How war crimes started in Afghanistan (Past 20 years)

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How US-Funded Abuses Led to Failure in Afghanistan*

by Patricia Gossman
July 6, 2021

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Afghan men search for the bodies of people killed in a NATO airstrike in Logar province June 6, 2012. Officials and villagers in Logar province, about 30 km (17 miles) south of Kabul, said a NATO air strike killed 18 civilians, including women and children, along with six Taliban insurgents.REUTERS/STRINGER

As U.S. forces continue their withdrawal from Afghanistan, postmortems on the 20-year U.S.-led military intervention are underway. Predictably, many in the U.S. national security establishment are rehashing old debates about the conflict and what could have led to “victory” – more troops, looser rules of engagement, or more freedom to choose military targets. These arguments – uncannily similar to those made after the U.S. war in Vietnam – grievously devalue the devastating consequences of the war for Afghans — civilians and fighters alike.

The primary and defining characteristic of the armed conflict in Afghanistan over the last two decades has been harm to civilians caused by massive human rights abuses and war crimes by all sides. These rampant abuses have in turn fueled the cycle of conflict in numerous ways, including by inspiring recruitment to the insurgency, rendering political dialogue nearly impossible, and undermining efforts to promote stability through better governance. Successive U.S. administrations have largely perceived human rights more as an obstacle than as an essential component of addressing Afghanistan’s problems. This approach has been catastrophic.

I have spent much of these past 20 years talking to Afghans about the consequences of counterterrorism gone wrong – the civilian deaths and injuries that never made it into the Pentagon’s airstrike death count; the night raids that turned into summary executions targeting people who had the bad luck to live in a contested district; the torture of people in custody that destroyed lives and motivated revenge. I have also talked to many Afghans about the unforeseen consequences of these actions – the Taliban resurgence abetted by Afghan government abuses and corruption; the grievances and disillusionment that drove people to lose faith that post-2001 Afghanistan would be better; and the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Afghanistan, an offspring of Pakistan pandering to Islamist extremism and Afghan warlords’ mis-governance in Afghanistan’s east.
The ground for what went wrong was laid early, long before the Taliban re-emerged, through squandered opportunities and the obliviousness or apathy of U.S. generals about atrocities being committed by Afghan forces, the U.S. military, and CIA units. Safe havens provided by Pakistan certainly helped pave the way for the Taliban’s return. But far too little attention has been given to what the United States did – and failed to do – in the years since 2001, and how U.S. decisions and policies essentially set the stage for failure.

Counterproductive Partnerships

Throughout, U.S. policy was guided by a number of myths. One was that the Afghan strongmen, warlords, and militia commanders the United States chose as allies in ousting the Taliban could help to provide security and stability, despite their records of abuses. In fact, the opposite proved to be the case. Persistent human rights abuses by warlords were a source of insecurity, and worse, over time, they fueled widespread resentment, undermined efforts to foster good governance at the local and national levels, and helped the Taliban obtain new support and recruits.

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In November 2001, as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters and others are believed to have been suffocated to death or shot in container trucks by U.S.-allied Afghan troops of the “Northern Alliance,” and buried in a mass grave in Dasht-e-Leili, near the town of Sheberghan in northern Afghanistan.

In late 2001, after Northern Alliance forces ousted the Taliban from the north, their militias – some led by men holding office today – carried out systematic attacks on Pashtun villages, raping women, summarily executing civilians, and stealing livestock and land. (Such attacks occurred as late as 2016, when militia forces under the former vice president, Abdul Rashid Dostum, terrorized Pashtun villages in Faryab, accusing them of supporting the Taliban.) The United States was inevitably linked to the abuses of its allies: In November 2001, Dostum’s forces massacred as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners who were captured or had surrendered outside Kunduz. I visited the mass grave – littered with human hair and clothes – in February 2002, and later interviewed a survivor who had hidden, wounded, under a pile of bodies and escaped before the bulldozers came to bury the bodies. (The area, called Dasht-e Laili, has thousands of graves, including those of Hazara victims massacred by the Taliban in 1998, and Taliban prisoners killed by a Dostum rival in 1997). The United Nations initially refused to support a full investigation, and the United States rejected calls to protect the site. By 2006, local militias had destroyed the gravesite. But the Taliban and the families of those killed have not forgotten.

