So What Does My Book Say About Afghanistan? – part 10

The Tora Bora Mountains (photo by William A. Lawrence II, 14 February 2011).

Continuing the discussion on Afghanistan drawn from fragments of text from page 264-266 of America’s Modern Wars. 

LESSONS AND OBSERVATIONS

There are five final lessons or observations that we wish to make about this war [Afghanistan]…

The fourth observation concerns the issue of rules of engagement. Even under the tightly controlled rules of engagements the U.S. was using, the United Nations was reporting over 1,500 civilians killed in 2007. In 2008, we had a determination from the UN as to who was responsible, with their claim being that there were 2,188 civilian casualties in 2008, of which 55% of those killed were caused by the insurgents and 39% of those killed were caused by the counterinsurgents… This is actually very good on the part of the counterinsurgents, as in most insurgencies, the majority of civilian deaths are caused by the counterinsurgents….

But the U.S. and other international forces did tighten the rules of engagement, and for 2009 the UN reported 2,412 civilian deaths, with now 675 accounted for by the insurgents and only 25% account for by the counterinsurgents… This only got better in 2010… The Secretary General notes that they are “…the result of a significant decline in deaths and injuries caused by air attacks.”

It is clear they were getting favorable results from the tighter rules of engagement although it is harder to determine how much these tighter rules are helping to actually win the insurgency. Still, our own work (see Chapter Nine) points to tighter rules of engagement helping the counterinsurgents win in the long run, so this is an effort we support wholeheartedly. 

 

….

(to be continued) 

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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