy and victim assistance organization

in humanitarian mine action (Benini &Donahue, 2003).

MCPA had maintained a staff of severalthousand active in minefield surveys,marking, and area reduction over the past tenyears and enjoyed acceptance throughout thecountry. In spring and early summer 2002,MCPA interviewer teams visited all com-munities suspected to have been subject toairstrikes or ground operations during Oper-ation Enduring Freedom. These communi-ties villages or urban neighborhoods hadbeen nominated by provincial administra-tions and by neighboring communities;moreover, MCPA had access to coalition air-strike imprints. The teams visited 747suspect communities, among which exactly600 were determined to have had at least oneairstrike or ground operation. These affected

communities were scattered in 102 districtsin 25 of the 32 provinces. This expert- and


Table I. Victim Estimates for Western Military Interventions, 19912003

Conflict Estimates of civilians killed Sources

Iraq 1991 2,5003,500 Mueller (1995: 103)Kosovo 1999 Ethnic cleansing: 1012,000 [incl. Shaw (2002: 347); Kaldor (1999: 157,

those before NATO intervened] 162)

Air campaign: 5001,400Afghanistan 2001 1503,600 Various. See discussion, page 417.Iraq 2003 7,3009,200 [as of 26 September 2003] Dardagan (2003)



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respondent-driven sampling was exhaustedfor all leads and, because MCPA teams facedvirtually no security restrictions, is con-sidered to be close to a full census of the

affected communities. Because these clusterstrongly in many areas and thus are generallyknown to some neighbors, sampling amongnon-suspected communities was not done.

In each community confirmed exposed topost-9/11 hostilities, a team would conductan interview, using a modular questionnaire,

with a small group of local key informants.These groups, variable in size and composi-tion, would share information on dates and

types of hostilities, prewar and current popu-lation, old and new contaminated areas andbroad types of munitions, types and numbersof property damaged or destroyed, andfinally, victims. Victim numbers were elicited,broken down in several dimensions by ageand sex, cause (direct violence vs. landmineand unexploded ordnance strikes), outcome(deaths and injuries) as well as two periodsof time. Counts were requested of all whohad come to harm between 11 September2001 and the date of survey a 9-monthperiod on average. Retrospective counts wererequested for the period of 12 months priorto 9/11. No attempt was made to attributethe violence that caused these victims to anyspecific parties to the conflict. Before leavingthe community, teams took GPS (GlobalPositioning System) measurements of the

coordinates of a central location such as itsmosque.

The affected community, and not, say, thedistinct danger area, violent incident, or indi-vidual victim, is the unit of analysis. We usethe term victim to designate both fatalitiesand survivors from injuries and use specificterms when we mean the one but not theother. Obviously, the reliability of the claimsto victims that the surveyed communities put

forward is critical. In complex emergencies with long traditions of relief, such as Afghanistans, communities perceive an

incentive to overstate levels of suffering orpopulations in need. For example, the 2,997landmine and unexploded ordnance victimsreported by the 600 communities for an

average nine-month period after 9/11 standin marked contrast to the 658 for the wholecountry on whom the International Com-mittee of the Red Cross (ICRC) collecteddata for the six months between January and

June 2002 (ICBL, 2002: 603). While theICRC says that its lists are not comprehensive(Desvignes, 2003), some of the MCPA-inter-viewed informants may have exaggeratedtheir local numbers. Similarly, for counts or

estimates proffered for pre-9/11 victimnumbers, retrospective bias (Tourangeau,Rips & Rasinski, 2000: 125), due to attenu-ation of memory or backwards extrapolationfrom post-9/11 figures, cannot be excluded.

Two partial reliability tests using externaldata are available. In addition, the significantcoefficients on the victim levels of neighboringcommunities are meaningful in this context.Claims regarding victims of direct violence

were compared to those reported in theHuman Rights Watch study on the use ofcluster bombs (HRW, 2002). Three of theHRW case study villages are documented insufficient detail in order to match claims. Fortwo villages with direct correspondence, figuresfor victims from the attacks and from bombletsexploding later match closely; the third HRWcase study village is subsumed in the statistics

of an MCPA village 200 meters away.For a second test, point coordinates of

over 6,000 contaminated areas recordedprior to the war were used. This externaldatabase (from the United Nations Mine

Action Programme for Afghanistan) wasconsidered reasonably complete for thecentral region of the country, where techni-cal survey teams used to enjoy access, but notfor the other four regions. It seems reason-

able to assume that communities claimingsome landmine or UXO victims from thepre-9/11 period should be in close contact




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with some of those contaminated areas. Although close contact is hard to define,and the average diameter of those areas is notknown, a distance of not more than 3 km

seems plausible if frequent exposure to thehazard is to be expected. Two-thirds of the86 central-region communities with suchclaims in fact are within this distance fromthe nearest recorded area.

