A friend suggests the winner of the war on terror may be judged by body count (and I don’t necessarily agree with this), so I’m curious to know how the the US is doing against Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban.
Pick, as a starting point, the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya/Tanzania, and add up all the deaths from terrorist acts and military engagements: 9/11, U.S. Cole, IED’s in Iraq and Afghanistan, suicide bombers, what-not.
From that same point on, add up all the deaths of Al Qaeda and the Taliban due to US military actions.
Problem: I’m struggling to find numbers for the latter category. Can anyone help?
While you are waiting, to add some sort of perspective, the 1100+ US soldier’s deaths so far in the “War On Terror*” equals 9 soldiers per week, whereas the deaths in WW2 were 4300 + per week!
If you’re going to go by body count, though, civilians are the obvious losers – at least tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, depending on which highly-politicized number you want to go by (and whether you count deaths by lack of infrastructure, services, and law).
I think determining how many “militants” and “Taliban” were killed, as opposed to civilians, is going to be next to impossible. In many cases, as Dexter Filkin points out in the Forever War, there’s no real difference. Entire towns will either attack or support attacks in some way on US troops, but when the troops come back later for revenge they find nothing but civilians.
So US-friendly sources are more likely to designate civilians as militants, and anti-US sources are more likely to do the reverse. Moreover there’s suspicions that a lot of the figures are simply made up. Bush’s former chief of high-value targeting in the White House has said that as long as fewer than 30 civilians would be killed as ‘collateral damage’ in a strike, the strike could be authorized by commanders on the ground; anything above that needed the direct approval of Rumsfeld or Bush.
Not surprisingly, a huge number of US air strikes seem to have killed exactly “30 suspected militants”. If we use a bit of common sense, that number could mean anything really: higher, lower… civilians, militants… it’s unlikely the commanders were even sure themselves.