War crimes against Taliban prisoners also occurred in the south. In early 2002, former Taliban wrote to the new Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, offering to lay down arms and recognize the government. Instead, Gul Agha Sherzai, a powerful tribal leader the United States embraced, later accused of corruption, had them imprisoned and tortured by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the intelligence agency created by the CIA in the months after the Taliban’s collapse. Others accused of Taliban links – whether true or not – also died under torture in NDS prisons or at CIA black sites. Some ended up at Guantanamo Bay. A number who were released or escaped later remobilized and helped lead the Taliban resurgence.

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Afghan policemen stand guard at the scene of a suicide bombing on the outskirts of Kabul June 16, 2007. A bomber drove a car packed with explosives toward a military-civilian convoy, killing four civilians and wounding five others, including a foreign soldier, police said.
REUTERS/OMAR SOBHANI


By 2005, Taliban forces were gaining ground and carrying out their own wave of atrocities. Suicide bombings – a new phenomenon for Afghanistan apparently adopted from the war in Iraq – emerged in 2005 with a wave of attacks targeting civilians. Human Rights Watch also documented increasing Taliban attacks on girls’ schools and assassinations of civilian officials.

At this time, another problematic U.S. ally came to prominence. Assadullah Khalid, now Minister of Defense, an important CIA contact after 2001 who was accused of sexual assault while governor of Ghazni, was named governor of Kandahar where he oversaw secret torture cells. A protegé of Khalid and Sherzai, Abdul Raziq, became head of the Kandahar border police, and later chief of police. He gained the support of NATO – who cared more about how his police could protect their forces than about Raziq’s litany of atrocities, including hundreds of enforced disappearances and torture of tribal rivals, civilians, and detainees. With high-level support by the United States and other NATO countries, Raziq escaped justice for his abuses. The Taliban killed him in 2018.

Sherzai became governor of Nangarhar, where he allied with local tribal leaders engaged in land grabbing. The infighting that followed created a vacuum exploited by militant groups from neighboring Pakistan, some of whom later proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015. (The Islamic State of Khorasan Province, as it calls itself, has been weakened, but is believed responsible for a series of recent massacres of Hazaras, most recently targeting staff of the HALO Trust, a charity that has been clearing landmine in Afghanistan for decades, on June 9. That day, gunmen, who killed 10 and injured 17, demanded to know who among the deminers were Hazara.)

Abuses by warlords and security officials like Dostum, Sherzai, Khalid, and Raziq did not stop the Taliban from gaining ground or definitively weaken their forces. While it could be argued that the Taliban would have reemerged regardless, there is no doubt these widespread abuses provided fertile ground for new recruitment and alienated local communities caught between predatory U.S.-backed forces and the Taliban.

Civilian Casualties Undermine Public Support

As the fighting between the Taliban threatened more of Afghanistan after 2006, U.S. air operations expanded.

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Afghan villagers sit near the bodies of children who were reported to have been killed during a NATO airstrike in Kunar province on April 7, 2013. (Photo: Reuters)

There’s a popular perception that except for an occasional mistake, civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes are rare. Some civilian casualties were the result of deliberate misinformation provided by Afghan leaders to target rivals, like the December 23, 2001, airstrike that killed some 65 elders traveling to Kabul for Karzai’s inauguration. Despite evidence to the contrary, U.S. officials claimed for months the elders were al-Qaeda members. But it remains publicly unclear what led to mass civilian casualties in other strikes over the years, since the U.S. military has so often refused to release complete information about its investigations, even in cases with as many as 90 dead. For example, in Gardez in December 2003, when a US A-10 Warthog aircraft gunned down nine children in broad daylight. Or the massive sustained airstrikes in 2009, in western Farah province, that killed almost 100 civilians – mostly children – some of whom were blown into unrecognizable pieces.

Civilian deaths in Afghanistan from U.S. and NATO airstrikes jumped in 2007 and rose to over 500 in 2008. The deaths and injuries – plus poor investigations and infrequent condolence payments – caused such a public backlash that U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal ordered new directives to reduce civilian casualties. Numbers dropped. But after the withdrawal of most NATO forces in December 2014, the Taliban made new gains on the battlefield. The desperate effort to oust Taliban forces from Kunduz city, which briefly fell to the Taliban in late September 2015, led to the shocking U.S. gunship attack on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital, which killed 42 patients, doctors, and other medical staff. The mistaken targeting was likely due to misinformation from Afghan government ground forces, and it cast a long shadow over U.S. claims that only insurgent forces were being targeted.