The strongest support for the reliability ofthe victim numbers, however, comes from thehigh correlation of victim counts among neigh-boring communities. This is seen in the regres-sion model coefficients of the variables that

contain the numbers of victims in communi-ties within 3 km. We will detail this for themodel of victims from direct violence furtherbelow, but it also holds for victims from mineand UXO strikes. If the victim data were notvery reliable, we would expect these coefficientsto be much closer to zero.

Community DemographicsOf the 600 communities exposed after 11September 2001, all offered current popu-lation estimates. Between them, the com-munities totaled slightly less than 2 millionresidents.1

This corresponds to less than 7% of oneof the currently available estimates for thenational population (27,756,000, mid-year20022). Communities were of extremelyunequal size extending from totally deserted

villages to the 60,000 residents estimatedfor one of the urban neighborhoods inKabul.

The hostilities took place in 26 of the 32provinces. Much of the fighting wasconcentrated around the centers of power ofthe Taliban, in the provinces of Kabul (166affected communities) and Kandahar (88),

with a secondary concentration in twonorthern provinces. One of them Takhar(82) had been cut by longstanding front-lines between the Taliban and the Northern

Alliance. The other Kunduz (39) was thescene of concentrated fighting against one ofthe Taliban strongholds.

The pattern of population displacementcorresponded to the fighting concentration,

which was regionally very unequal. About athird of the 600 communities (211) reportedthat some or all of their residents had fled tothe outside; of 216,000 such displacedpersons, 71,000 were from Takhar and

55,000 from Kabul provinces.That pattern extends to the community

level: among 497 communities with prewarpopulation estimates, 298 (60%) experiencedno population flight; 172 communities (35%)saw some but not all people move away; anda small group (27 communities, 5%) saw itsentire population flee from the war.

On the other hand, the returnees between9/11 and the survey dates outnumbered thedisplaced persons. An estimated 289,000persons returned to the 600 communities.Most of the gain, however, was in the 166communities of Kabul province, whichreceived 164,000 returnees.

In sum, the communities exposed to hos-tilities form a minority phenomenon, bothby their small number among the over30,000 settlements registered by the

Afghanistan Information ManagementCenter, a UN humanitarian informationunit, and by the size of their combined popu-lations. However, they form stark regionalclusters, around pre-9/11 frontlines and thecenters of the defeated regime.

Hostilities and Victims

ExposureSignificant numbers of communities startedbecoming the object of ground attacks and


1 To be precise, 1,919,752, as added up from local keyinformant estimates. These people were living in an esti-

mated 300,689 households.2 US Bureau of the Census (2003). Population estimatesfor Afghanistan vary widely. One of our reviewers had seenestimates ranging from 15 to 30 million people.



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airstrikes three weeks after 11 September2001. As the war intensified, larger and largernumbers were engulfed, and stayed exposedfor longer periods of time. Figure 1 details the

flow by weekly cohort. Clearly, two peaks canbe made out in terms of entry cohorts andperiods of exposure, although the dynamicsare slightly different between those twocriteria. Starting in the first week of October,a significant number of communities becameexposed to hostilities, primarily as a result ofcoalition airstrikes on Kabul, Kandahar, andKunduz. This first wave peaked in the third

week of October. The first of its weekly

cohorts saw hostilities go on for longer thanany other cohort, perhaps because the Talibanstill believed they could resist.

By the end of the first wave of entrants,ground attacks by the Northern Alliance inTakhar province had finally gained mo-mentum. As it progressed, 153 new entrants

created another sharp peak in the weekstarting 5 November. The median exposureof this cohort (9 days) was shorter than thatof the two preceding cohorts, indicating that

the Taliban were clearing from theirpositions more readily. The fall, on 9November, of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif tothe Northern Alliance was a watershed event.Communities entering the war thereafterhad only brief median exposures. For most,the war was over.

