Recounting the Dead: An Analysis of ISAF Caused Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan

• Author: Neil Shortland,Elias Nader,Huseyin Sari
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17737737
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Armed Forces & Society
2019, Vol. 45(1) 122-139
Recounting the Dead:
ª The Author(s) 2017
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An Analysis of ISAF
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17737737
journals.sagepub.com/home/afs
Caused Civilian Casualties
in Afghanistan
Neil Shortland1, Huseyin Sari1 and Elias Nader1
Abstract
In wars fought against insurgents, civilian casualties present the challenging dilemma of
balancing security and stability while targeting insurgents who operate within the civilian
population. In Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has made
minimizing civilian casualties a top-tier strategic issue. Yet beyond annual reports, there
has been a lack of data-driven analysis into the number of civilians killed by ISAF
operations. This research investigates ISAF-caused civilian casualties between 2010 and
2013, incorporating civilian casualty events to investigate changes in ISAF “lethality.”
This analysis finds that although ISAF-caused civilian casualties decreased overall, this
was mitigated by the tactic employed (airpower vs. on the ground operations). The
implications of this analysis for theories of military adaptation, future population-centric
operations, and current military operations (e.g., in Iraq and Syria) are discussed.
Keywords
military adaptation, counterinsurgency, tactical change, civilian casualties,
Afghanistan
1 Center for Terrorism and Security Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Neil Shortland, Center for Terrorism and Security Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 113
Wilder Street, Room 433, Lowell, MA 01852, USA.
Email: neil_shortland@uml.edu

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Shortland et al.
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What is it that we don’t understand? We are going to lose this fucking war if we don’t
stop killing civilians.
General Stanley McChrystal (2008)
In his 2009 report on military progress in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrys-
tal (2009), the then Commander of the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan, concluded
that there was an urgent need for a significant change in the operations of the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). A central tenet of this need for
change was that ISAF-caused civilian casualties were eroding ISAFs credibility
among the local population, and in turn, significantly bolstering the Taliban’s stra-
tegic goals. When General McChrystal took over as the commander of ISAF
(COMISAF), he implemented a series of strategic and tactical realignments and
adaptations focused on minimizing civilian casualties, including implementing more
restrictive rules of engagement, increasing cohesion of civilian and military efforts,
building up the Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF), and emphasizing
nonkinetic activities.1 The goal was not to eliminate kinetic operations (ISAF oper-
ations were concurrently moving into the highly contested areas of Kandahar and
Helmand) but to ensure that kinetic activities were deployed in a counterinsurgency
(COIN)-centric manner. The civilian population is the ultimate prize in COIN
operations (Catignani, 2012).
Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan
Civilian casualties are potentially the most salient, visible, and systematic measure of a
war’s cost (Asthappan, 2016). As a result, in war, observers pay special attention to
casualties and attempt to estimate their future direction to make decisions regarding
support for war (Gartner & Segura, 1998; Gartner, Segura, & Barratt, 2004). Civilian
casualties enrage the local population, encourage insurgent recruitment, and are
highly damaging to coalition efforts in Afghanistan (see Bordin 2011). Condra, Felter,
Iyengar, and Shapiro (2010), using civilian casualty and “significant activity”
(SIGACT) data from Iraq and Afghanistan, identified a “revenge effect,” finding that
for every ISAF-caused incident that caused two civilian casualties (within an average-
sized Afghan district), there was one more insurgent attack over the next 6 weeks.
Furthermore, not only do ISAF-caused civilian casualties have a highly detrimental
effect on the populations’ perception of ISAF, but this is also subject to an in-group
distortion effect. The ISAF-caused civilian casualties result in decreased support for
ISAF, yet this punitive perception is not transferred to the Taliban when they cause
civilian casualties (Lyall, Blair, & Imai, 2013). This reinforces the importance of
minimizing ISAF-caused civilian casualties even though insurgent groups are known
to cause over 80% of total civilian casualties (Shortland & Bohannon, 2014).
Reducing civilian casualties is both a moral and strategic issue, but it also presents a
dilemma as stability requires security, and security requires the targeting of insurgents
who are often operating within and around the civilian population (Jones, 2008, p. l;

