I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey guys, on the line, I've got Joe Dyke from airwars.org.
Welcome back to the show, Joe.
How are you doing?
Hi.
Thank you so much for having me again.
It's great to be back.
Very happy to have you here.
Very important piece that you guys have put together, tens of thousands of civilians likely killed by U.S. in forever wars, and by that you mean indirect airstrikes, drone or airplane strikes, not shot or artilleried, correct?
Yep.
With the caveat that the early years of the Iraq war, the data comes from Iraq body count, and they don't disaggregate between artillery and airstrikes, but the rest of the data is all airstrikes only.
I see.
And then, just like with Iraq body count, this is an attempt to do a specific count of dead individual people from all of these various strikes, 91,340 strikes over the length of the terror war so far, correct?
Yeah.
So I mean, essentially the principle was that we felt it was very likely that in the conversations around 20 years since of these forever wars, the conversation would focus around the cost, the trillions of dollars, and it would focus around 7,000, more than 7,000 U.S. service people killed.
But we really wanted to bring the focus back to the civilians as well who have lost their lives at the direct hands of U.S. actions.
So obviously there are much bigger estimates for civilian deaths in all of these conflicts, which is somewhere around 360,000, according to Brown University.
What we wanted to do was try and work out just from U.S. strikes only, how many of those were responsible, how many of the U.S. killed in those wars.
Well, and those numbers from the Cost of War Project also are lowball estimates, too, where they're essentially being very careful trying to count individual reports of deaths rather than, say, for example, taking the excess death rate from before the war, say, Iraq War II, and then comparing that to the death rate during the war.
It was found by 2004, October 2004, that 100,000 people had already been killed in the war.
And then, you know, something like 650,000, I think, by 2007.
And there have been various other estimates where if you include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria, and I'm not sure why there's this Doctors' Association, their estimate was above 1 million killed.
And so then that would include, like, killed by all sides in the war, in Iraq War II, for example, where the Civil War was absolutely out of control for like three and a half years straight.
And then in the war in Syria, for example, too.
There's a lot of killing going on besides in airstrikes.
And you know, there are various estimates there have it that something like 500,000 people died.
But that wasn't an American invasion.
That was just a CIA operation in cooperation with our allies to support certain armed groups against the state there.
And so, you know, you ask me, all those deaths, every one of them is on Barack Obama and his government for causing that war in the first place.
But that kind of count is not going to make it into your study here or into the cost of war study there, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, we can argue about what exactly happened in Syria, but, you know, we were trying to look very specifically at, you know, a very conservative estimate of direct civilian harm caused by the United States.
And you know, I think most Americans would understand that if you are killed in a direct U.S. strike, that, you know, that the U.S. is responsible, whereas, you know, you many Americans may say, OK, well, it's not my fault if the Islamic State blows up a market in Iraq.
Now, we would we might argue that, you know, because the reason why the Islamic State was able to to to predominate and become powerful in Iraq was due to the invasion and then the chaos, you know, the subsequent vacuum.
But that's an indirect thing.
What we were looking at is very specifically direct civilian harm caused by the United States strikes.
And I'm just belaboring the point here because I don't want anyone to think that you're trying to play down the numbers or anything like that.
It's just the direct approach you're taking is very direct.
It's not the same as trying to count excess death rates and things like that.
That's an entirely different kind of attempted science here.
So in other words, you're going into this with this is all I can prove to you.
So it must be a lowball estimate, you know, on the face of it.
Correct.
And yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, some of our data sets, you know, we don't we as an organization don't track Afghanistan.
So we were using the data from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.
So UNAMA.
Now, UNAMA has a very different methodology to other organizations.
So, you know, we personally at Airwars might believe that they essentially what they do is that they can they they include data where they have been able to go and verify it, which enables more accuracy in, you know, they can prove in exactly this location that they had a field of research and a number of civilians killed in this particular incident was exactly this.
And that often leads to criticism that they miss events and that, you know, they're not doing all source monitoring.
And there are parts of Afghanistan, you know, where where the civilian harm is just not tracked.
So, you know, we we would definitely say that, you know, the certainly the 22,679 figure is probably a lowball estimate, you know, but that was the aim was to really bring back as much certainty as we could.
But with all the necessary caveats that we don't know for certain, we don't know exactly, you know, and we do think that particularly the early years of Iraq and Afghanistan, the numbers may well be significantly lower than they were in actuality, because civilian harm monitoring was not very advanced.
It was very early days.
The Internet that was not local, local communities were not able to report in the same way.
There wasn't social media, there wasn't ways for people to express, you know, the civilian harm within their family or, you know, if they had a cousin killed, they couldn't post about it on Facebook, which would etc.
So so there's lots of reasons to believe these numbers may be lowball estimates, but that's those are the numbers that we reached.