Of the 582 communities with definedstart and end points, 75% had less than 17days of exposure to hostilities, and 146

(25%) of the communities were exposed foronly 1 day. The median exposure was 6days. However, this varied greatly amongregions, from 1 day for communities in theSouth, to 9 in the center, and 10 in theNorth. As to the mode of attacks, 500 of theaffected communities reported at least one


Bars represent cohorts of communities by start of exposure to hostilities in given weeks. The length of the bars is pro-portional to the median duration for first to last episode. Figures beside bars stand for the number of communities ineach cohort. Cohorts shown include 570 communities; 30 communities are missing duration data, or start dates are in2002.

Figure 1. Communities by Date of First Hostilities



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instance of airstrikes; only 262 saw groundoperations on their territories.

Victims The Global ClaimFor the period between 11 September 2001and their respective survey dates, the 600affected communities claimed a total of 10,770victims among them. With 20 June 2002 as the

median survey date, the period in question wasroughly nine months. Key informants attrib-uted 2,997 victims to landmine and UXO inci-dents, and 7,773 to aerial or indirect firebombardment, shooting,3 and other forms ofviolence. These victims resided in 400 of the

affected communities; 200 communities didnot claim any human victims during thisperiod. The claims vary a great deal from com-munity to community, from 0 to a maximumof 399.

The victim claims can be broken downalong several dimensions. By outcome, 1,582of the landmine and UXO victims died,

while 1,415 survived their injuries. Amongthe victims of bombardments, shooting, andother violence, 3,994 persons died and 3,779survived. By age and sex, 1,937 of thelandmine and UXO victims were men, 388

were women, and 672 were children underthe age of 15 years. Among those killed orinjured by bombardments, shooting, orother violence, 4,586 were men, 1,455

women, and 1,732 children. It is apparent

that the women-to-men ratio is higheramong the latter group. This may be sobecause direct violence may have affected


Figure 2. Communities and Post-9/11 Victims from All War-Related Causes (N = 600)

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

0 120 2140 4160 6180 81100 100+

Victims

Communities

3 In military parlance, indirect fire refers to fire deliveredby such weapons systems as artillery, mortars, and multiplerocket launchers. Direct-fire weapons include assault riflesand other small arms, as well as anti-tank weapons such asrocket-propelled grenades (RPG-7). However, in this

article we use the term direct violence to embrace violencefrom direct and indirect fire as well as from other activelyused weapons, as different from violence from victim-actuated devices.



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residential areas (where women spend muchof their time) relatively more than landminesand UXO did.

An Extreme CaseWe illustrate those lifeless statistics with anextreme case. Hazar Bagh, in the KhwajaGhar district of Takhar province, claimed thehighest number of recent victims among anyof the 600 surveyed communities no fewerthan 399.

This tragedy did not simply coalesce outof random circumstance. Hazar Bagh, atown with an estimated current population

of 21,000, has been the object of hostilitiessince as far back as the Soviet war. It changedhands an unknown number of timesbetween Taliban and Northern Allianceforces prior to 11 September 2001. Thepeople there estimated that the communitysaw 475 of its members killed or injured inthe roughly one-year period prior to 11 Sep-tember. A large part of the population wasdisplaced and returned only in 2002.

The most recent direct conflict occurred inHazar Bagh during 2630 October 2001.Coalition aircraft attacked the town, andTaliban forces fired into buildings. TheMCPA interviewers were told that 210 resi-dential buildings, three mosques, two schools,and half a dozen shops were damaged tovarying degrees. The landmine problem wasserious estimates were made of 16 sq. km of

farmland already contaminated before 9/11plus 1 sq. km of newly contaminated land.Mines blocked access also to some good watersupplies, and the road to the district center

was damaged and likely mined. The com-munity lost an estimated 760 animals to thedirect post-9/11 violence, as well as another300 to landmine and UXO incidents.

Correlation Between Types of Violence

As the account of Hazar Bagh suggests, thenumbers of victims claimed from the twogroups of violent causes are correlated. In

Table II, communities with victims of eachtype were placed in three categories, labeledlow, medium, and high. Their ranges are setso that each group comprises approximately

one-third4

of the communities that claimedsome victims. The 66 communities thatreported a high number of victims fromlandmines and UXO tended to have highnumbers of victims from bombardments,shooting, and other kinds of violence as well.Most of these communities were in the pre-9/11 friction zone between the Taliban andvarious factions, chiefly the Northern

Alliance. No fewer than 30 of them were in

Takhar province (with a median count of34.5 in direct-violence victims), the scene ofthe heaviest fighting before 9/11.

