Random Variable
Lifer
<< KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 11 ? The cemetery is little more than a scattering of stones across a dusty hillside. A few tattered green flags flutter in the winter wind, marking the resting place of casualties of war. Such grave sites are haunting reminders of civilian deaths that have scarred the U.S. air war in Afghanistan.
BUT AUTHORITIES have not calculated Afghanistan?s civilian death toll in the war on terrorism, and the dimension of this tragedy is not fully known. Although estimates have placed the civilian dead in the thousands, a review by The Associated Press suggests the toll may be in the mid-hundreds, a figure reached by examining hospital records, visiting bomb sites and interviewing eyewitnesses and officials.
That number will surely rise as more exhaustive surveys are compiled by independent bodies. Neither the U.S. nor the Afghan government is attempting a tally, but two Afghan nongovernmental groups are. The New York-based group Human Rights Watch also plans a study.
One factor in some inflated estimates was the distortion of casualty reports by the Taliban regime. Afghan journalists have told The AP that Taliban officials systematically doctored reports of civilian deaths to push their estimate to 1,500 in the first three weeks of the war on the Taliban and Osama bin-Laden?s al-Qaida. >>
http://msnbc.com/news/704903.asp
