Newsday (New York, NY) October 9, 2001, Tuesday
Few Civilian Casualties Expected;
Military targets focus of attack
By Earl Lane
Washington - Some "collateral damage," the Pentagon's euphemism for civilian casualties, is almost inevitable during waves of air strikes, experts say, but the bombing campaign against Afghanistan seems designed to minimize such casualties.
"We are being extremely sensitive to the fact of collateral damage," Stephen Baker, a retired Navy rear admiral and senior fellow at the nonprofit Center for Defense Information, said yesterday. Pentagon officials have stressed that the strikes are aimed at military targets, such as airfields, early-warning radar and command centers for the Taliban regime, as well as Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist training camps.
"Every target was a military target," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday regarding the first wave of attacks on Sunday by the U.S. and Britain. There were additional strikes by U.S. planes yesterday. The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan said 20 civilians had been killed in the first day's attacks, but a regime health official later put the toll at eight. A senior defense official said he was unable to confirm or deny whether civilians had been hit in the attacks because the Pentagon had not yet received full battle damage assessment reports. The Pentagon also has not been able to say whether strikes against Taliban and al-Qaida troop concentrations resulted in casualties.
But this official said any reports from the Taliban must be viewed with deep suspicion, noting that Taliban claims of shooting down four U.S. aircraft turned out to be false. "I'm not saying there might not be a potential for inadvertent injuries or deaths, but that's clearly not what we're targeting," the official said.
Collateral damage is a touchy issue for the United States as it attempts to go after Osama bin Laden and his network in Afghanistan without further antagonizing Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere. In an unusual move aimed at helping prevent an anti-American backlash, the United States also is dropping food to refugees in Afghanistan.
But Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the food drops so far will not begin to replace the supplies from relief agencies that have been disrupted by the bombing campaign. "There are not going to be large numbers of casualties through direct collateral damage," O'Hanlon said. "The issue is how much is the basic infrastructure and the relief effort impeded by dropping bombs." That could lead, he said, to civilian deaths from disease or starvation as an indirect effect of the military action.
Baker said the United States and its allies likely will use supply drops to help create safe havens where civilian refugees and defectors from the Taliban regime can get access to food and other supplies.
There were notable examples of collateral damage in the 1991 Gulf War, with some bombs going astray and others targeted correctly but with unintended consequences (including scores of deaths at a bunker civilians had been using as an air raid shelter). In the Kosovo conflict, NATO forces mistakenly killed civilians during accidental air strikes against a vehicle convoy, a civilian bus on a bridge, a residential neighborhood in the Serbian city of Nis and a misidentified building in Belgrade that turned out to be the Chinese embassy.
But analysts said the Afghan campaign is likely to be different. There are relatively few "high value" military targets, they said, and so the current phase of the air war could be over rather quickly. "After this first wave of air strikes, it probably will not last very long," said Kim Holmes, head of international studies for the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank. "Many of the cities already are emptying. I just don't think it will be anywhere near what the collateral damage was during the Gulf War."
As the effort shifts to ground action by anti-Taliban militias and bands of allied special forces in search of Osama bin Laden, he said, additional air strikes are likely to be "very targeted."
The current air strikes are meant to disrupt the Taliban regime that has been harboring bin Laden, but U.S. officials are realistic about what such attacks will accomplish. "It's unlikely that the air strikes will rock the Taliban back on their heels," he said. "They have very few targets that are of high value that are manageable from the air."
During the Afghan operations, military officials said, the U.S. will use more "smart" weapons than in the past, particularly against targets near population centers. "In the Gulf War, about 10 percent of our munitions were what we call precision-guided munitions," Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said at a Pentagon briefing yesterday. "In Operation Allied Force [the Serbia-Kosovo conflict], about 90 percent of our munitions were guided munitions."
Moreover, military planners can rely on newer, satellite-guided bombs that are less susceptible to failure than laser-guided munitions, which can stray off course if the laser beam that designates the target is interrupted or deflected by clouds, smoke, fog or dust. The satellite-guided bomb, called the Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, was an all-weather workhorse during the Kosovo conflict, experts said, and also is much less expensive than laser-guided bombs and cruise missiles.
While he does not anticipate many civilian deaths from the current air strikes, John Pike, director of the nonprofit GlobalSecurity.org, said that could change as the focus shifts to air support in areas where it may be hard to discriminate between groups of refugees and bands of militia. "You start getting back to the Vietnam-era problem of figuring out who the Viet Cong are," Pike said. "That's what I'm worried about."
Craig Gordon of the Washington Bureau contributed to this story.
Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc.
