On December 10, 2001 Marc W. Herold--a Professor of Economics, International Relations and Women’s Studies at Universiy ot New Hampshire—publicly released a paper criticizing the current war in Afghanistan. Entitled “A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting,”  the paper purports to demonstrate that more than 3500 Afghani civilians have been killed by American bombs. In the course of making this case, Herold articulates a scathing indictment of the Pentagon, and the U.S. media, for downplaying civilian casualties and misleading the American public about the nature of the war. And he mobilizes both his factual “comprehensive accounting” and his critique of the media on behalf of the broader claim that the civilian casualties are “unacceptable” and “criminal” and the war itself “unjust.”

            This paper has not received much attention in the mainstream U.S. media, a fact that does, I would suggest, confirm some of Herold’s arguments about the media (it has received coverage in a number of reputable foreign media outlets, including the BBC World News Service). But it has received much attention on the left and, predictably,  it has been embraced by opponents of the war, for whom it is seen as providing powerful empirical support. As someone who has publicly articulated a critical defense of the war (see “What We Do With Words,” opendemocracy, http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=109&DocID=858&DebateID= ), I have felt compelled to pay careful attention to Herold’s paper, because I have friends on the left who cite it, because I believe that it is important to honestly and publicly debate the war, and because I believe that Herold’s claims are significant. For while I believe—as both Michael Walzer and Richard Falk have argued—that the war is a just war,  I also believe that we must continually interrogate the war, and ask whether it is being prosecuted in a just and justifiable manner, and that the question of civilian casualties must be central to such discussion.

            Herold’s paper is ambitious,  useful and important. Herold has done all who care about the war a service by attempting to render a “comprehensive accounting.”  The skepticism he displays towards official explanations and mainstream media representations is healthy and indispensable in a democratic society.  Beyond this, Herold’s study of a range of reports in the media of many nations—BBC, the Guardian, Agence France-Presse, etc.-- demonstrates that the U.S. media has clearly failed to report many stories that reputable news outlets elsewhere have considered newsworthy, and that these reports call into question many official U.S. claims.

            Yet Herold’s paper is also flawed in important ways. It is characterized by biases and unwarranted inferences that should cause any but true believers to be skeptical about its arguments. It employs a questionable methodology. And it draws conclusions that far exceed what might reasonably be concluded from its “comprehensive accounting” even if one assumes—against the evidence—that this accounting is fully accurate. For these reasons it fails to support the strong case against the war that its author clearly intends.

            Bias. It would be absurd to expect that any argument about the war could be free of preconceptions and value commitments. It is to be assumed that some people are predisposed towards the current war and others predisposed against it, and that the way we frame our questions, pursue our evidence, and draw our conclusions, will be shaped by where we stand. Nonetheless, it is also reasonable for readers to expect that a “comprehensive accounting” will rest upon empirical evidence, and that a “dossier” designed not simply to make assertions but to persuade reasonable readers will avoid hyperbole. But Herold’s argument is riddled with hyperbole. Thus early in the paper, before he has even begun to document his claim about civilian deaths, he asserts categorically—in the manner of a premise rather than a conclusion—that the war is “unjust,” that even the unintentional killing of civilians is “simply unacceptable” and “criminal,” and that there is “no difference between the attacks on the WTC whose primary goal was the destruction of a symbol, and the U.S.-U.K. revenge coalition bombing of military targets located in populated urban areas. Both are criminal. Slaughter is slaughter.” Herold’s inability to restrain this editorializing impulse, and his eagerness to assert his opinions prior to establishing the facts, is revealing.

So too are his foolish comments, made midway through the paper, about why the U.S. has been inclined to bomb military targets in populated urban areas. His hypothesis: “race enters the calculation. The sacrificed Afghani civilians are not ‘white’ whereas the overwhelming number of U.S. pilots and elite ground troops are white.” This is a foolish claim because it is completely unsubstantiated, and because it flies in the face of evidence. One sort of evidence is noted by Herold in the same paragraph—that the U.S. was no more concerned about “collateral casualties” during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Herold’s way of saving his hypothesis—“But the Serbs were in the view of U.S. policymakers and the corporate media tainted (‘darkened’) by their prior Communist experience.” Herold is here playing an absurd sematic game with the concept of “race.” Another sort of evidence is also noted by Herold—that key military-related facilities have long been located near or in populated urban areas. Perhaps the reason why the U.S. has bombed these areas is simply because that is where the targeted facilities are. But Herold strangely chooses simply to ignore this possible explanation. That he does so does not invalidate the factual claims he makes elsewhere in the paper. But his inclination to play such games must give readers pause. For they indicate that Herold is disingenuous, and less than fully serious.