The reverse holds to a much smallerdegree. In fact, there were a considerablenumber of communities (107) with mediumand high levels of victims from directviolence, and none from landmines andUXO. This reflects the nature of the mobile

war in the later stages of Operation EnduringFreedom, as compared to the static frontlinespre-9/11 and in the first three weeks of theoperation.

The main finding, however, seems to bethat a significantly higher proportion (57%)of communities claimed some victims frombombardment, shooting, or other violencethan those that reported some landmine andUXO victims (34%).


4 This is a convenient categorization for count variables,particularly for later estimation purposes. In these two andseveral more variables used in regression models, ranges

were defined for low, medium, and high so as to haveroughly equal numbers in these non-zero categories(roughly because of ties). The downside is that this entailsranges that are different from variable to variable, which

some may find disturbing. The point here is that thecategories were formed for formal reasons (cross-tabulationand estimation), not in any substantive relation to Shawssmall massacres concept.



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Analysis

Extreme ValuesThe distribution of victims from the post-

9/11 violence over the 600 affected com-munities is of key importance to ourinvestigation. On the lowest end of thedistribution, large proportions of affectedcommunities had no victims: in Table II, wesee that 256/600 (43%) of the communitieshad no direct-violence victims, and 397/600(66%) had no landmine/UXO victims. Onthe high end, looking just among thosecommunities with at least one victim, the

one-third of the communities with thehighest numbers of direct-violence victimsaccounted for 5,832/7,773 = 75% of thevictims, and the corresponding percentagefor the landmine/UXO communities is2,375/2,997 = 79%. Our goal is to assessfactors that explain the great variabilityexhibited by these distributions. We begin byplacing them in a conceptual framework andthen describe the regression model used toquantitate the relationships between thefactors and the victim counts.

Conceptual ModelOur model explaining the differences invictim counts looks at four domains ofpotentially significant factors:

Community characteristics Recent war experience Neighboring communities recent war

experience

Pre-9/11 violence

The variables by which we fathom outeach of those domains are limited to thosefor which the contamination assessment col-lected data, plus the calculation of distancesfrom the community coordinates to theknown main road network.

We assume that different communitycharacteristics attracted hostilities and

created vulnerability to different degrees. Wemeasure the location of communities in theregion with the longest fighting in recentpre-9/11 history, the magnitude of the popu-lation (at survey dates, not prewar, in orderto minimize loss of cases), and distance to thenearest primary or secondary roads.

Unfortunately, we do not have accountsof individual episodes through which each ofthe communities went, and thus we do nothave a direct measure of exposure to hostili-ties. Our measurements are restricted to thetime period from the first to the last episodeof exposure to any airstrikes or to any groundoperations ever, and the presence or not inthe community of munitions depots. Suchdepots reportedly were frequent targets ofairstrikes, with expected collateral damage.


Table II. Afghan Communities, by Levels of Direct and Indirect Violence Victims, Post-9/11

Direct: Victims from bombardments, shooting, other violence

Low Medium HighNone (16) (722) (23280) Total

Indirect: Victims None 200 90 58 49 397from landmines Low (13) 32 18 20 3 73and UXO Medium (412) 16 10 22 16 64

High (13185) 8 2 16 40 66

Total 256 120 116 108 600

Figures in cells are numbers of affected communities with particular combinations of victim levels. Gamma = 0.46,p < .001.



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The combination of no airstrikes and noground operations does not occur becauseonly such communities were surveyed ashaving suffered at least one type of attack.

The recent war experience of neighboringcommunities was considered as a likely cor-relate with the intensity of violence to whichthe communities in point were subjected.

We reason that mine laying and UXOlittering do not respect community bound-aries, and defensive positions and advancingfronts tend to entrap the civilians of neigh-boring communities simultaneously or inshort succession. We measure neighbors

recent experience as the sums of post-9/11direct violence, respectively landmine andUXO victims in all neighboring communi-ties within a 3-km radius. For each variable,

we create categorical variables as described infootnote 4. We use medium and high levelsas two dichotomous variables for each ofthem. In a formal perspective, these eco-logical variables take care of the spatial auto-correlation of the communities victimcounts.

