Killing 400,000 Iraqi civilians, by some estimates more, and displacing 3 - 5 million of them does not sound like helping them to me.........

Counting the Dead

One symptom of this indifference is the absence of an adequate accounting of the wars’ destruction, particularly of war mortality. The governments don’t discuss it, and the news media reliably report the lowest conceivable numbers—“tens of thousands” is the usual formulation for Iraq – or the partial numbers collated by the U.N. office in Kabul for Afghanistan. In fact, the numbers of fatalities are significantly higher and need to be studied for their implications.

In Iraq, some brave attempts to collect and analyze data about war-related mortality have at least given us a sense of the scale of mayhem.  Several household surveys, the state-of-the-art method favored by epidemiologists, indicate a death toll reaching well into the hundreds of thousands. (This includes all Iraqis, not just civilians, from direct violence and indirectly due to other factors – so-called excess deaths above the pre-war mortality rate.)  Even the oft-cited tally of Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO, holds that more than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of violence. IBC’s method is crude and incomplete—it gathers data mainly from English-language newspapers—and they acknowledge an undercount by at least a factor of two.  The lowest estimate of all the household surveys—a large, randomized sample conducted by the Ministry of Health in the spring of 2006—was 400,000 excess deaths in the 2003-2006 period, and there was still a lot of killing to come.  By using data on widows, displaced persons (up to 5 million), and the household surveys, I estimate the number of war-related dead to be at least 600,000 and possibly as much as one million. 

This is not a number that most American politicians want to consider. What’s more puzzling is the reaction of the news media, which have generally failed to report on the war’s destruction. Even as the U.S. military exits Iraq, the news media’s treatment focuses on American soldiers returning home or questions the future stability of Iraq in the absence of U.S. troops.  There is very little on how the war has affected ordinary Iraqis.

On Afghanistan, a far less violent conflict compared with Iraq, we have even less information. The U.N. office gathers data from morgues, the military and news reports, but this “passive surveillance” captures only a fraction of the war dead and cannot explain what is being missed. No household surveys have been conducted in Afghanistan.  So we have only the sketchiest notions of the war’s human toll. (This was also true of the wars in Korea and Indochina, where estimates are largely guesswork.)  Overall, my best estimate of excess deaths in Afghanistan is around 100,000, but it is an inadequate estimate, as all are for this beleaguered country.