Methodological Weakness. Herold establishes his claim that over 3500 civilian casualties through a fairly exhaustive review of media reports and first-hand testimonies. His ambition, and his hard work, in reviewing these sources can only be admired. Herold is a single individual, and he does not have the resources of a state or a media bureaucracy. That his data base is imperfect can hardly be surprising, and he can hardly be faulted for this. At the same time, his methodology does suffer from two serious weaknesses, for which he does shoulder responsibility. The first is, as he acknowledges and indeed celebrates, that he employs the principle of maximum credulity in evaluating his sources. As he puts it: “I have eschewed making judgements about the relative reliability of one nation’s news agencies and reporters versus anothers.”  He assumes, as he states, that if an editor of any newspaper or outlet considered an account to be accurate, then it is accurate. In its refusal to privilege “Western” sources such an assumption may please those of anti-imperialist inclinations. But it is a strange assumption. It leads Herold to treat reports in the Manchester Guardian as being on par with reports from The Frontier Post of Peshawar and from the Pakistan News Service. Herold, for example, cites an eyewitness account of the bombing of a commercial truck that was reported in Albalagh. Albalagh, it turns out, is an “Islamic E-Journal,” apparently produced in Karachi, whose motto is “Our Duty is to Deliver Only the Message” (the message in question is that of Mohammed). Among the texts featured on its web page of 10 January 2002 are an article entitled “Islam is the Solution,” an essay on “Religious Toleration” that defends the destruction of Buddhist temples by Islamic fundamentalists, and a petition calling for the imprisonment Ariel Sharon. Hardly an unimpeachable media source. And yet Herold is oblivious to facts such as these. Herold’s lack of discrimination betrays either a lax approach to his sources or perhaps an inclination to believe certain claims that others among us might have reason to doubt. In either case it raises questions about the accuracy of his figure.

Herold’s second methodological failing is even more serious—the use of citations that seem to provide factual support but in fact do not. He thus cites a web article by a Harvard researcher, claiming that this person “confirmed that civilians had been killed in Jalalabad and elsewhere.” But the cited web address turns up a one-page opinion piece by this same individual that offers general opinions but confirms nothing. Similarly, Herold writes that “the U.S. alternative media noted that during the first week of bombing, 400 Afghan civilians had been slaughtered.” The cited source is an opinion piece by an individual who writes—with no substantiation—that four hundred people were killed. But while this individual—an activist and writer on American environmental and labor issues with no evident expertise in or experience of Afghanistan—claims that a toll of 400 has been “confirmed,” his claim in point of fact confirms nothing. There are a number of similar citations in the article. They seriously weaken Herold’s case.

Questionable Conclusions. A careful reading of Herold’s “comprehensive accounting” raises many questions about his method and about his accuracy. His claim that over 3500 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S. bombing cannot be considered substantiated. At the same time, it cannot be doubted that many—too many—Afghani civilians have been killed by the bombing, and that this has been downplayed by U.S. officials and by the American media. Anyone who sincerely cares about moral questions, who believes in the universal value of human life, or who cares about American democracy should care about this. It is important to know about it, and it is important to draw the appropriate conclusions. But what are the appropriate conclusions?

Herold concludes his paper by suggesting that that the victims of U.S. bombing are no different than the victims of the September 11 terror attacks. And he implies by this what he states earlier—that the bombing, and the war more generally, is murderous and unjust. But these claims do not follow from Herold’s “accounting,” and they cannot follow from any factual argument of the kind that Herold purports to make. As Richard Falk has made clear on the pages of the Nation, there is a long and powerful tradition of thinking about the conditions of a just war, and, according to this tradition, a war against Al-Qadea and its Taliban hosts can be justified, and is justifiable, on the grounds of defense and retributive justice. Unless one is a pacifist, and proceeds on the basis of an absolute refusal of the taking of human life, then one cannot claim, as Herold does, that “slaughter is slaughter. Killing civilians even if unintentional is criminal.”  For as soon as one admits that a war can be just, then one must admit that—as morally terrible and disturbing as it must be—there can be no war in which only “military targets” are hit and civilian casualties are avoided.  When wars are fought then people are killed, combatants but also civilians. This is unavoidable. I am not a war-monger. I write this with utter gravity and sorrow. Or course the magnitude of civilian deaths matters. Of course, as Falk has also argued, a just war must be fought justly, and this means that civilians cannot be the intentional object of attacks, and that civilian casualties must be minimized. Here Herold’s inclination is correct. If thousands of civilians are being killed, even if as a result of “collateral damage,” this is serious, and must be taken into account. But would even three thousand civilian casualties be dispositive evidence of the war’s injustice?

