'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Monday 26 September 2011

Afghan body count

Bing West suggests in the current Foreign Affairs ("Groundhog Wars", September/October 2011) that Western military casualties to Afghan civilian casualties are in the ratio 1:2. This seems a surprising statistic and given FA don't footnote, I wonder how it was arrived at.

As it's Foreign Affairs, the statistics used would have been from a "reliable" source such as NATO or the UN, and indeed the UN recently released this suggesting that whilst civilian casualties were on the rise, the culprits were the insurgents. Air strikes were named as the leading cause of civilian deaths by Western forces, here euphemistically named "Pro-government forces".

Wikipedia has an excellent table on this here suggesting that the total number of Afghans killed as a direct result of US-led action is between 6250 and 9000 people.

From iCasualties, total Western troop force deaths in Afghanistan since the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom are cited as 2738.

Taking the lower boundary of civilian deaths fo 6250 against 2738 suggests a ratio of 1:2.3 which in the world of social science is pretty much exactly what Bing West calculated. The upper threshold suggests a ratio of 1:3.3.

Of course statistics can be argued over even when it's body counts especially when the nature of the insurgent and the civilian is relative. NATO has been constantly on the backfoot over civilian deaths and the neoTaliban have been adept at making the most of propaganda opportunities associated with this anti-humanitarianism.

See also:

Cost of war

Thursday 15 September 2011

The Great Dictator Speech




In 1940 Chaplin made a film satirizing Nazi Germany, in which the dictator Adenoid has an unlikely double, a Jewish barber. The end speech is extremely interesting, especially given the debate ongoing about the revolution in military affairs and cultural approaches to counterinsurgency. The film became Chaplin's highest ever grossing work, but the full horrors of the Jews' plight in Europe were not at that time known, a point which Chaplin concedes in his 1964 biography, made jokes still possible at that time.


Here is the full text from the final speech (courtesy of Reza Ganjavi): 


I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.


Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.


Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.


Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men---machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.


Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.


Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.


Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!


[Huge hurray from the huge crowd – scene changes to Hanna (Paulette Goddard) a refugee on the floor with eyes still in tears from having been beaten down by the Dictator’s soldiers. Romantic string music in the background. Hanna’s beautiful face and eyes are in awe as to how her Jewish barber friend who was imprisoned by the Dictator’s troops is not speaking as the Great Dictator!]


Hanna, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up Hanna! The clouds are lifting! The sun is breaking through! We are coming out of the darkness into the light! We are coming into a new world; a kind new world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed, and brutality. Look up, Hanna! The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow. Into the light of hope! Into the future! The glorious future! That belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up, Hanna! Look up!

Sunday 11 September 2011

Punditry from the Arab world on the tenth anniversary of 9.11

The world looks West this week on the tenth anniversary of 9.11 so it's interesting to look East.


Rahsa Sadek at Al-Ahram provides a good commentary on the Iranian position on Syria, noting that al-Husseini writing in the London-based Asharq al-Awsat (owned by the house of Saud) believes that, "Iran's fears are firstly, that the vital route through which Iran provides Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Palestinians -- particularly the Hamas movement -- with military and logistical supplies and funding will be blocked."


Only a week previous (Aug 30), Dick Cheney released his memoirs, perhaps to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9.11 and generate patriotic sales (a review here). Called in a 2005 Washington Post editorial, the "Vice President for Torture", his memoirs cast him once again into scrutiny into the Arab and Muslim worlds. The radical polemicist el-Khazen at the London-based Dar al-Hayat (owned by prominent members of the house of Saud) launches a diatribe: "this century will know no war criminal more contemptible than Dick Cheney. The terror of 11 September 2001 killed around 3,000 Americans, and the former US vice president was responsible for the deaths of 6,000 American soldiers, for oil and Israel, and the deaths of a million Arabs and Muslims."


And still the shadow of colonialism provides a very powerful resistance narrative for the NATO interventions and Western policy in the region. Also in al-Hayat, Zein writes that, "the talk of Western democratic values being brought to the Middle East "is no more than cover for the return of the colonisers to this region."


Jazeera English carries a front page dedicated to remembering 9.11 but the Arabic portal homepage is concerned with the rift between Egypt and Israel following the embassy incident. It's possible that for the West, this War on Terror failed to touch us as much as the original incident, as it was in the very heartland of torch of democratic freedom. Nothing since in the "long war" has evoked such feeling from us. The wars of attrition in Iraq and Afghanistan have been characterised by low body counts (60 000 American troops died in Vietnam, approximately 1600 have died in Afghanistan over a decade of occupation). 9.11 still defines us. But for the Arab world, much has passed which makes the original incident of much less interest. Wars fought on their soils and continuing unrest must lead many to question the way in which they feel about the terrorist tragedy, since it spawned, as al-Khazen overestimates, "the deaths of a million Arabs and Muslims."


Al-Quds is concerned also with Egypt and Syria but carries an op-ed by the editor (in arabic here) on 9.11 in retrospect and the world now facing America. Atwan brings out the well-worn arguments that much hatred has been ignited and enflamed against the West particularly in muslim-majority countries, that America failed in Afghanistan, created an Iraq which now has much closer ties to Iran, and drained its own financial resources to the point of national bankruptcy. Atwan sees NATO's involvement in Libya as neo-colonialism and finally ends with the point that he believes the US will veto any attempt by the Palestinians to press for statehood at the UN. The decade since 9.11 has surely seen America's standing both financially and morally in the world decrease dramatically. Whilst in her possession are nearly all the economists and international relations experts in the world. What future too then, the social sciences?

With the role of culture an ascendent trope in military planning, it's interesting to look back on one of the lesser moments after 9.11, covered well in a Washington Post article, about the Taliban's offer to hand bin Laden over to a neutral country. The Post observes that: "Some Afghan experts argue that throughout the negotiations, the United States never recognized the Taliban need for aabroh, the Pashtu word for "face-saving formula." Officials never found a way to ease the Taliban's fear of embarrassment if it turned over a fellow Muslim to an "infidel" Western power. "We were not serious about the whole thing, not only this administration but the previous one," said Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California. "We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities." Yet our recent culture surge doesn't seem to be paying off yet, if the punditry is anything to go by.