The pre-9/11 violence is relevant for anumber of reasons that our model cannotseparate with the information extant. Localregions with persistent pre-9/11 fightingprobably saw high levels of mine laying andUXO littering, in addition to civilianvictims from direct collateral damage. Anumber of communities may have suffered

significant oppression at the hands ofarmed forces from other parts of thecountry, producing violent behaviors after9/11. Anecdotal accounts of setting updefensive positions inside residential areasof selected villages and towns by retreatingtroops and score settling by advancing onesfall in this category. We measure pre-9/11violence levels by their outcomes duringthe preceding approximate 12-month

period. As with the ecological variablesdescribed above, we create dichotomousvariables for the medium and high levels of

direct violence, and for landmine and UXOvictims.

Descriptive statistics for the 15 modelcovariates from four domains are given in

Table III.

Regression Models We present the results of a zero-inflatedPoisson regression (ZIP) (Lambert, 1992) ofthe number of post-9/11 victims from directviolence on the above covariates. The choiceof this model was motivated by two con-siderations. First, because the responsevariable was a count with many small values,

some kind of Poisson regression model wasrequired. Second, there were an observed dis-proportionately large number of zero counts.This indicated the presence of two differentdistributions mixed together: a group ofcommunities that were inherently at very lowrisk in spite of being affected by hostilities,and a group of communities that were athigher risk. The ZIP model allows us to dis-entangle two separate effects: (1) whatfactors are related to being in the near-zerorisk distribution, as opposed to the higher-risk group?; and (2) for the communities inthe higher-risk group, what factors explainthe variability of the rates among them? Themodel is called zero-inflated because itallows for the large number of zero-countcommunities. Two sets of coefficients areestimated, one for a logistic model com-

ponent that distinguishes the two distri-butions and one for a standard Poissonmodel for those in the higher-risk group.5

Our conceptual framework did not extendto differentiating between which covariates

would be most likely to affect one or othercomponent of the ZIP model. Therefore, wefit a full model in which all covariates wereentered in both parts of the model. In this


5 In addition to this model, a zero-inflated negativebinomial regression was run to test for even greater vari-ability than assumed. The test was not statistically signifi-cant (p = 0.15), and the ZIP model was retained.



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way, we could examine the relative contri-bution of a variable to both parts, adjusted forthe presence of the other covariates.

We have estimated models for both typesof victims, those of direct violence and thoseof landmines/UXO; for space reasons, we

will present only the model for direct-violence victims.6

We will interpret these results substan-tively in the next section, but here give some

technical explanation. The coefficients in thetwo parts of the ZIP model have oppositemeanings. A positive coefficient in thePoisson part signifies that an increase in thecovariate increases the expected number ofvictims. For a positive coefficient in the infla-tion part, however, an increase in the covari-ate indicates a lower probability that thecommunity had some victims (equivalently,a higher probability of zero victims). Some

covariates are significant in both parts. Forexample, in the northern region, not only were there relatively fewer communitieswithout recent victims, but also the numberamong those who did have some tended tobe higher than for the other regions. Notethe effects of ground operations: this variableproduces positive coefficients in both modelparts. The apparent paradox between twotendencies such attacks produced more

victims; they also improved the chances forcommunities to come away without anyvictims will be commented on below. A


Table III. Descriptive Statistics

N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. dev.

Community characteristicsIs in northern region 600 0 1 0.28Population (log10) 584 0.00 4.85 3.11 0.66Distance to main road (meters, log10) 599 0.14 5.02 3.39 0.89

Recent war experienceDays start-to-end local hostilities 582 1 63 11.01 11.48Local airstrike 595 0 1 0.84Local ground operations 595 0 1 0.44Had munitions depot 600 0 1 0.07

Neighboring communitiesDirect violence 3 km radius post-9/11 medium 599 0 1 0.18Direct violence 3 km radius post-9/11 high 599 0 1 0.18

Mines UXO 3 km radius post-9/11 medium 599 0 1 0.12Mines UXO 3 km radius post-9/11 high 599 0 1 0.13

Pre-9/11 violenceDirect violence communitys own pre-9/11 medium 600 0 1 0.12Direct violence communitys own pre-9/11 high 600 0 1 0.12Mines UXO communitys own pre-9/11 medium 600 0 1 0.10Mines UXO communitys own pre-9/11 high 600 0 1 0.11

