Kabul, Afghanistan – After more than five years of increasingly intense warfare, the conflict in Afghanistan reached a grim milestone in the first half of this year: U.S. troops and their NATO allies killed more civilians than insurgents did, according to several independent tallies.
The growing toll is causing widespread disillusionment among ordinary Afghans, eroding support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and exacerbating political rifts among NATO allies about the nature and goals of the mission.
About 500 Afghan civilians have been reported killed in 2007, and the rate has increased drastically in the past month. In some instances, distinguishing between combatant and noncombatant dead was difficult. But in many other cases, there was no doubt that the person killed was a bystander to war.
Still, Western military leaders argue that any comparison of casualties caused by Western forces and by the Taliban is fundamentally unfair because there is a clear moral distinction to be made between accidental deaths resulting from combat operations and deliberate killings of innocents by militants.
“No (Western) soldier ever wakes up in the morning with the intention of harming any Afghan citizen,” said Maj. John Thomas, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. Moreover, alliance officials say Taliban fighters are ultimately to blame for many of the fatalities attributed to coalition military operations because the insurgents deliberately place civilians in harm’s way, using them as human shields and employing other tactics.
Political analysts say that despite the increase in civilian deaths, most Afghans still support the presence of international troops.
