May 21, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 8,1423

LONDON: Who killed Asaq Mohammed? His uncle watched him die. Soon after the US started bombing Afghanistan last autumn the small boy, just under two years old, fled his home on the back of a donkey with his family. For four days they travelled across snow-covered mountains. At night their only protection against the cold was a handful of blankets.

After three years of drought, everyone was weak before they set off from the village of Ghorambay in western Afghanistan. When they reached Owbeh, exhausted, Asaq and his six-month-old brother, Abdul Rahman, died. Seyd Mohammed believes his nephews would still be alive if they had not been forced to flee. Their deaths can be blamed on drought, poverty, cold, the Taliban, the Americans or a combination of these factors. Sorting them out is not easy, yet it has relevance in any attempt to calculate the human cost of the US airstrikes on Afghanistan.

The direct victims of American bombs and missiles have commanded most attention. A Guardian report in February estimated civilian deaths at between 1,300 and 8,000 (casualties among Taliban and other combatants are thought to be substantially higher). Many aid agencies believe that the “indirect victims” exceed the number who died as a result of direct hits. As many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention. They, too, belong in any tally of the dead.

The bombing had three main effects on the humanitarian situation. It prompted hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. It stopped aid to drought victims. It provoked an upsurge in fighting, leading to yet more people fleeing.

Counting victims with accuracy is impossible. Muslims bury their dead within 24 hours and the graves of those who died in the mountains are known only to their closest relatives. The only way to reach even an estimated figure is by extrapolation.

First, dislocation. Just under a quarter of a million Afghans fled to Iran and Pakistan after September 11. They received aid once they arrived, either in established refugee/immigrant communities or camps. The journey was the difficulty. An unknown number died on the way.

At least 200,000 fled their homes but remained in Afghanistan after September 11. In Badghis, one of the provinces most affected by three years of drought, US bombing caused hundreds to flee from Qala-i-Nau, the provincial capital, to villages. People there were close to starvation and had no chance to feed the newcomers.

No one has exact figures on how much aid was lost. “Before Sept 11 Afghanistan was already on a lifeline, and for three months we cut the line,” a human rights analyst says.

The third effect of the bombing was to heighten instability. Until Sept 11 the Afghan civil war had been stalemated for almost three years. Drought aid moved to Taliban areas or those controlled by the opposition Northern Alliance with relatively little difficulty.

The best starting point for calculating the “indirect” casualties is the death rates at refugee camps. Medecins du Monde records show deaths at Maslakh camp in Herat averaged 145 per month between September and December last year, almost double the total of 79 for February this year, a clear sign that things were worse during the bombing period.

At three smaller refugee camps death rates were above Maslakh’s; at two others they were lower. The average mortality rate was two per 1,000 per month. The camps covered by these figures contained about three-quarters of the 200,000 refugees in camps throughout Afghanistan. Extrapolating from this produces an average of 400 deaths in camps every month, or 1,600 from September to the end of December.

It is hard to know whether the one million refugees outside camps had comparable death rates. If so, the number of deaths would be 8,000.

This is a maximum assumption. Adding this figure to the 1,600 estimated deaths in the camps and the 8,000 deaths of refugees outside the camps gives a top figure of 49,600.

How many of the post-Sept 11 deaths would have occurred anyway given that so many Afghans were weakened by drought? The bombing caused a 40 per cent decline in aid deliveries to Afghanistan in October.

Even if one halves the estimated percentage to 20, a rough total of 10,000 will have died “indirectly” because of the US campaign. The range of estimates is broad but it clearly exceeds the scale of for those killed by bombs.

No-one will ever know the true figure, and as time goes on, the chances of reaching even a narrower estimate of the scale of death are more likely to recede than grow. The nameless graves on Afghanistan’s hillsides, in patches of the desert and obscure corners of displaced persons’ camps will slowly be forgotten.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.