Seattle PI : Afghanistan body count raises skepticism

Afghanistan body count raises skepticism

By MATTHEW PENNINGTON | ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER | September 15, 2006

KABUL, Afghanistan -- NATO's estimate of Taliban killed this month has created skepticism and worry in Afghanistan, with local officials saying that either the militant force has grown bigger than imagined - or too many innocent Afghans are being killed.

NATO says its forces, backed by the Afghan army, have killed more than 500 Taliban militants near Afghanistan's main southern city of Kandahar in Operation Medusa, a sweep launched Sept. 2.

The figures, if accurate, make it the deadliest battle since U.S. warplanes bombed the extremist militia, host of Osama bin Laden, out of power in late 2001.

"If they kill that many, the Taliban must have thousands of fighters on that front," said Mohammed Arbil, a former Northern Alliance commander. In the recent past, Taliban units have been described in terms of dozens or hundreds at most.

But NATO has stood by its battle assessments as solid, even conservative.

One official with the military command, called the International Security Assistance Force, said internally circulated estimates of militant dead were more than double the tally released to journalists.

"We'd rather have a lower figure that we can back up than a higher one that stretches your willingness to trust us," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

NATO says the high toll is due to its superior firepower, including fighter jets and artillery, compared to the Taliban militia's roadside bombs and assault rifles. It says it avoids civilian casualties by warning residents to evacuate.

The inability of journalists to reach the area has made it virtually impossible to check the figures.

Hundreds of families displaced from the war zone, in the Panjwayi district, are also in the dark, and don't even know if their homes are still standing.

The onslaught has dispelled any doubts that NATO, which recently took over in southern Afghanistan, is willing to use overwhelming military force. But Afghans, while eager for the Taliban uprising to end, have mixed feelings.

In the capital Kabul, there's disbelief that so many guerrillas could be killed and citizens escape unscathed. In Kandahar city, closer to the battle, there's dismay over the intensity of the fighting, and calls for peace talks.

"Who are these Taliban? They are Afghans," said Mira Jan, a displaced 42-year-old grape farmer from Panjwayi. "NATO and the government must convene a ulema (Muslim clerics') council with tribal elders and convince the Taliban to stop fighting."

By all measures, the Taliban have stepped up their attacks this year. NATO forces that took charge of security in the south last month expected hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, but instead have often faced well-organized militant forces that stand and fight.

Nowhere has that been more apparent that in Panjwayi, a rural district of dried-mud houses scattered among orchards where hundreds of Taliban militants had massed, posing a threat to Kandahar city, the former stronghold of the hard-line Islamic regime, just 15 miles away.

NATO launched Operation Medusa to wipe out the militants.

When NATO announced by the second day of the offensive that its artillery and airstrikes had killed more than 200 militants, skeptical journalists without access to the action - following a government warning that anyone straying off the main road could be shot as suspected Taliban - pressed for details: where were the bodies and how are they counted?

"Your know what you can see through a telescope? We have those kind of capabilities all over the battle field," said NATO spokesman Maj. Scott Lundy. "We are reliant on every soldier on the battlefield to feed up the information that they have, from what they have seen through weapons' sights and with other surveillance assets. It all gets thrown into the mix."

Lundy said such estimates are "imprecise," but stressed that NATO makes every effort to make them as accurate as possible and usually goes with a conservative number. "We would be quite happy to speak about military success without going into the detail, but it's what the media want," he said.

To date, NATO has reported at least 517 militants dead compared to 20 from its force, 14 of them in an accidental plane crash.

The Taliban has denied suffering such high casualties. Neither side has offered details about how many militants have been wounded.

According to an Associated Press count based on reports from U.S., NATO and Afghan officials, 2,800 people have died so far this year in violence nationwide, including militants and civilians - about 1,300 more than the toll for all of 2005.

Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, said that given the circumstances in which the Taliban had massed in one place, the figures given by NATO were plausible and could well be an underestimation, because of the effort the Islamic militia makes to bury their dead quickly.

He also said that given NATO's aim to create secure zones, they had little incentive to inflate the death toll.

"I have no suspicion they are trying to widely inflate the casualty numbers. They are not trying to measure success that way anyway," Krepinevich said in a telephone interview.

"They would be trying to measure success in terms of the population feeling secure, is reconstruction proceeding, is commerce growing."

Insecurity has clearly prevented any progress on those counts. And the alliance's success in battle has induced little optimism among Afghans that NATO - struggling to marshal enough forces for its mission - is close to defeating the resurgent Taliban.

"All these bombardments leave behind a bad name for the international community for killing Afghans," said Taj Mohammed Wardak, a former Afghan interior minister. "It will only create more motivation for revenge."

Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Noor Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.