The terrible price that is paid by the forgotten casualties of war

Jonathan Foreman says that the focus upon the death toll in the Afghan conflict obscures the high numbers of soldiers who have suffered catastrophic wounds — and the scandalously inadequate compensation they have been offered once home in a land unfit for such heroes

It is not easy to measure success and failure in counter-insurgency warfare. Modern military establishments have all sorts of ‘metrics’, as they call statistics, but the politicians and the general public tend to focus on one measure alone: fatalities, and our fatalities at that. The deaths in Afghanistan of other Allied forces rarely make the headlines (though the loss of ten French troops in a single 2008 ambush did reach the front pages), and numbers of enemy dead are rarely mentioned at all.

The number of civilian casualties during the recent pre-election allied surge in southern Afghanistan has remained unclear. This is partly because the Nato-led Coalition doesn’t want to be in the business of Vietnam-style body counts, and perhaps because it is not easy to know who counts as a civilian in a conflict where one side eschews uniforms and in which a 14-year-old boy could easily be a combatant. This is frustrating because it makes it that much harder for the public to know ‘how we are doing’ and what, if anything, has been gained by all the sacrifices.

So — is it worth it? Much has been made of the 200th British military death in Afghanistan. However,  those who are committed to the war in Afghanistan might point out that 200 fatalities over eight years works out at a lower death rate than the conflict in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1977, and obviously at a much lower rate than in the Falklands war where 250 British servicemen died in three months. (We tend to forget that the IRA killed 146 members of British security forces in 1972 alone, about the same number that were killed by enemy forces during the entire Iraq war.)