Valid N (listwise) 561

6 In addition to this full model, we fit several other models.In one set of models, we fit one covariate at a time, in bothcomponents of the ZIP model, to look at the univariaterelationship between the covariate and the victim count. Ingeneral, the coefficients in these models were somewhatlarger in magnitude than in the full model, as is usually thecase, yet there were no large differences in the patterns. Wealso conducted an influence analysis, excluding the 5% ofthe observations of the full model with the largest residu-als on both tails. Finally, we produced a reduced model, in

which all variables of the full model that did not have atleast one statistically significant (p < 0.1) coefficient in

either the Poisson or in the inflation parts were eliminated.For these latter two models, there were only minimaldifferences from the full model, and so we report only thelatter.



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similar paradox is apparent among the fourcoefficients of the levels of landmine and

UXO victims in neighboring communities.Despite its many technicalities, the

significance of regression modeling must be

seen in the larger picture. Our models permitus to discern simultaneously the influence of

historic and contemporary factors on thedistribution of victims. Since the data aregeo-referenced, neighborhood effects can be


Table IV. Zero-inflated Poisson Regression, Victims from Direct Violence Post-9/11

Coefficient P>|z|

Poisson partIs in northern region 0.28 .051Population (log10) 0.26 .079Distance to main road (meters, log10) 0.07 .330Days start-to-end local hostilities 0.01 .115Local airstrike 0.19 .184Local ground operations 0.34 .048Had munitions depot 0.26 .246Direct violence 3 km radius post-9/11 medium 0.03 .875Direct violence 3 km radius post-9/11 high 0.07 .698Mines UXO 3 km radius post-9/11 medium 0.25 .116Mines UXO 3 km radius post-9/11 high 0.48 .044

Direct violence communitys own pre-9/11 medium 0.06 .769Direct violence communitys own pre-9/11 high 0.91


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controlled for as well. This provides a basic(by econometric standards), but neverthe-less attractive, spatio-temporally integratedframework for estimation purposes.

Discussion

We restrict discussion of statistical findingsto those relevant for our three hypotheses.

Victim EstimatesSeveral researchers have publicized estimatesof civilian victims in this war. All of thosementioned here restricted their focus to

victims of the US intervention. The scope ofthese estimates varied enormously. At itsmost narrow, the Human Rights Watch,concerned with the use of cluster bombs,tallied a minimum of 25 deaths from directimpacts plus another 127 from later dudexplosions (HRW, 2002: 1, 25). HRW col-lected this data through visits to 250bombing sites in March and April 2002.Herold, in a piece amplified by an article inThe Guardian (Herold, 2002), estimatedthat just under 3,000 Afghan civilians hadbeen killed in US air attacks betweenOctober and December 2001. Includingdeaths from Special Forces attacks, heincreased his claim to 3,620 civilians killedup to 31 July 2002, a period just slightlylonger than our survey period. Herold usedmedia reports and Internet searches. The

most sweeping claim has been advanced bythe Project on Defense Alternatives(Conetta, 2002), adding to an estimated1,0001,300 civilian deaths from airstrikes8,00018,000 deaths from indirect wareffects. This latter estimate hinges on mor-tality figures collected in IDP camps.Conetta attributed 40% of it to the war.

Shaw (2002: 345) points out themethodological difficulties of Conettas

indirect-effects claim, while Lemieux (2002)takes Herold to task for the inclusion ofmaterial from the Afghan Islamic Press, a

pro-Taliban agency. In the end, Shaw settlesfor 1,0001,300 civilians killed by the West(2002: 347). Regardless of those problems,

we take issue with the idea that violent

deaths of civilians can be neatly attributed toone or the other side of the conflict. Civilianscaught in crossfire, moving in contaminatedareas, or held hostage by troops hiding inresidential areas are harmed by the un-distinguishable cause-and-effect mix from allsides. In addition, counting only the dead,and not also the injured, is tempting for thebenefit of easy comparison with death statis-tics from other conflicts, but overlooks the

loss of life years among the injured who diesoon after the compilation period, and thehuman suffering caused by permanent dis-abilities.

Our figures, therefore, paint a differentpicture from those taken with an exclusiveview to one party of the conflict. The 600surveyed communities claimed 5,576 resi-dents killed violently between 11 September2001 and June 2002; another 5,194 wereinjured. The combined figure is nearly amagnitude higher than the signature rangethat Shaws comparative table displays for the

Afghanistan war.

