Certainty

Afghanistan.  2011

Benjamin Franklin once famously said "nothing is certain, except death and taxes".  Yet another great man who never knew Afghanistan. 

On Monday, a UK Apache attack helicopter, firing 30mm cannon on an insurgent on a motorbike, hit 5 boys playing in a field.  On Thursday, a French soldier opened fire on a car in Kapisa, killing three Afghan civilians including a woman and a child.  Also on Thursday, a 9 year old boy called Ibrahim was strangled, his body left in a ditch, because his police officer father refused to give the Taliban his police car.  On Friday, 16 civilians were killed in a roadside bomb blast in Helmand. 22 more were killed, mostly women and children, in a series of linked suicide attacks in Uruzgan.   

Depressing as this all sounds, it gets worse.  Civilian casualties are at an historic high, with recently released UN figures showing Afghanistan suffered 1,462 civilian deaths from January to June, a 15% increase on the same period last year.  It is stressed that 80% of all these deaths were caused by insurgents, with 14% caused by ISAF and 6% "unattributed".  May 2011 saw the most deaths of any month since the UN began recording civilian casualties in 2007, while June 2011 saw the most casualties recorded by improvised explosive devices.   Over the same 6 month period, suicide attacks have caused 52% more casualties during the first half of 2011 than the same period in 2010. All these figures are, of course, unverifiable.  They are a "best guess".  All these figures also form the backdrop for the handover of responsibility for security, from ISAF to the Afghans.  Things must be getting better...

We have no idea of the numbers of insurgents killed in Afghanistan.  NATO policy is not to deal in an enemy body-count as a "metric of progress".  NATO also believes the number of insurgent deaths or injuries "does not equal success" in a counter-insurgency campaign, the main stated aim of which is now to protect the Afghan people. Conservative estimates however place the number at around 5000 a year.  NATO and its individual coalition partners do, however, release news of each ISAF nation's own military fatalities to each nation's media - hence the continuous reporting stream of NATO casualties of which you are all well aware.

Given the woeful lack of any government structure in most of this country, it seems Mr Franklin was wrong.  In Afghanistan, only one thing is certain.