Stardate 20020211.1231

(On Screen): Laura King, of the AP, seems to have decided that it was important to clear the air on the issue of Afghan civilian casualties. She makes the point that we still don't even know exactly how many people died in New York, so an exact number for Afghan civilian casualties from the American bombing may well never be known.

That said, there was a deliberate effort by the Taliban to distort and exaggerate the number of civilian dead during the bombing in an attempt to shame the US into stopping it (which was evident at the time, but is now documented).

Mohammed Ismail – then a Bakhtar reporter, promoted to acting director after the Taliban fled – told AP that in one typical instance, he went to the scene of an airstrike in Kabul's Khair Khana neighborhood on Oct. 20 and saw eight bodies.

"But it was changed in our dispatch to 20," he said. When he heard the report later on Taliban-run radio, the figure had gone up to 30, he said.

Bakhtar journalists also said they were ordered to report military deaths as civilian ones. Reporter Younis Mihireen recalled a direct hit on a Taliban and al-Qaida housing complex in the west of the city in late October, in which about 60 fighters were killed.

"I saw it with my own eyes – there were no civilians anywhere nearby, and I reported this," he said. "But the dispatch said all the dead people were civilians, not fighters."

Marc Herold's much-referenced (and much derided) study is mentioned and discounted. It's used as an example of a study which relies on these reports from the Taliban, and as a result of that gets much too high a figure.

The AP's number at this point is 500-600, certainly well below Herold's estimate. That figure is expected to rise in further investigation, but probably not by all that much.

All civilian casualties are regrettable. It would be nice if none were ever inflicted. But not even the US has yet developed a bomb which can read the minds of the people in the area and only kill the ones who harbor hostile thoughts while leaving the innocent untouched. The American bombing campaign of Afghanistan is remarkable not because of how many civilians died in it, but because of how few did. In those terms, it is easily the most successful major military campaign in history. There has never been a campaign where so many cities were taken while inflicting so few casualties on civilians.

The only way to not inflict any civilian casualties at all is to not attack. Which, I think, is the point that Herold's fans are trying to make, because that is what they really wanted. But while it is true that war, and civilian casualties, are bad it is also true that not fighting is sometimes even worse. I believe that this was such a case. Even if the bombing had actually killed the number that Herold claims, or if it had killed five times that number, it still would have been right.