Right.
And it's worth mentioning, too, that, you know, compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is New York City or something like that.
I mean, the countryside out in Afghanistan, you got people who, you know, have never traveled more than 20 miles in their life, have never seen a city before, don't know anything about even their own country and are so isolated out there in this massive country.
It's the size of Texas, which is huge if you haven't been to Texas.
And so I think there's probably every reason to believe that the majority of civilians killed in airstrikes in Afghanistan were never reported to anyone because who is there to report to?
There's no AP bureau in the Helmand province, you know, to take the testimonies of farmers and things.
I'm sure you saw this piece by Anand Gopal in The New Yorker.
I was actually just yeah, I was just going to bring that up.
Yeah.
It's a brilliant piece.
And from our methodological stuff, it raises some really interesting stuff, because as you said, he does a straw poll of I think it's eight or 10 or 12 families in Helmand and finds that on average, each of them has lost 10 to 12 family members in the conflict.
And this is something that our friends at Iraq Body Count have documented previously is that actually, if you look at civilian harm, we as Westerners, particularly folk often end up focusing around the instance when lots of civilians were killed, when dozens of civilians were killed.
Right.
The worst civilian harm happens when one or two people, you know, the vast majority of civilian harm happens when one or two people are killed.
And it almost is never tracked.
It almost is never documented.
And that was something I agree with you that Anand Gopal's brilliant piece captured.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, for people who haven't seen that, it's called The Other Afghan Women in The New Yorker.
And I'm trying to get Anand back on the show.
I haven't talked to him in a few years, but he's, of course, the author of No Good Men Among the Living and has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan.
And there's just this one section of the article where he says, yeah, Jimmy was out, you know, planting poppies and got bombed by a drone.
And Joey was walking down the street and got bombed by the drone.
And Grandpa Jack was out there, you know, with his granddaughter.
They got bombed by a drone.
And it just goes on down the list.
I'm making up the names.
It goes on down the list of innocent civilians.
And see, what's interesting, too, from this point of view is just a day or two before that, I interviewed this guy, Jack Murphy, who's a former Green Beret turned journalist and who wrote this thing for ConnectingVets.org all about the Trump era drone war in the Helmand province.
And I don't know if you saw this, but what had happened, according to his reporting here, and he had a ton of sources and stuff, was that in Iraq War Three against ISIS, the rules of engagement were far looser than they had been in Afghanistan, even though we know the rules of engagement in Afghanistan was anybody you kill, you call them an enemy killed in action and then move on with your life anyway.
But what happened was they took these much looser rules from Iraq War Two, and they kind of imported them to Afghanistan to the war against the Taliban.
So even while there was a ceasefire during the negotiations, that was only ground combat.
And airstrikes continued essentially the whole time through the Trump era there.
And then Murphy got, you know, all kinds of quotes and sourcing from the guys actually doing the strikes who talked about, you know, anybody with anything that looks like it might be an antenna is a dead man.
You know, and this kind of thing where the rules of engagement are just stretched so broad and you have the lowest possible level officers under the law authorizing the strikes.
And so we already knew that from, you know, the legal end reporting and from the overall casualties in Afghanistan and the rate going up from airstrikes over the past couple of years.
But then here was it the same story told from the point of view of the guys flying the drones.
And just a few days later, Anand Gopal from the point of view of the people down in the Helmand province getting bombed by those drones.
And it's just, you know, from their point of view, absolutely relentless, ultra violence coming in, just absolutely destroying their lives and families and communities in ways that as we're talking about, go completely unreported.
You know, who knew the people of Helmand province, you know, weren't being won over their hearts and minds to the American project there that they resented being killed so often, you know?
Yeah.
And I think it does capture the, I think you call it relentless, but in a way I think that's such a good phrasing because it is that kind of, you know, it's not that somebody is shooting you every single day.
It's the possibility that it could happen any day that really, you know, the one of your cousins was out in the field, he goes out in the field 200 times and then the 200th time is hit by a strike and killed.
That is what changes behavior and that's what changes civilian populations in a way and changes their understanding and, you know, makes it almost impossible to, you know, what I think that piece captures so well is the folly of American attempts, particularly I'm talking about American attempts, but you know, you could use other nationalities, but it's the folly of attempts to win hearts and minds militarily.
And, you know, this is something that you've seen in multiple locations.
And, you know, in Afghanistan, it fundamentally never really succeeded.
And there was no military strategy that was going to be enabled to do that.
And I think it was, yeah, I think it's really captured that phenomena and where where we believe, you know, that both airstrikes and occupations are not are blunt, can be blunt tools to try and achieve the aims of a particular military organization.
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Yeah, I think a big part of the problem is, right, is all the lingo here.
Just like with intelligence, make it sound like, oh yeah, sure.
