The 97-page report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors’ group is
the first to tally up the total number of civilian casualties from
US-led counter-terrorism interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
The PSR report is authored by an interdisciplinary team of leading
public health experts, including Dr. Robert Gould, director of health
professional outreach and education at the University of California San
Francisco Medical Center, and Professor Tim Takaro of the Faculty of
Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.
Yet it has been almost completely blacked out by the English-language
media, despite being the first effort by a world-leading public health
organisation to produce a scientifically robust calculation of the
number of people killed by the US-UK-led “war on terror”.
Mind the gaps
The PSR report is described by Dr Hans von Sponeck, former UN
assistant secretary-general, as “a significant contribution to narrowing
the gap between reliable estimates of victims of war, especially
civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and tendentious, manipulated
or even fraudulent accounts”.
The report conducts a critical review of previous death toll
estimates of “war on terror” casualties. It is heavily critical of the
figure most widely cited by mainstream media as authoritative, namely,
the Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate of 110,000 dead. That figure is
derived from collating media reports of civilian killings, but the PSR
report identifies serious gaps and methodological problems in this
approach.
For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.
Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance,
IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number
of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again,
the gap here is by a factor of 40.
According to the PSR study, the much-disputed Lancet study that
estimated 655,000 Iraq deaths up to 2006 (and over a million until today
by extrapolation) was likely to be far more accurate than IBC’s
figures. In fact, the report confirms a virtual consensus among
epidemiologists on the reliability of the Lancet study.
Despite some legitimate criticisms, the statistical methodology it
applied is the universally recognised standard to determine deaths from
conflict zones, used by international agencies and governments.
Politicised denial
PSR also reviewed the methodology and design of other studies showing
a lower death toll, such as a paper in the New England Journal of
Medicine, which had a range of serious limitations.
That paper ignored the areas subject to the heaviest violence, namely
Baghdad, Anbar and Nineveh, relying on flawed IBC data to extrapolate
for those regions. It also imposed “politically-motivated restrictions”
on collection and analysis of the data – interviews were conducted by
the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which was “totally dependent on the
occupying power” and had refused to release data on Iraqi registered
deaths under US pressure.
In particular, PSR assessed the claims of Michael Spaget, John
Sloboda and others who questioned the Lancet study data collection
methods as potentially fraudulent. All such claims, PSR found, were
spurious.
The few “justified criticisms,” PSR concludes, “do not call into
question the results of the Lancet studies as a whole. These figures
still represent the best estimates that are currently available”. The
Lancet findings are also corroborated by the data from a new study in
PLOS Medicine, finding 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the war. Overall, PSR
concludes that the most likely number for the civilian death toll in
Iraq since 2003 to date is about 1 million.
To this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and
80,000 in Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of
US-led war: a “conservative” total of 1.3 million. The real figure could
easily be “in excess of 2 million”.
Yet even the PSR study suffers from limitations. Firstly, the
post-9/11 “war on terror” was not new, but merely extended previous
interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Secondly, the huge paucity of data on Afghanistan meant the PSR study probably underestimated the Afghan death toll.
Iraq
The war on Iraq did not begin in 2003, but in 1991 with the first Gulf War, which was followed by the UN sanctions regime.
An early PSR study by Beth Daponte, then a US government Census
Bureau demographer, found that Iraq deaths caused by the direct and
indirect impact of the first Gulf War amounted to around 200,000 Iraqis,
mostly civilians. Meanwhile, her internal government study was
suppressed.
After US-led forces pulled out, the war on Iraq continued in economic
form through the US-UK imposed UN sanctions regime, on the pretext of
denying Saddam Hussein the materials necessary to make weapons of mass
destruction. Items banned from Iraq under this rationale included a vast
number of items needed for everyday life.
Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due
to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children.
The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN
sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national
water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)
document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business
at George Washington University amounted, he said, to “an early
blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq”.
In his paper for the Association of Genocide Scholars at the
University of Manitoba, Professor Nagi explained that the DIA document
revealed “minute details of a fully workable method to ‘fully degrade
the water treatment system’ of an entire nation” over a period of a
decade. The sanctions policy would create “the conditions for widespread
disease, including full scale epidemics,” thus “liquidating a
significant portion of the population of Iraq”.
This means that in Iraq alone, the US-led war from 1991 to 2003
killed 1.9 million Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million:
totalling just under 3 million Iraqis dead over two decades.
Afghanistan
In Afghanistan, PSR’s estimate of overall casualties could also be
very conservative. Six months after the 2001 bombing campaign, The
Guardian’s Jonathan Steele revealed that anywhere between 1,300 and
8,000 Afghans were killed directly, and as many as a further 50,000
people died avoidably as an indirect result of the war.
In his book, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950
(2007), Professor Gideon Polya applied the same methodology used by The
Guardian to UN Population Division annual mortality data to calculate
plausible figures for excess deaths. A retired biochemist at La Trobe
University in Melbourne, Polya concludes that total avoidable Afghan
deaths since 2001 under ongoing war and occupation-imposed deprivation
amount to around 3 million people, about 900,000 of whom are infants
under five.
Although Professor Polya’s findings are not published in an academic
journal, his 2007 Body Count study has been recommended by California
State University sociologist Professor Jacqueline Carrigan as “a
data-rich profile of the global mortality situation” in a review
published by the Routledge journal, Socialism and Democracy.
As with Iraq, US intervention in Afghanistan began long before 9/11
in the form of covert military, logistical and financial aid to the
Taliban from around 1992 onwards. This US assistance propelled the
Taliban’s violent conquest of nearly 90 percent of Afghan territory.
In a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report, Forced Migration and
Mortality, leading epidemiologist Steven Hansch, a director of Relief
International, noted that total excess mortality in Afghanistan due to
the indirect impacts of war through the 1990s could be anywhere between
200,000 and 2 million. The Soviet Union, of course, also bore
responsibility for its role in devastating civilian infrastructure, thus
paving the way for these deaths.
Altogether, this suggests that the total Afghan death toll due to the
direct and indirect impacts of US-led intervention since the early
nineties until now could be as high 3-5 million.
Denial
According to the figures explored here, total deaths from Western
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s – from direct
killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation – likely
constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2
million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as 6-8 million
people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in
Afghanistan.
Such figures could well be too high, but will never know for sure. US
and UK armed forces, as a matter of policy, refuse to keep track of the
civilian death toll of military operations – they are an irrelevant
inconvenience.
Due to the severe lack of data in Iraq, almost complete non-existence
of records in Afghanistan, and the indifference of Western governments
to civilian deaths, it is literally impossible to determine the true
extent of loss of life.
In the absence of even the possibility of corroboration, these
figures provide plausible estimates based on applying standard
statistical methodology to the best, if scarce, evidence available. They
give an indication of the scale of the destruction, if not the precise
detail.
Much of this death has been justified in the context of fighting
tyranny and terrorism. Yet thanks to the silence of the wider media,
most people have no idea of the true scale of protracted terror wrought
in their name by US and UK tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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