Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction.

NATO deaths in Afghanistan

[More analysis of the Afghan War Diary]

Analyzing NATO/US casualties (“Friendly Killed In Action” or FriendlyKIA) by type of unit gives the following. Coalition Forces (CF) casualties have more wounded than killed.

TypeOfUnit Data

(empty) Sum – FriendlyKIA 28
Sum – FriendlyWIA 29

ACM Sum – FriendlyKIA 6
Sum – FriendlyWIA 15

ANSF Sum – FriendlyKIA 20
Sum – FriendlyWIA 23

ANSF / CF Sum – FriendlyKIA 1
Sum – FriendlyWIA 0

CF Sum – FriendlyKIA 782
Sum – FriendlyWIA 983

CF / ANSF Sum – FriendlyKIA 17
Sum – FriendlyWIA 15

CIV Sum – FriendlyKIA 14
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At least 15219 Afghans killed in combat

[More analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]

I was looking at situations where Enemy Killed in Action was greater than 0, which gave 3729 incidents. I expect that if there are more civilian deaths than are encoded in the database, they are here, as armed people tend to classify those they kill as combatants, sometimes when they are not. But let’s take the data for what it says, and say that who they say were combatants are, for now.

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Civilian Deaths in the Afghan War Diary

Looking at only incidents where CivilianKIA was greater than 0, I got 1458 events. In OpenOffice Calc (after downloading the convert text-to-numbers extension) I used DataPilot to divide these incidents

by Type:

Air Mission 2
Criminal Event 99
Enemy 1
Enemy Action 716
Explosive Hazard 2650
Friendly Action 162
Friendly Fire 34
Non-Combat Event 309
Other 19
Suspicious Incident 2
Total Result 3994

And by Category:

Accident 120
Ambush 62
ANA-on-ANP 1
ANP Training 12
Arrest 1
Arson 2
ARTY 4
Assassination 38
ATTACK 94
BLUE-GREEN 6
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CF in Afghanistan – a map

[ERROR – THIS MAP SHOWS CF OR COALITION FORCES. A MAP OF CANADIAN FORCES ENGAGEMENTS WILL FOLLOW… APOLOGIES FOR THE FAILURE TO CHECK THE ACRONYMS]

I’ve started to analyze the incredible Afghan War Diary that was published by Wikileaks.

What follows is a bit of nerdiness, in case you want to try this at home.

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Is there some standard for evidence that we’ve discarded?

I’m working over some of the material I wrote and have never published – it’s one of my summer projects. There are quite a few projects that need a bit of work to push them over the edge. One of them has me revisiting my Haiti files. I have a pretty passive research method – stuff comes to me. The Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN) for example, is an active community of people, among them very skilled researchers, constantly posting stuff on Haiti politics for years. Looking back at their archives is a pretty amazing exercise.

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Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People”

I just read Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People”. It could easily be in my top 20 books. It is really awesome – historically rich, beautifully written, clearly looks at the past, and has a beautiful vision for the future, even though the author is pessimistic (realistic) about the prospects. I might review it – lots of other projects are taking up time right now – but meanwhile I wanted to just put this one long quote down, because it summarizes exactly what I have long thought on the topic. Page 282:

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Israel’s Flotilla Massacre

Overnight, Israeli commandos attacked an aid flotilla in the high seas, some 65km from Israel. The commandos killed at least 10 people and injured dozens of others, mostly Turkish nonviolent activists bound for Gaza who were aiming to break Israel’s siege with humanitarian supplies. Israel attacked all of the ships in the flotilla, but the killings seem to have happened on the flagship Mavi Marmari.

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Contested spaces worth defending

Introductory Note:

The Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Graduate Student Conference this year took place on April 3, 2010. It had the theme “Contested Spaces: The (Re)Organization of Schooling Under Neoliberalism”. From the conference program:

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