Proving the obvious: Study shows civilian war deaths create enemies

If soldiers from another country come to your town and bomb your neighborhood and kill your friends and family, aren’t you going to hate them? So why is it any surprise that many of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan have learned to hate Americans in the last 10 years?

There’s a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that shows something simple and obvious. If U.S. forces in Afghanistan kill civilians — even if the deaths are accidental — the attacks on American and allied forces go up in the weeks and months to come. Is anybody surprised?

According to coverage from Wired magazine:

“When [U.S. and allied] units kill civilians,” the research team finds, “this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.” According to their model, every innocent civilian killed by [U.S. and allied forces] predicts an “additional 0.03 attacks per 1,000 population in the next six-week period.” In a district of 83,000 people, then, the average of two civilian casualties killed in [U.S. and allied]-initiated military action leads to six additional insurgent attacks in the following six weeks.

The study looks at the short-term and medium-term effects of such violence, but I’m even more concerned about the long-run effect. I’m concerned about the kids who are growing up watching family and friends die — because they’re the ones who are going to be angry and ripe for recruitment by groups offering a chance to retaliate against America in the future — maybe a decade or more from now.

Many Americans would indignantly say, “But they started it. They attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001. So they caused the problem. Not us.”

The truth is far more complex than that. We have a tit for tat going on now, but the roots of the problem run many decades back. Haven’t you wondered how people in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq came to hate westerners? And how they came to hate Americans?

The U.S. government has been interfering in those countries for longer than most people can remember. They were pawns in the struggle against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. American tax dollars have propped up cruel dictators in many countries. The Soviets did the same thing. In Afghanistan, for instance, Soviet troops invaded to prop up a communist government, so U.S. taxpayers pumped many millions of dollars in weapons to the terrorists fighting them. (Oh, wait. They’re terrorists when they fight us. They’re freedom fighters when they’re killing Russians or whoever our enemy of the day is.)

We’ve created our own problems by trying to control bits and pieces of the world. The administration of George W. Bush was famous for telling us that those who hate us over there “hate us for our freedoms,” but the truth is that they have hated us (and other foreigners) for decades because we interfered with their lives. And over the last 10 years, U.S. troops have been in their countries, killing civilians — sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident. Either way, it’s created new generations of people who hate us.

Most Americans woke up to the existence of these places on Sept. 11, 2001. They had pretty much ignored them before that. They didn’t know the history of the places or what their government had done there, so they just assumed there was no cause for the attack. The truth is that there’s a long cycle of reasons — back and forth.

The current military approach isn’t going to work, now or ever. The only thing that’s going to work is if we can agree to leave each other alone. We see their way of life and barbaric and evil — and they see our way of life as barbaric and evil, too. We need to agree to leave each other alone. The killing needs to stop.

There’s a 1991 song from a rock group called Daniel Amos that looks at what it’s like for children growing up in those countries where war is just part of the norm. For me, it’s an emotional reminder that our actions and reactions to one another are just creating more generations of people to hate each other. And remember that this song was recorded 10 years before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

It’s time for the violence to stop. It’s not leading to a future that any of us are going to want.

Father Explains
Daniel Amos

from the album “Kalhöun”
Words and music by Terry Taylor

His bare feet are calloused, he hikes up his pants
His mother says “Son you’re too young for the ranks”
We need food for our family not airplanes and tanks
And that’s where the moneys all gone

Eight brothers and sisters, but three of them died
Caught out in the marketplace with nowhere to hide
The boy thinks God may be over on the devil’s side
Where the line in the sand has been drawn

Father’s screaming now “Somebody put out the light
If God wills it now we’ll be in heaven tonight”
(Oh yeah) The bombs came down like steel rain
(Oh yeah) Hit the ground like steel rain
(Oh yeah) Nothing sounds like steel rain
“It’s our lot in life, son” his father explains

When the total of life has been suffering and hate
Death on the doorsteps and endless debate
Then God only knows how much blood it will take
Before someone makes right all the wrong

So bitter and hardened, too old for his age
The boy screams his madness, succumbs to his rage
Now he’s just another death on the bottom of the page
And that’s how the story goes on

Father’s screaming now “Somebody put out the light
If God wills it now we’ll be in heaven tonight”
(Oh yeah) The bombs came down like steel rain
(Oh yeah) Scarred the ground like steel rain
(Oh yeah) Nothing sounds like steel rain
“It’s our lot in life, daughter” her father explains