Dead Children at War

Dead Children at War

A team of official Afghan investigators has determined that NATO forces killed eight children last week in the Narang district, after NATO officials claimed they had killed only insurgents. As I never tire of saying, such tragedies are inevitable at wartime, warring powers need to do their best not to make such mistakes, but the deaths of innocents are not the single, critical component of the justness of a war.

The item also contains some UN figures on civilian deaths in Afghanistan between January and October 2009 - i.e not including the deaths of those children who were killed in December:

The latest figures released by the United Nations show that 2,021 civilian died during clashes in the first 10 months of this year, up from 1,838 for the same period last year. Taliban insurgents were blamed for 68 percent of the deaths this year — three times more than NATO forces, according to the U.N. (Actually, 68% is twice as many, not thrice- ed)

Since the article helpfully doesn't quite do the maths, I'll do it for them. 32% of 2,021 is 646.72 dead civilians, killed by NATO forces in Afghanistan by the end of October this year, or 65 a month, or two a day. Afghanistan is mostly a rural place, not densely populated.

It looks to me, reading the UN numbers, as if NATO killed about the same number of civilians in Afghanistan this year as Israel did in Gaza, though the Gaza numbers may be a bit higher or lower depending on whom you ask. But the magnitude is similar.

The Solidarity March For Afghanistan will be setting out soon, I expect. Mondoweiss will have the details.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations