For all the flak the blogosphere catches for being an insular narcissistic echo chamber, sometimes its collaborative problem-solving potential is pretty impressive. Here's an example: One astute blogger noted that every time news outlets reported skirmishes with ISAF forces, they seemed to be killing Taliban fighters in multiples of 30. Coincidence?
Maybe. But another blogger, Joshua Foust of the Central Asia blog Registan came across a possible explanation. In a tweet, he noted that a piece in the LA Times last year offered a window into how “collateral damage” calculations unfold:
"In a grisly calculus known as the 'collateral damage estimate,' U.S. military commanders and lawyers often work together in advance of a military strike, using very specific, Pentagon-imposed protocols to determine whether the good that will come of it outweighs the cost."
"We don't know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon's former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, "the magic number was 30." That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush. If the expected civilian death toll was less than 30, the strike could be OK'ed by the legal and military commanders on the ground."
While the article refers to civilian casualties rather than to the deaths of those identified as militants, when it comes to Afghanistan, the difference between a civilian and a member of the Taliban is often a tough call to make. It would stand to reason then, that commanders on the ground, not wanting to bother getting permission from the top military brass, might round all casualties down to a convenient "30."
The very fact of a political calculus implies that a higher death toll might provoke a some sort of outcry, a quaint notion when we've been “at war” for almost a decade and have become largely desensitized to reports of the war dead.
Like many things, it would seem that this arbitrary figure is a holdover still in place from the Bush administration. If we're going to attempt to understand what is going on in a war going on thousands of miles away, knowing how many people are dying in it would seem like a useful place to start.
-- Laura Dean
