Fear of Civilian Deaths May Have Undermined Effort

The war isn’t over, but already Pentagon and intelligence agency teams are going to Afghanistan for a post-mortem on U.S. weapons and tactics. The Air Force has launched a similar effort, code-named “Enduring Look.”

Yet neither of these studies, nor any others planned thus far, is set to dig deeply into one of the toughest problems of the war--civilian casualties.

The omission reflects what may seem a surprising fact: Behind a screen of self-congratulatory public statements by senior officials, the U.S. military is tied in knots over the issue, known euphemistically as “collateral damage.”

Since the Afghan war began more than three months ago, fear of criticism about civilian casualties has spread through the Pentagon “like a virus,” as one senior commander put it. And, unfair as they consider such criticism, senior officials admit that it has influenced wartime decisions.

In fact, some charge that obsessive attention to safeguarding civilians has undermined military effectiveness, fueled interservice rivalries and hurt morale. Worse, these officials say, it has increased the likelihood of Al Qaeda chieftains escaping because of its pervasive influence on U.S. strategy.

And, they argue, focusing too much on bad public relations about casualties has raised the long-term cost in lives.

“Collateral damage considerations are considerations that need to be weighed against mission accomplishment,” a senior military officer said. But he said he feels that a culture of hesitation has infected the military at all levels.

“In an environment in which [each reported incident] is autopsied, these become more than considerations. They become the first thing people think about,” he said.

In such a climate, the last thing some officials want is a detailed examination of the issue. First, they think, that could lead to measuring success by “body count.” At the same time, it could open up military commanders to a level of public scrutiny that they believe ultimately infringes on command prerogative.

Yet the military is paying a price for withholding detailed information about civilian casualties and for its failure to engage in open discussion about what U.S. policy should be.

A gulf of mutual suspicion has opened between the Pentagon and critics in the global human rights community--critics who have had a substantial impact on military decision-making, regardless of what professional soldiers think about them.

Amnesty International has demanded “an immediate and full investigation into what may have been violations of international and humanitarian law” as a result of “indiscriminate attacks” by the United States.

James E. Jennings, president of Conscience International, wrote in early December, “The total number of war victims in Afghanistan equals or exceeds those killed on our own soil on Sept. 11.”

And a University of New Hampshire professor has released a tally based on news reports suggesting that the number of civilian deaths from the U.S. campaign exceeds 4,000.

Pentagon Looks to Past Conflicts

Publicly, the Pentagon has responded by sidestepping specifics and broadly defending its record compared with past conflicts.

Last week, for instance, amid a slew of news reports and editorials addressing civilian losses, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said, “I can’t imagine there’s been a conflict in history where there has been less collateral damage, less unintended consequences.”

And defense officials were pleased when the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, said the Afghan war is unlike Vietnam, Korea or World War II. “The American side is very, very carefully selecting targets, taking maximum precautions about the civilian casualties,” he said early in the war.

One indicator of the Pentagon’s sensitivity was a meeting that Rumsfeld held in November with a dozen religious leaders--an open discussion about the moral limits on war. According to one participant, Rumsfeld was clearly frustrated.

Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, described how targets were determined. He insisted that the United States was using just enough ordnance to “do the job” without causing excessive civilian deaths.

Joe Loconte of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, who also attended the meeting, quoted Wilson as saying that the Pentagon had opted to “slow the pace of the campaign and increase the risk of the people executing it” because of legal restraints and “moral values.”

War planners frequently chose not to hit particular targets, even if they were considered important in purely military terms, Wilson said, and pilots were complaining about lost opportunities.

“We’ve gone so far the other way” in adopting measures to avoid harming civilians, a senior officer declared, that “it drives targeters and planners crazy believing that the system is overcompensating.”

Virtually every attack must be approved by Central Command in Florida, this officer said, and the percentage of precision-guided weapons being used is rising drastically.

Yet “the U.S. still gets blasted for not being sensitive,” this officer complained,

He and others expressed frustration that neither the media nor the public understands the considerations behind the Pentagon’s reluctance to engage in a detailed debate about specific incidents.

One reason, the senior officer said, is to avoid providing the enemy with information about the “thresholds” for American action. “If the U.S. said we did or didn’t bomb A or B because of some specific reason, then the enemy would have a recipe book for not being bombed,” the officer said.

“We don’t want to give the bad guys a no-hit list,” the officer said.

Another reason given for not defending each incident in public is concern that information supplied by the Pentagon may later be used in international courts to try to hold pilots or targeters legally responsible.

Everyone acknowledges that attention to the issue of civilian losses has become one of the conditions under which Americans wage modern warfare. But many officers say that disproportionate attention is paid to the issue--with a consequent tendency to hold back that has undesirable consequences of its own.

So heavily does the issue weigh on those most closely involved in fighting the war that Lt. Gen. Chuck Wald, the early air war commander for the campaign, said he felt a continuous need to act as a cheerleader for his staff in the Combined Air Operations Center, according to officers there.

“We’re here because of dead Americans,” Wald would find himself saying almost daily as he urged those choosing targets not to be too cautious.

Interservice Squabbles Arise

What’s more, the issue of civilian casualties has become ammunition for interservice battles. “You don’t let the Air Force bomb stuff and take some risk,” an officer said. “No wonder, then, that the Army and the pundits argue you have to have boots on the ground.”

“We couldn’t have a better air campaign because collateral-damage concerns stopped obvious military missions, like interdicting moving targets,” another officer said. “When everybody’s telling you a civilian structure is nearby, [that] there might be refugees in that column, we can’t see inside a truck, [so] we end up not bombing the bad guys.”

“If Osama bin Laden is in a mosque, I’d take it down,” another said, although in the present climate that probably would not happen.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has promised an accounting, saying, “You have to find out what the ground truth is, and we will do that,”

But so far, at least, no major official effort is underway to establish such facts.

Gen. Wald set up a special desk in the Combined Air Operations Center to examine incidents of civilian deaths. He was motivated in part by the fact that Pentagon and Central Command officials inquired about every such incident. But this is an informal effort that is not publicly acknowledged and it is not matched in any methodical way at the Defense Intelligence Agency or elsewhere in the Pentagon.

Nor is there likely to be any exposition of numbers of dead or mistakes made--not with Rumsfeld on the record as saying, “Nobody wants to see a single civilian death.”

“Look what we’re reduced to,” an officer complained, pointing to what he sees as Rumsfeld’s defensive stance. “We’re the most careful in the world? I cannot imagine us being more careful about minimizing civilian casualties.

“But how about we’re the most deadly? How about, if you’re a bad guy, we’re going to kill you?”

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William M. Arkin is an adjunct professor at the U.S. Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, a consultant to nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, and the author of several books on military affairs.