Exposed Communities As noted, almost half of the communitiesexposed to hostilities suffered no victimsfrom direct violence, and two-thirds claimed

no landmine/UXO victims. Given the meansover all exposed communities, these zero-victim communities are unexpectedlynumerous (this is indicated, for example, bythe many statistically significant variables inthe inflation part of the ZIP model, TableIV). They contrast with the 13 communitiesthat each reported more than 100 victims ofdirect violence and the three that reportedmore than 100 landmine/UXO victims.

The regression model for direct violenceidentifies some of the factors of this polarizeddistribution, and some of them can be




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speculatively connected with expectedoutcomes of a highly asymmetrical conflict.The speed of the operations advance and theuse of airpower to breach resistant front lines

are significant. Many of the 168 communi-ties in the north were close to front linesfrom before 9/11, which took relatively longto soften up in the initial weeks of the war.Their median number of victims from directviolence was 12, as opposed to only 1 for thecommunities in all the other regions through

which Operation Enduring Freedom parleyedits advance with increasing speed. The coeffi-cients for the northern region confirm this

logic even after controlling for all other regres-sion covariates.

Refining the regional effects, local clustersof violence at smaller spatial scales operate as

well. Communities in close neighborhood toothers with medium or high levels of victimsfrom direct violence were about half to athird as likely to avoid victims in their ownranks.7

Another characteristic of asymmetrical warfare seems to be that once static frontlines crumble, the militarily weaker partyquickly retreats from many of its defensivepositions and is subsequently met withstrong fire in those places where its forces tryto regroup and to offer coherent resistance.

Around the former, most of the exposedcommunities should get away without manyvictims from direct violence. Near the latter,

they should suffer high numbers. This isborne out by the coefficients of the groundoperations variable. The fact that a com-munity witnessed such operations on itsterritory at first greatly improvesits chancesto avoid victims the Taliban ran away

without much of a fight. However, wherethey did fight, communities would suffersignificantly. This can be made more graphic

with figures from the region where the war

progressed more rapidly. Of the 432 com-munities outside the northern region, 218reported victims from direct violence.

Among these, 58 communities exposed to

ground operations reported a median of 19.5victims; the 160 exposed only to airstrikesscored a median of 6.

Background Noise of a Violent UniverseIf there is any true surprise in the victim data,it is the discovery of how strongly levels ofpost-9/11 victims were determined by thelevels that existed before. These highlysignificant effects persist when the structural

factors (region, population, etc.) and theconcurrent violence levels are taken intoaccount. In our model of direct violence, allfour pertinent variables in the Poisson partare strongly significant. In addition, highlevels of direct violence in the year prior to11 September 2001 demolished chances toescape without victims after 9/11 thiscoefficient in the inflation part is thestrongest for all dichotomous variables.Similar, although slightly weaker, effects ofthis kind hold for the landmine and UXOmodel that we developed outside this article.

All this points to the continuing effects ofthe earlier violence into the period of Oper-ation Enduring Freedom. While so much

was, of course, known for the large-scale situ-ation of the Afghan nation, the backgroundnoise from old conflicts is clearly measurable

at the fine grain of the individual communi-ties. We can be more precise: if we eliminatefrom the regression model the variables char-acterizing the old conflicts pre-9/11 victimlevels and whether a community was part ofthe northern region or not the measure forregression fit drops by half.8 In other words,legacy and concurrent effects seem to be onpar in terms of explaining variability invictim counts.


7 The odds of being in the near-zero risk group are calcu-lated by base eexponentiation of the inflation part coeffi-cients. 8 McFaddens adj. pseudo-R2: from .37 to .19.



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Victim Counts and the Difficulty ofBaselines

Returning from the discussion of our threespecific hypotheses to Shaws first broadclaim compared to earlier periods,

Western interventions reduced civilianlosses the Afghanistan data support it.This is true of short-run as well as long-runcontrasts. A caveat should nevertheless bemade regarding long-run baselines for suchcomparisons.

During the 12 months preceding 9/11, an

estimated 12,421 residents of the 600 com-munities became victims to violence 8,935to direct violence, 3,486 to landmine and

UXO strikes. Although this figure is lowerthan an annualized post-9/11 figure from the

nine-month period of our survey (10,770

12 months/9 months = 14,360), by allaccounts the incidence of violence haddropped very sharply by January 2002 andhad not as of May 2003 climbed back toanywhere near war levels.

