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Re violence in Afghanistan: I follow @nytimes's important Afghan war casualty report by @FatmaFaizi and @fahimabed. It offers weekly reports of confirmed significant security incidents with details of the incidents across Afghanistan. 1/n https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/afghan-war-casualty-reports
Reporting casualties in violence is exceedingly hard and the casualty report acknowledges some of the challenges up-front in all reports. So the reports only carry *confirmed* casualties, which makes the reporting a credible low-bound estimate.
The Afghan casualty report's latest tally suggests that since the February 2020 US-Taliban deal, 3386 pro-government forces and 1448 civilians have been killed. Recorded on this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BgztvasWtVQ8OXPxPywQnPUDW9isEZA9VjvFL3U_3gc/edit#gid=0
Related to this, UNAMA provides monthly violence against civilians on a quarterly basis. Its last available reporting is for the period ending September 2020, which found 2117 civilians killed from Jan to Sept 2020. Link to report: https://unama.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/unama_protection_of_civilians_in_armed_conflict_-_3rd_quarter_report_2020_revised_13dec_.pdf
What might UNAMA's civilian harm number come out to for the year 2020? If I add the Q4 Times' Afghan casualty report civilian killed number to UNAMA's Q1 to Q3 number, that comes out to 2630 civilians killed. This is a low-bound estimate.
For a higher estimate, if I take the multiple by which the UNAMA number is higher than NYT Q1 to Q3 reporting-- which is 2.22, multiply that with the Q4 Afghanistan casualty report and add to UNAMA, the 2020 number can be as high as ~ 3257. Lets see what UNAMA final report says.
Why does this matter? For one, the 2630-3257 range of civilian harm means that 2020 was among the worst years for Afghan civilians over the last decade despite the Doha deal between the US and the Taliban.
This is a failure of US policy, including the strategy of Amb Khalilzad. I realize the process has been and remains difficult. But the fact that it secured US personnel & failed to curb violence against civilians by even a little bit is tragic, indelible stain on the process.
Second, there is some spin that civilian harm is a "both sides" problem. It isn't. Afghan govt is bad at protecting civilians, culpable in serious harm (at times with US forces), but per UNAMA, the Taliban was responsible for the highest amount of civilian harm in 2020.
Civilian harm has to be non-negotiable, needs to end. US gov't & regional actors must clearly ask for & work towards a ceasefire as a priority. Taliban's line that ceasefire comes at the end or with progress in the process--which Pakistan is now publicly backing--is shameful. n/n
Addendum: The Afghanistan casualty report offers a way to track patterns of harm in one place; it has a lot of details on specific incidents, nature of the target, and casualties. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/world/asia/afghan-war-casualty-december-2020.html
