Bureau Recommends: Afghan war becoming more deadly for civilians
The Bureau recommends an article by Science magazine analysing military data on civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan over the last two years, which reveals that the conflict is becoming more deadly for Afghan civilians.
In January this year, the International Security and Assistance Force (the international military coalition in Afghanistan) provided Science magazine with their database on civilian casualties, known as CIVCAS. According to the magazine’s analysis, 20% more civilians were killed in 2010 than in the previous year.
However, only 12% of civilian casualties contained in the database can be attributed to international forces, with the majority caused by indiscriminate attacks by Afghan militants. The magazine also found that ISAF is gradually posing less of a threat to civilians, with the majority of the recent surge in civilian deaths caused by militants and a 26% drop in the number of deaths caused by international military forces.
Furthermore, the analysis revealed a 93% correlation with the Afghan War Logs published last year by the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, suggesting a high degree of accuracy in the leaked data published by the website.
The team of analysts have also constructed an interactive 3D model of civilian casualty distribution, which can be found here (requires most recent versions of Safari, Firefox or Chrome to view).