A comparison with Afghanistans longpast of war leads to a similar finding. Before11 September 2001, Afghanistan had gonethrough 22 years of internal conflict. These

wars together killed, if we take a middlingestimate (see page 406), 2 million people.

Annualized, the 5,576 deaths during our


Figure 3. Districts with Victims from Direct Violence During Operation Enduring Freedom

The regional concentration of victims is illustrated by district-wise counts of post-9/11 victims fromdirect violence. The two districts with over 800 such victims each were on the front lines between theTaliban and the Northern Alliance both before and after 11 September 2001.



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post-9/11 survey period approximate one-twelfth of the historic violence level.

A problem with such interpretations isthat they are volatile to the ideological

climates of the day. Until 1997, US andPakistani propaganda depicted the Taliban asa source of stability for the region, particu-larly in the context of a Central Asia-to-Pakistan gas pipeline project led by a USenergy corporation (Shadid & Donnelly,2001; Cottey, 2003: 170). Their law-and-order regime was billed as deliverance fromthe anarchy of local warlords. This impliedthat violence against civilians had abated

from earlier periods. If so, then historic yard-sticks of the long run, such as an averagecalculated on 22 years, are not helpful asbaselines. We prefer, as both more authenticand more reliable, the victim numbersthat our key informants recalled for the12-month period preceding 9/11.

Conclusion

Operation Enduring Freedom, as we knowby now, was not the last intervention by the

West that pitted military forces of veryunequal strength against each other.

Although Iraqs armed forces were in adifferent league from the Taliban ragtagtroops, the spring 2003 Iraq war, too, was aninstance of highly asymmetrical conflict. Itmay be too early for a numerical assessment,

and if the Pentagon has its way, none mayever happen (Graham & Morgan, 2003;however, see Dardagan, 2003). What tran-spired from the media coverage of the warnevertheless indicates a pattern of engage-ments that likely produced a polarized localdistribution of victims similar to that in

Afghanistan. Western forces applied concen-trated airstrikes to regime infrastructure andenemy troop concentrations. They strove to

limit ground engagements to strategicpoints, simply sidestepping the majority ofpoorly defended localities. Judging from the

overflow of major hospitals, a small numberof urban neighborhoods suffered numerousvictims while a host of other communitiesmay have remained outside the theater and

without human loss. All this is speculativeand subject to vast observational and report-ing bias.

In the end, the dense figurework fromAfghanistan and the impressionistic pictureof the Iraq war both urge the samequestion: Does the new Western way of wargo hand in hand with considerable under-reporting of civilian losses? There areseveral factors that make this a systemic

likelihood: media management, theomission of injuries and of landmine andUXO strikes from victim counts, and theefforts of researchers to attribute victims tothe actions of one or the other party to theconflict. One of our reviewers stressed,against the media bias charge, that quanti-fying victims had become vastly moreaccurate since the Armenian genocide. Butthis is a longue dure-argument; it doesnot refute the biases operating on publi-cized counts of victims during recent wars.Counting is never value-free: on oneextreme, redefining war on our terms, asPresident Bush put it, will encourage afocus on what went wrong in very narrowterms of collateral damage. On the otherextreme, exemplified by Conettas research,compilations of violent incidents are sup-

plemented by estimates of victims fromindirect effects that depend on arbitraryattributions. We have chosen a third path,that of surveying the communities thatsuffered the loss.

Whether community surveys offer agenuine methodological improvement, andtheir findings will be heard in assessments ofthe cost of war, only further research canprove. This study of civilian victims in

Afghanistan emerged as a sideline to alandmine contamination assessment; com-munity surveys directly focused on victim




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questions will need to adapt their instru-ments, such as by incorporating sampling forfalse negatives and a record of individualincidents that took place during a com-

munitys period of exposure. Victimizationstudies concerned also with indirect victimsmay yet want to evolve other designs, such asrepeated measurements post-intervention orhousehold-level surveys, in order toovercome the limitations of ecological(macro-level) prevalence studies.

Despite these limitations, our data weregood enough to confirm two enduring factsof war: the civilian population suffers more

than a few small massacres, and forces thatpredate short-term military interventionsignificantly shape the pattern of violence.

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