After that, civilian casualties from airstrikes soared as the Trump administration vastly increased air operations while removing directives prohibiting strikes on residential buildings and loosening rules on targeting. Between 2016 and 2020, 40 percent of all civilian casualties from U.S. and Afghan government airstrikes in Afghanistan – almost 1,600 – were children. In mid-2019, civilian casualties caused by Afghan government and U.S. forces briefly surpassed those carried out by the Taliban and Islamic State.

There is no question airstrikes significantly weakened Taliban forces (and decimated much of the Islamic State’s strongholds in Nangarhar), and no question that the Taliban’s own atrocities in urban areas increased, as Human Rights Watch documented in a 2018 report. But the psychological impact of so many civilian deaths and injuries from air operations, and the terror in rural Afghanistan inspired by the constant raids and special operations, may have done far greater damage in undermining support for the Afghan government than any military advantage gained.

Facing the Legacy of 20 Years of War
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Film of Australian SAS soldier ‘killing defenceless Afghan’

Air operations were only part of it. Today, Australia is grappling with the fallout of serious allegations about a pattern of potential war crimes its special forces committed during raids in Uruzgan province that included murdering children, kicking detainees off cliffs, and planting weapons on men whom they had summarily executed. The alleged crimes echo those of U.S. special forces, including the never-prosecuted 2012 murders of 17 civilians who were detained and tortured to death in Nerkh district. Afghan victims of such crimes never saw justice – which is why the International Criminal Court has sought an investigation into crimes by all parties to the conflict, including the U.S. military and CIA, as well as the Taliban and Afghan government forces. The U.S. response has been to reject the ICC’s jurisdiction and try to shut down any investigation.

It is also true that in these 20 years, Afghanistan saw progress in many areas. Since 2002, in cities under Afghan government control, millions of Afghan girls have gone to school and Afghan women have participated in public life, including holding political office, in greater numbers than ever before. In government-controlled areas, Afghan media play an active role in providing a forum for public debate, while also risking threats and violence from officials, security forces, government-backed militias, and increasingly the Taliban.

But these gains are fragile and limited and were achieved against a background of tremendous violence and abuse. In these 20 years, the propensity of the United States to prioritize short-term military gains over the creation of genuinely democratic institutions and the protection of human rights fatally undermined both the U.S. mission and the entire post-2001 State-building effort. Overreliance on airstrikes without adequate civilian protections, relying on abusive warlords to fill security and political leadership roles, and largely ignoring wholesale corruption and rights violations, fostered deep resentment and distrust of the U.S. and Afghan governments, grievously weakened Afghanistan’s military and political capacities, and made it far easier for the Taliban to gain ground.

As U.S. policymakers debate a new US posture toward Afghanistan, they should try to understand the true history of these last two decades and recognize that their mistakes were not in matters of troop numbers, rules of engagement, or military strategy or tactics. Instead, the mistakes were rooted in a basic failure to recognize that corruption and widespread human rights abuses – both by U.S. and Afghan government forces – sabotaged the overall enterprise. If the U.S. government does not learn from this history, it will find itself embracing policies – whether in Afghanistan now or elsewhere in the future – that repeat the same mistakes.

(* All the pictures above are not from the Original article)

 

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Trump authorizes sanctions on ICC staff investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan​


ICC allows probe into war crimes by the US military and its allies in Afghanistan​

 

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Disgusting and Immoral acts of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.(video)
[Viewer discretion advised]

Shocking evidence of potential war crime exposed in major investigation

 
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Death by Drone: America’s Vicious Legacy in Afghanistan

As the United States prepares to leave, thousands of killings remain unprobed, and Washington refuses to talk about them.

By Emran Feroz

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A Reaper drone used for missions in Afghanistan is seen in Nevada in 2009. RICK LOOMIS/LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

MARCH 27, 2020, 4:03 PM

Ordinary Afghans say it has happened to them many times and never—not once—has it made news anywhere outside Afghanistan. Last November, an American Reaper drone targeted a group of villagers in the mountainous area of Afghanistan’s southeastern province of Paktia and killed seven of them. Paktia has long been home to Taliban militants, but local residents say all the victims were civilians, including three women and one child. They had gone to the remote area to graze their cattle and collect wood. Suddenly, they were dead.

“Nobody wants to listen to us. I doubt that the murderers will face justice one day. God is our only hope,” said Mohammad Anwar, a resident of Zazai Aryub, a district in Paktia. The perpetrators he is talking about are sitting far away in one of the many U.S. military bases where drone operators are working from.

According to Anwar, who is related to the victims, some families lost their male breadwinners, as often happens after such attacks. “They are desperate. Their future is very uncertain,” he told Foreign Policy in a phone conversation.

