Graeme Smith of the Global Mail has written on the facts in Afghanistan thus ( Report on 'more peaceful Afghanistan' doesn't tell the whole truth December 13 2011 ).
The World Bank study suggested a “sense of urgency” about avoiding a situation like that of Somalia, in which “abrupt aid cut-offs lead to fiscal implosion, loss of control over security sector, collapse of political authority, and possibly civil war.” Afghanistan’s economy, in other words, is a bubble inflated with war money.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the Foreign Policy analysis is the violence data. The magazine website reports that “the country remains considerably more peaceful and united than it has been for most of the past 40 years,” citing World Bank data on battle deaths that show an average of 9,000 deaths a year in the 1990s, as compared with about 3,000 deaths a year from 2003 to 2008.
These numbers are compiled by a Swedish academic group called the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, and it appears that researchers did not have particularly refined data for several years in the 1990s; the figures are round estimates. Even those rough numbers show a clear trend during that decade, however. Battle deaths exceeded 10,000 every year from 1990 to 1994; in the following years, as the Taliban seized control of the country, battle deaths fell to an average of 5,000 per year from 1995 to 2001. The Taliban were exceptionally bad in many ways, but the statistics suggest that they imposed a certain amount of brutal order.
The Foreign Policy analysis is correct that violence remained relatively low in the first years after 2001, but the World Bank/Uppsala statistics don’t include the terrible heights of mayhem reached in 2009, 2010 and 2011. For those numbers, it’s easiest to look at the charts compiled by Brookings in the Afghanistan Index, which make it clear that violence now exceeds the averages for the years under the Taliban regime. Among civilians alone – excluding combatants on both sides of the conflict – the annual death toll is now running at roughly 3,000 per year.
I’ve been trading emails about this today with Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security Project, and he summarized his opinion with typical flair: "If the international community had spent $100-billion on development over ten years and accomplished nothing, that would be shocking. So it’s no surprise that some things have improved. What [author Charles] Kenny should be asking isn’t, ‘Did we get anything for our vast expenditure?’, but rather, ‘Have the improvements been worth the cost?’"
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