'Human Cost' of War on
Terror Must be Considered
New report attempts to tally civilian
casualties from wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan
By Shawn Conner
March 27, 2015 "ICH"
- "Vancouver
Sun" - We
should take stock of the human toll of
war on terror before rushing to send
more troops overseas, says Simon Fraser
University health scientist Tim Takaro,
who co-authored a new report tallying
civilian casualties.
Body Count,
published this month, attempts to
estimate the number of deaths that have
resulted since 2001 from wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“The public health
impacts of war are enormous, and they
are way underestimated by the people who
make war,” Takaro said.
“Especially because
the governments really don’t want us to
know. In their last war in Iraq, the
United States government was very clear.
They said: ‘We don’t take account of
civilian casualties.’ They do, but they
said they don’t. They’re not even
pretending that’s something they should
be doing.”
The study was
co-written with members of Physicians
for Global Survival in Canada,
Physicians for Social Responsibility in
the U.S., and the German affiliate of
the group International Physicians for
the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Takaro and his fellow
researchers looked at peer-reviewed
publications on Iraq as well as “grey
literature” — such as reports from the
United Nations — for Pakistan and
Afghanistan.
He said it’s difficult
to know exactly how many civilian deaths
are an indirect or even direct result of
war, especially in remote areas.
“It’s extremely
difficult to get the information out,”
Takaro said. “Especially when the
Pakistani government isn’t working in
the areas where there is conflict.”
Besides deaths
resulting directly from war, such as
bombs or weapons fire, casualties — up
to 40 per cent of the total number of
deaths — result from other effects of
war, such as the spread of disease, poor
health care, poor sanitation and other
infrastructure failures.
“Those numbers are
even more difficult to get,” Takaro
said. “And how do you parse them? It was
pretty clear in the first Bush Iraq war
there was a period of time they targeted
infrastructure. But hard numbers are
hard to come by.”
The amount of damages
inflicted by the Canadian military is
also uncertain.
The report estimates
that the war has, directly or
indirectly, killed around 1 million
people in Iraq, 200,000 in Afghanistan
and 80,000 in Pakistan (a total of
around 1.3 million).
“The press tends to
underestimate the human toll of war,
particularly in these last few wars
since 9/11,” Takaro said.
“The human impact
needs to be part of the equation. When
(Prime Minister Stephen) Harper says:
‘We’re going to take Canada to war,’
they need to take into account what the
real impact is. Do we know how many
people are being killed by Canadian
fighter jets today? Over the last six
months? I don’t.”
The take-away from the
report, says Takaro, is that “the human
cost of war makes war untenable in
modern society and we should figure out
better ways to solve our problems.”
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