And now it is more uncertain than ever, even after 18 and a half years of war. The newly signed U.S.-Taliban truce contains secret annexes that reportedly will give the Taliban information allowing the Islamist insurgent group to prevent attacks during the U.S. withdrawal. But the Afghan national government and its officials have been cut out of the deal—though it calls for peace talks between various Afghan factions—and even more so, ordinary Afghans, who have no recourse to justice and don’t know whether the drone strikes will let up.

“We are like ants for them,” said Islam Khan, a resident of Paktia. “The murderers need to face a trial. If it’s not happening, it just reveals that the Western world does not care about the Afghans they are murdering.”

According to Lisa Ling, a former drone technician with the U.S. military in Afghanistan, civilian casualties caused by drone strikes must be investigated and regarded as war crimes. “I think that every strike where community leaders speak out and tell us that we are killing their civilians should be thoroughly investigated by the ICC [International Criminal Court] and the international community should listen,” she told Foreign Policy via Signal. Ling, who has become a whistleblower and staunch critic of drone attacks, believes that “this kind of warfare is wrong on so many levels” and that the United States cannot “fight terror with terror.”

Neither the U.S. military nor the CIA responded to a request for comment for this story. But both typically portray drone attacks as “precision strikes” that kill “alleged militants” or “suspected terrorists,” and actual on-the-ground investigations rarely take place afterward. According to a recent analysis of 228 official U.S. military investigations conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria between 2002 and 2015, most investigations of alleged civilian casualty incidents didn’t include even one visit. The military conducted site inspections in only 16 percent of the casualty investigations reviewed for the study by researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

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Children in Balkh province, northern Afghanistan, in April 2019. Airstrikes there have increased during recent months.EMRAN FEROZ FOR FOREIGN POLICY

The same was true of the strike in Paktia. Not a single U.S. investigator is believed to have visited the site of the killings afterward. On its Dari Twitter page, U.S. Central Command reported that an action had allegedly killed Taliban members from Faryab province in the same timespan, but it did not mention any drone strikes nor civilian casualties.

Despite the U.S.-Taliban truce, residents of Zazai Aryub are still afraid, saying that they have been haunted by American drone strikes for years and that their fate is often ignored by both the U.S. military and the Afghan government in Kabul. “They keep saying that they are killing terrorists. But that’s not true. Farmers, shepherds, and women are not terrorists. One of the victims, Naqib Jan, was a 2-year-old child,” said Khan, who works as a teacher in a local village. During the last months and years, several relatives and members of his family were killed by drone strikes. He claims that his fellow tribesmen are terrified and depressed, suffering from trauma, and that many children fear to play outside.

“We tried to raise our voice, and we even confronted President Ashraf Ghani with this issue, but he does not care,” Khan said.
While in the past, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai took a critical stance toward U.S. airstrikes and criticized them in public, Ghani’s administration, which is heavily dependent on the United States for aid and support at a time when the Taliban are winning in many parts of the country, has preferred to largely conform to Washington’s “global war on terrorism” narrative, mostly ignoring civilian casualties. In some cases, Ghani’s officials have even rejected the findings of independent observers and human rights organizations that offered proof of civilian harm. U.S. military officials have sometimes claimed that their Afghan army allies ordered the strikes.

In early March, senior judges at the ICC authorized an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan. By doing so, they overturned an earlier rejection of the inquiry. Mainly, the ICC investigation will look at actions by U.S, Afghan, and Taliban troops. But immediately after the ICC’s announcement, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attacked the ruling, describing it as “reckless,” and said the United States would outline measures in the coming weeks to prevent its citizens being brought before the court. “This is a truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable political institution masquerading as a legal body,” Pompeo told a news conference.

In terms of possible U.S. war crimes, the ICC is focusing on alleged CIA torture and some cases of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. However, according to various reports, drone strikes, such as the one that wiped out Khan’s family members, will not be included in the inquiry. “These strikes could be seen as violations of international humanitarian law. But that does not make it a war crime, which has to be intentional or sufficiently reckless. But determining recklessness requires a legal analysis in each case of the evidence,” Patricia Gossman, an associate Asia director for Human Rights Watch, told Foreign Policy via email.

Nor has the United States done an effective job of investigating any of these strikes, rights officials say, especially since the International Security Assistance Force was disbanded in 2014 and the U.S. military was in control once again.


Mohammad Kabir, pictured in May 2017, lives in a village in Maidan Wardak province, which is regularly targeted by airstrikes and night raids. His brother was killed by a drone strike. “Everyone here fears the drones, especially the children. They can’t sleep at night,“ he said.