Every bit of information that you have makes you smart, right?
It might not be right at all.
It's just information.
You call it intelligence and you build in this giant bias toward how correct it all must be.
And, you know, they do the same kind of thing with, you know, hunting militants or whatever it is.
They change the language and make it all seem like, you know, whoever they kill are guilty.
We mentioned from the Daniel Hale leak, the drone papers there about how anyone they kill is EKIA.
And then if someone does an investigation and proves after the fact that they were actually innocent, then they'll update the records.
But since they never do that, they never investigate.
They just get to hold their own record.
As John Brennan once claimed, we haven't killed any civilians at all.
All right.
We don't count anyone that we kill as a civilian.
It's really easy.
Anyway, yeah, and I would just say that also, you know, even with the best intelligence and, you know, reconnaissance that you have in the world, you know, quite a lot of the time they will monitor a site for 48 hours, 72 hours before hitting it.
And then they will say, well, we didn't see any movement from that in that 72 hours.
So we assumed that there were no civilians.
I mean, if you're in the middle of an active conflict zone, people hide in their homes.
Right.
And, you know, they often are sleeping in bunkers downstairs.
Right.
And so it is a it's a common refrain that, you know, you find people who you find people, you know, the United States will say we did or the Western military will say we did 24 hours, 48 hours of reconnaissance on this particular target before striking it and saw no signs of life.
Now, that doesn't mean that there are no signs of life.
And that's a very common refrain that we come back to.
Yeah.
Well, that was, you know, famously they bombed a supposedly a Haqqani Network house, I think, in Pakistan and killed American hostages there and said, oh, man, we've been monitoring that house for a very long time and saw no evidence of hostages being held there.
Well, they're locked up inside, you know, just as you're saying.
Yeah.
You hadn't seen them come and go because they weren't coming and going.
They were prisoners.
And, you know, anyway.
All right.
So to try to zoom back out here, you mentioned that, as they say now, in 80 countries across the globe, it'd be nice if I could speak English.
In 80 countries across the globe, they have some kind of special operations going on.
I think probably most of that is training, but, you know, possibly advising and assisting special operators from other countries going on missions against their own people.
Who may or may not claim to be associated with ISIS or al-Qaeda.
I mean, just how broad are they define this?
I mean, I notice in here, for example, you don't characterize the war against Qaddafi as part of the war on terrorism.
You don't count that.
You only count when they're going after al-Qaeda or ISIS guys there at later times.
So it can be hard when they bait and switch all the time.
You know, the American people might have thought the war against Qaddafi had something to do with terrorism.
You know, it's a Muslim country over there somewhere, that kind of thing.
It was in the same era as the other Middle Eastern wars that were being fought in the name of killing bin Laden's men, you know, that kind of thing.
But I wonder how you define that, how broadly you define that.
Hunting Joseph Kony doesn't count, right?
No, I mean, we did have active conversations about particular, I mean, that's a particular one you've hit on there is an interesting conversation.
And, you know, it was within this kind of Arab Spring narrative of 2011.
And, you know, it wasn't primarily led by the Americans as well.
If you remember, the Americans were leading from behind was the language that Obama used.
But, you know, the French were really pushing for that war and it wasn't framed in that way.
But I think another analysis could have included it.
I don't think it's, you know, we we kind of came to the conclusion that we didn't think it was, you know, it wasn't really seen as part of the class, classical war on terror.
But I mean, the other thing I would say is, you know, it's written in the piece.
I hadn't read the George W.
Bush speech for a few years, and I'd kind of forgotten how, you know, the ones relatively straight a few weeks after 9-11, I'd forgotten how much he lays out what was to come to pass, you know, where he talks about our war will not end until every terrorist of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any we have ever seen.
It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations, success, secret, even in success.
And then the real kicker for me is just like every nation in every region now has a decision to make.
Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists.
And, you know, obviously we can we remember 9-11 and the days and weeks after it and how how, you know, I'm obviously British, but you know how Americans were scared and felt threatened in a way that perhaps they'd never felt before.
And it is interesting that, you know, at that time, Bush enjoyed near universal support for that language and for that speech.
That speech was one of the most welcomed speeches.
And, you know, and it was only really a couple of years later with Iraq that you started to have European nations criticising it and saying that this is not a feasible strategy, not Britain, I should point out.
But it is interesting just to look back and to realise that, you know, it was almost put in motion very quickly after 9-11, you know, and if 9-11 had been discovered through intelligence mechanisms and had not happened, then this 20 year war on terror would not have happened.
So these these deaths are direct response to 9-11 and the atrocity of 9-11.
Yeah, or, you know, at least they're based on the decision to exploit the American people's fear to cynically get away with launching all these other extracurricular activities.