The answer, I would submit,  must be no. There are two reasons for this. Neither is categorical and absolute. Both are relative, and must involve intelligent and responsible judgment. The first is that when assessing the justice of the war one must consider not simply the real human and moral costs of the war—including the civilians killed—but also the human and moral costs of avoiding the war. The war was a response to a real attack and a real threat, not simply to American symbols but to American lives and to the lives of the civilians of many other countries who stand in the way of Al Qaeda’s unique and murderous vision of the world (many non-Americans, and many people of “color,” perished in the World Trade Center on September 11). The costs of having failed to seek to destroy this network and to bring its leaders to justice would have been substantial. To say this is not to say that Afghan civilians are less morally worthy than American civilians. But it is to say that the failure to bring Al Qadea to heel may well have jeopardized many more thousands of lives, of people living in Los Angeles and Paris and London and Hamburg, who include Caucasians but also Turks and Africans and Asians and Arabs and many others. This must be factored into any intelligent evaluation of the war.

An assessment of the justice of the war must also consider the benefits of the war. One such benefit is the severe weakening of Al Qaedea. This is not simply a benefit to Americans, though Americans have every reason and rationale to seek this advantage. But another benefit is distinctively relevant to the people whom Herold and his colleagues purport to care about most—the innocent Afghani civilians. The war has destroyed the Taliban regime, a regime that for over six years had persecuted and ravaged the Afghani people and particularly the women of Afghanistan. This, to be sure, has not been the principal goal of the war. It is what we might call the “collateral benefit” of the war. But, if we are to morally assess collateral “damages,” as we must, then we must assess the collateral benefits as well. The war has liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban. Only a blind and deaf person could ignore the fact that a large number of Afghanis are happy about this, a large number of Afgbanis were willing to fight and die for this, and a large number of Afghanis in fact did fight and die to accomplish this. What preceded the Taliban was no doubt terrible. The war has not brought deliverance to Afghanistan. There are other oppressive forces at play, some allied with the U.S. The future of Afghanistan has not been assured by the war. But the defeat of the Taliban nonetheless has created the possibility of something approximating freedom for Afghanis.

This freedom—and the cultural and material advantages that might come with it—is not inconsiderable. But it is ignored by Herold, just as it is ignored by so many of those who have denounced the U.S.-led war. Is this freedom worth three thousand civilian lives? To even ask the question is to enter an awful and painful domain. But this is the domain of politics in dark times. We cannot avoid it. If we want to act as citizens, to take public positions, and to participate in public debate about alternative courses of action, then we must all ask ourselves hard and painful questions. If we are honest, and if we care about human rights, then we will acknowledge the pain, and acknowledge the costs of even the most justifiable courses of action. We will not gloat, we will not deceive ourselves,  and we will not celebrate what can only be considered a vast human tragedy. But decide we must. Herold denounces the war, and purports to stand for a policy of clean hands. But he fails to say anything about how to protect the world from terrorism or about how to secure the freedom of Afghanis. He claims to stand for the rights of innocent civilians. But the alternative to the current policy is not the peaceful enjoyment of human rights by the Afghans or anybody else. It is the continuation of a situation in which a vicious terrorist organization can operate with impunity and in which a despotic and medieval Taliban regime can oppress its population. In such a scenario many people will die needless deaths and many people will be murdered and many more will be oppressed and terrorized and forced to live their lives in fear. Is this peace? Is this justice? Hardly.

The question of civilian casualties is a crucial one. This question must be continually raised, and debated. By raising this question Herold has done an important service. But his argument is weak, and his moral and political conclusions are specious. His paper is not an intellectual breakthrough. It deserves to be read. It does not deserve to be accepted as true. This war, like all wars, is bloody and horrible. It is not uplifiting. It is costly and it is tragic. But, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it is less bad than the alternatives. That is not saying much. But right now it seems to be enough.