Family members of the victims in Paktia believe that there is no doubt about the nature of those human rights violations. “We don’t believe that it was a mistake. It happened too often. We want the culprits to face prosecution and trial,” Khan said. Other Afghans share his opinion. “It’s a war crime, and it needs to be prosecuted properly. We are not interested in quibbling words and phrases. We want justice. This is just one case out of thousands that took place since the end of 2001,” said Abdul Malik Zazai, the head of Paktia’s provincial council, in a phone conversation.

Afghanistan is the most drone-bombed country in the world. The United States dropped more bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 than in any other years since the Defense Department began keeping track in 2006. According to new figures released by the U.S. military, at least 7,423 bombs and other munitions were dropped on the country in 2019, a nearly eightfold increase from 2015 and an average of 20 bombs a day.

In its numbers, the U.S. military does not differentiate between strikes conducted by drones or those conducted by conventional aircraft. At the end of 2001, the age of drone warfare began in Afghanistan, where the very first lethal strike of an unmanned aircraft took place.

According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is observing U.S. drone warfare around the world, at least 6,825 drone strikes took place in 2019 in Afghanistan. The total number of victims remains unknown since most of these attacks are taking place in remote areas like in Zazai Aryub.

“The Americans are benefiting from the nature of this war and from the status quo of the international community. They believe that they are above the law,” said Karim Popal, an Afghan German lawyer who is representing the victims of a 2009 NATO airstrike that was ordered by a German colonel in Kunduz province. Back then, dozens of civilians were killed. A German court rejected considering the massacre as a war crime and paying compensation to the victims’ families. A few years later, the responsible colonel was promoted by the army.

Recently, however, a hearing took place in front of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, with no outcome as yet.
“This is a big success, but at the same time, it’s very clear that many Western countries, including Germany and the United States, are not interested in addressing the crimes their troops committed,” Popal said by phone.

“Imagine being the Afghan father or mother who heard that the one who killed their children did not face any trial but was promoted. It’s a shame.”

 

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Disgusting and Immoral acts of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.(video)
[Viewer discretion advised]

Shocking evidence of potential war crime exposed in major investigation


You know an Anzac soldier kept a Ottoman soldier's head as a trophy.

So dont be surprised in Australians committing awful war crimes because it has happened ever since 1788.
 

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Wikileaks: 'War Crimes' Evidence in Afghanistan

Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: 'They show the true nature of this war'
 

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40% of all civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan – almost 1,600 – in the last five years were children​

Source AOAV
published : 6 May 2021


Hundreds of children have been killed and hundreds more injured by US and Afghan airstrikes in the past five years, UN data analysed by AOAV can reveal.

Between 2016-2020 (inclusive) there have, in Afghanistan, been:


  • 3,977 total civilian casualties from airstrikes: 2,122 civilians killed, 1,855 civilians injured
  • 1,598 total child casualties from airstrikes: 785 children killed, 813 children injured
  • 40% of all civilian airstrike casualties were children (1,598 of 3,977)
  • 37% of those civilians killed by airstrikes were children (785 of 2,122)
  • 44% of those civilians injured by airstrikes were children (813 children of 1,855 total)
  • The majority (62% – 1,309 of 2,122) of civilian deaths from airstrikes were caused by international forces.
  • The majority (50% – 2,000 of 3,977) of overall civilian casualties (deaths and injuries) were also caused by international forces.
  • Overall casualties from international airstrikes more than tripled between 2017 and 2019, from 247 to 757.
Explaining the high numbers of child deaths requires context. As foreign ground troop numbers have dwindled in Afghanistan, with a full pull-out expected in September 2021, the NATO operation has become increasingly reliant on US aerial operations, alongside their ally the Afghan Air Force, in their fight against the Taliban. But this form of offensive, especially when used in populated areas, has had devastating impacts on Afghan civilians in the past five years, as an analysis of data from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reveals.

The road to almost 1,600 children being killed by airstrikes in Afghanistan was paved, in part, in late 2017, when then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis announced that the Rules of Engagement for airstrikes against the Taliban had been loosened, enabling the US Air Force to conduct more airstrikes. This was part of President Trump’s promise to “lift restrictions and expand authorities” for fighters in Afghanistan.

In each of the following two years, the US dropped more weapons on Afghanistan than in the height of their presence in 2011 – at a rate of more than 20 a day.