You know, Gary Bernson, who was the second CIA commander on scene at Tora Bora, who it wasn't his fault, they basically forced him to let bin Laden go or wouldn't allow him or his Delta Force counterparts to finish the job there.
He told Michael Hirsch back in 2016 and General Zinni, who had been the commander of Central Command under Bill Clinton, also told Michael Hirsch that, yeah, the whole war could have been over by the end of 2001.
Imagine a global war to fight 400 men.
And by, you know, terrorist groups of global reach, we mean the secular, atheistic governments of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, you know, the latter two of which were extremely cooperative with the war against al-Qaeda dating back to the 1990s when, you know, Gaddafi was the first guy to put an interpol arrest out for Osama bin Laden in 1996 after the MI6 was using the LIFG to try to assassinate him.
But anyway, and this goes back to your data sets here.
Like, it's pretty hard, right?
Like, you've got to count the war against AQAP in Yemen from, you know, essentially 2009.
I know Bush had a few, a couple of drone strikes there in Yemen, but Obama really got the drone war going in 2009.
But then he almost entirely called off the war against AQAP when he switched sides in that war.
And it's been fighting for AQAP against the Houthis since, and that includes all through the Trump years, since 2015.
And so you can't count any of that.
And that's also leading from behind where it's American jets sold to Saudi princelings who are dropping bombs on civilian targets for, you know, six and a half years straight.
But that can't make your data set either because it doesn't count because it's the war for terrorism.
Yeah, again, you know, we can disagree on some of the politics there, but yeah, we would not include that in the sense of, you know, as I said, if at all possible, we were looking at direct civilian harm.
Now, the support for the Saudis and, you know, as you said, as you correctly identified, the Saudis would not be able to continue this campaign without some U.S. support, certainly not in the early years and probably now.
So, you know, if you were to start looking at indirect civilian harm, then that was certainly a conversation you could have.
It's just we were looking at a very specific, you know, substrata of civilian harm.
And, you know, doing our best to identify this, knowing that it's an imprecise, you know, mechanism, you know, knowing all of these things.
And also, as we say in the piece, knowing that there are no U.S. estimates for this, right?
There are no publicly released U.S. estimates for these figures, for how many civilians that they accept have been killed.
You know, they have improved in recent years, but in the early years of the war, we really had, you know, the early years, Afghanistan and Iraq, I would refer you to the British Chilcot Report, which says that Tony Blair informed, was telling people in the days before the Iraq war, the estimates for civilian harm would be in the low hundreds.
And, you know, and we all know how that ended up, right?
So there really was no mechanism for monitoring civilian harm in the early years of Afghanistan and or Iraq.
And the U.S. has never, as far as we know, published and made available their assessment for how much civilian harm they have caused.
Now, in the Iraq war logs, there was something in the Iraq war logs where they admitted that there were 15,000 more civilians killed than they had admitted so far.
But I don't guess they had the entire kind of background research, right?
They just had sort of one paper that referred to that.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I believe so.
And I'd have to double check on exactly what I remember the thing that it's a while back, but yeah, that the whether that was civilian harm, direct civilian harm or indirect without more civilians killed as a result of the war, et cetera.
You know, as you said at the beginning, there are many ways that you could do this.
You could look at how many civilians, you know, as John Hopkins, I believe, did and found hundreds of thousands of people had died.
If you do an assessment of take a certain sample size of family, how many how many people is each family lost and then extrapolate that to the Iraqi population at large.
That's very, very different to what we're trying to do.
And, you know, all of these different methodologies, we don't say that one is right or one is wrong.
And, you know, they're doing slightly different things to try and understand different phenomena.
And, you know, really what we were trying to do is just trying to make sure that the civilian impact of U.S. strikes and 20 years of U.S. actions was not forgotten in conversations around, you know, 20 years of forever wars.
Right.
I just found the piece from the Iraq war logs.
It's not all airstrikes, of course.
It includes, you know, all kinds of, you know, violent deaths in the Iraq war there.
And The Guardian has a piece all about it from October 2010.
But yeah, no, listen, I really appreciate the work that you guys are doing here.
And Chris Woods is still part of the group, right?
He's the boss.
He's my boss.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
I just hadn't talked to him a little while.
I want to make sure he didn't float away and start another project somewhere.
No, no, Chris is still the director and leading us strongly forward.
So so I head the investigations team.
Chris is the director.
Dimitri is the deputy director.
And now we have a new head of research called Emily.
Great.
All right.
Well, listen, you guys are doing really important work here.
And I urge everybody to check it out.
I think we ran a big piece about it, or at least we ran the main piece at antiwar.com the other day.
It's airwars.org.
And the piece is titled Tens of Thousands of Civilians Likely Killed by U.S. in Forever Wars.
Thanks, Joe.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much for time.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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