April 08, 2015
"ICH" - "MEE" - Last month, the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social
Responsibility (PRS) released a landmark study concluding
that the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks
is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.
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.
Nafeez
Ahmed PhD is an investigative journalist, international security
scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the 'crisis of
civilization.' He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding
Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of
global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and
conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald,
The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New
Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the
root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially
contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
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