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124
Armed Forces & Society 45(1)
United Nations Assistance Mission Afghanistan [UNAMA], 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011,
2012, 2013). Thus, in ensuring security, a degree of civilian casualties is inevitable.
Military forces must therefore find the balance, because too much force runs the risk of
turning neutrals into enemies and replenishing the ranks of the insurgency, while too
little force allows insurgent groups time and space to rebuild, train, and recruit
(McChrystal & Stanley, 2009). This balance between achieving military goals and
maintaining civilian safety has also been referred to as the “annihilation–restraint
paradox,” in which there is a commitment to the “overwhelming but lawful use of
force” while complying with noncombatant immunity (the view that noncombatants
should not be harmed or targeted during war; Kahl, 2007).
Early ISAF operations were not striking this balance well, and as ISAF com-
mander McChrystal noted that ISAF “had shot an amazing number of people, but
to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat” (Oppel, 2010). To redress
this issue, a series of strategic adaptations occurred, including establishing a civil-
ian casualty tracking cell (CCTC; which became the Civilian Casualty Mitigation
Team or CCMT in 2011) to learn and respond to tactical events that results in
civilian harm. The CCMT allowed ISAF to learn from civilian casualty events and
improve as a force (Bohannon, 2011). Prior to the CCMT, neither ISAF nor
UNAMA had the procedures or systems to address civilian casualties in Afghani-
stan. The CCMT then expanded this role from data collection to monitoring and
outreach as well as filtering lessons learned back into predeployment training
(Civilians in Conflict, 2014). At the same time, General McChrystal also identified
the role of ISAF air strikes and issued tactical directives aimed at limiting their use.
Escalation of force (EOF) was also identified as a cause of civilian casualties and
new directives were issued to avoid the need for soldiers to fire their weapons in
situations of an oncoming vehicle. There is preliminary evidence of the success of
these adaptations in that civilian casualties caused by air-to-ground engagements
have decreased since 2010 (Chaudhuri & Farrell, 2011) and the number of civilian
casualties caused by EOF dropped by 50% after these directives were issued
(Bohannon, 2011).
Even the top military brass in ISAF, at times, struggled to find the balance that
mitigates the civilian casualties but does not decrease the military’s firepower
against the insurgents (Kaplan, 2014). Once in command, General Petraeus issued
a tactical directive that while emphasizing the need to “reduce the loss of innocent
civilian life to an absolute minimum” (noting that “every Afghan civilian death
diminishes our cause”) emphasized the need to balance efforts to mitigate harm to
civilians with the “obligation to protect [ISAF] troops.” This tactical directive,
therefore, aimed to rebalance the scales of civilian casualties and force protection
because “it is a moral imperative both to protect Afghan civilians and to bring all
assets to bear to protect our men and women in uniform” (Petraeus, 2010, p. 1).
In Nagl’s (2013, 199) view, “McChrystal’s guidance had limited the ability of
American units to call in air support or artillery fire even when they were under
enemy fire but Petraeus restored firepower to its proper place.”

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Shortland et al.
125
This Study
Through annual reports of civilian casualties (e.g., UNAMA, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012,
2013, 2014), we know that ISAF-caused civilian casualties have decreased, and
insurgent-caused civilian casualties have increased. In this article, using new data
released from ISAF through Science, we provide a detailed examination of ISAF-
caused civilian casualties throughout the latter years of the war. Furthermore, by
integrating civilian casualty “events”—the number of ISAF operations that resulted
in any civilian killed or injured—and the number of civilian casualties caused, we also
present the first analysis of ISAF “lethality” toward the civilian population.
This research provides a data-driven examination of ISAF as an adaptive orga-
nization in Afghanistan. Research has often discussed the need for militaries to adapt
to optimize their operations in war (Rosen 1991), and work has recently begun to
document ISAF’s adaptation in Afghanistan (see Farrell, Osinga, & Russell, 2013).
While these works detail the tactical and strategic adaptations employed by ISAF
forces in Afghanistan, what they often lack is a quantifiable measure of effect. Thus,
while scholars often view that ISAF has adapted (e.g., Farrell, 2010), little analysis
exists of whether these adaptations...