Such heavy bombardment resulted in the deadliest year of airstrikes for children in Afghanistan on record, AOAV can reveal. In 2018, 236 minors were killed by airstrikes. Another 256 were injured, leaving a total of 492 child casualties This was an 85% increase on the year before, resulting in a rate of four child casualties every three days.

The majority (57%) of these child casualties were caused by US-led international forces.

Combining adult civilian and child victims, international forces were responsible for the majority (64%, or 644) of the 1,013 civilian casualties from airstrikes in 2018.

For Afghan civilians, this was more than double (2.6 times) the international airstrike casualty rate of the year before (2017). UNAMA cited particular concerns of international strikes on structures and in support of Afghan ground operations in 2018. But their warnings went unheeded, by the end of 2019 the annual casualty rate from US strikes was triple that of 2017.

In 2019, the US Air Force were responsible for more than two-thirds (69%) of child casualties from airstrikes. 2018 and 2019 were a reversal from 2016 & 2017 when the Afghan Air Force were responsible for more overall civilian casualties than the US.

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This switch was fuelled by the relaxed rules of engagement from the US, announced in October 2017. The new regulations allowed the US to strike at Taliban targets even if they were not in proximity to any NATO or Afghan forces and it would allow more US operatives to be embedded with Afghan forces, permitting them to authorise more airstrikes.

One such incident ended tragically.

On the morning of 19 July 2018, the US Air Force carried out airstrikes on a residential compound in Chahar Dara district, Kunduz province, resulting in the death of 14 women and children, all from the same extended family. The strike took place during an Afghan National Army ground operation. During the fighting, a member of the family asked for help from the local police, but before anything could be done the US fired a missile onto the street corner. A second bomb was then dropped directly on the house, completely destroying the building and killing everyone inside, apart from one baby.

Both the Afghan and American militaries at first denied any civilian casualties. Soon the Afghan Ministry of Defence admitted wrongdoing and paid compensation. The US forces eventually launched an investigation on 25 July. By August 10, they released a statement, continuing to deny any civilian victims. It took significant protest from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) for the US to launch another formal investigation, eventually admitting 12 civilians were killed and one injured.

But this kind of wrangling over civilian deaths is commonplace.

In both 2018 and 2019, UNAMA and the US diverge dramatically on the figures. In 2018, the US only acknowledged 117 civilian casualties from airstrikes (70 killed, 47 injured). A difference of over 500%. Again, in 2019 the US counts 97 deaths and 59 injuries due to their airstrikes. A margin of nearly 500%.

In March 2020, soon after an initial deal had been signed with the Taliban to end the war, the US scaled back its aerial operations. At the same time, the US Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT) ceased to publish monthly aerial operations data in Afghanistan, something they’d done since 2012 so there is no publicly available data from the US military from March 2020 onwards.

However, in the first two months of 2020, UNAMA attributed 39 child casualties (32 killed and 7 injured) to airstrikes from international military forces – that’s more than one child casualty every two days by the US.

Despite the deadliness of the US Air Force’s operations in the past five years, there is still concern about the future threat that the Afghan Air Force poses to civilians as they take control of aerial operations. UNAMA found that civilian casualties resulting from airstrikes by the Afghan Air Force during the first six months of 2020 had tripled, compared to the same time period in 2019.

Even as the US military pulls out of Afghanistan this year, their leaders cannot distance themselves from this harm. They helped establish the Afghan Air Force in its current form, and have supplied and trained it since 2005, spending $8billion over the past decade in the process.

The Taliban has continued to attack Afghan forces and civilians during the peace talks process that began in Doha in September 2020. And many fear that the US withdrawal, along with other international forces including the UK, will lead to further destabilisation and violence.

Colonel Simon Diggins, former British defence attaché in Kabul, told The Times, the US and Britain were giving a “green light to the Taliban to take over”.

This was backed up by an Annual Threat Assessment report from the US Director of National Security that read: “We assess that prospects for a peace deal will remain low during the next year. The Taliban is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan Government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.”

President Biden has overruled such warnings and committed to a US withdrawal by September 11, 2021 – the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Although it is likely that several hundred special forces and private military contractors will remain in Afghanistan. The Taliban themselves have focused on the fact that this announcement means the US have missed the May 1 deadline agreed under the Trump administration.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said on local television. “Any delay after May 1 is not acceptable for us.”

With the U.S-trained Afghan Air Force now set to take the lead on airstrikes, desperately fighting against a resurgent Taliban, it’s clear the risk to civilians from aerial weapons remains and may worsen.

 
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