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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
The U.S. war in Afghanistan is “going badly,” according to the New York Times. Nine years after American forces invaded to oust the repressive Taliban regime and its Al-Qaeda ally, “the deteriorating situation demands a serious assessment now of the military and civilian strategies.” Aerial bombardment, a centrepiece of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, has had a devastating impact on civilians there. Along with Taliban and Al-Qaeda insurgents and suicide bombers, who have recently escalated their slaughter of the Afghan population, U.S. and NATO aircraft have for years inflicted a horrific toll on innocent villagers.
1 New York Times editorial, June 24, 2010, p. A32; see also, “Pakistan is Said to Pursue An Afghanistan Foothold,” New York Times, June 25, 2010, p. 1.
2 New York Times, October 14, 2002; emphasis added.
3 New York Times, March 4, 2010, p. A16.
4 Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-century History, ed. Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young, New York, New Press, 2009.
5 Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (New Haven, second edition, 2004), pp. 284, 345, 349-57, 390.
6 Ben Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973,” Vietnam Generation 1:1 (Winter 1989), 4-41, e.g. pp. 6, 13-14; accessible online here.
7 Carl Conetta, Operation Enduring Freedom: Why a Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties? Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Report #13, January 18, 2002. Available here.
8 “The Americans… They Just Drop Their Bombs and Leave,” The Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2002.
9 Ben Kiernan, “‘Collateral damage’ means real people,” Bangkok Post, October 20, 2002.
10 Human Rights Watch, 2008. Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan.
11 United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, 2009. “Afghanistan: Mid Year Bulletin on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, 2009,” pp. 10-12. Human Rights Unit, 30 July 2009. Available here.
12 Reuters AlertNet, April 15, 2010, “Spate of Afghan civilian deaths ‘disturbing.‘”
13 “British officer wants US out of Afghan zone,” Guardian, August 17, 2007, pp. 1-2.
14 New York Times, March 26, 2010, “Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints.”
15 Ibid
16 “Afghan Officials Say U.S. Strike Killed 40 at Wedding Party,” New York Times, November 6, 2008, p. A19.
17 “Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War,” New York Times, May 7, 2009, p. A1.
18 CNN, June 23, 2009.
19 CNN, June 2, 2009.
20 See e.g., “U.N. Sees Rise in Attacks by Afghan Insurgents,” New York Times, June 20, 2010, p. 12
21 The Guardian, February 14, 2010; New York Times, February 15, 2010, “Errant Rocket Kills Civilians in Afghanistan,” pp. 1, A6.
22 AFP, February 18, 2010.
23 BBC News, February 22, 2010; New York Times, February 23, 2010, “NATO Airstrike Is Said to Have Killed 27 Civilians in Afghanistan,” p. A4.
24 “U.N. Sees Rise in Attacks by Afghan Insurgents,” New York Times, June 20, 2010, p. 12.
25 New York Times, March 21, 2010, “Bombs Kill 13 Afghans; Elderly Man Dies in Raid.”
26 New York Times, June 20, 2010, “Afghan Civilians Said to Be Killed in an Airstrike.”
27 The Washington Independent, January 14, 2010.
28 Human Rights Watch, 2008. Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan. pp. 3-4.
29 ABC News, May 29, 2010, “US Drone Crew Blamed for Afghan Civilian Deaths;” see also New York Times, May 30, 2010, p. 6, and June 3, 2010, p. A10.
30 The Washington Post, May 30, 2010, “Drone operators blamed in airstrike that killed Afghan civilians in February.”
31 To be precise, there were 35,914 U.S. B-52 attacks on Cambodia in 1969 and 1970.
32 See Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, p. 350.
33 William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, New York, 1979, p. 145.
34 Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, New York, 2003, p. 479.
35 Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, New York, 1983, p. 64.
36 The GIS database comprised data originally recovered by the National Combat Command Information Processing System (NIPS) on missions conducted between 1965 and 1975.
The data was classified top secret and maintained by the Joint Chiefs of Staff until declassified and delivered to the National Archives in 1976. It was originally compiled in four separate databases. These files are Combat Activities File (CACTA - October 1965-December 1970); Southeast Asia Database (SEADAB - January 1970-June 1975); the Strategic Air Command's Combat Activities report (SACCOACT - June 1965-August 1973); and herbicide data files (HERBS - July 1965-February 1971). E. Miguel and G. Roland (2005), The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam. Draft Manuscript, p. 45, and Tom Smith, ‘Southeast Asia Air Combat Data, ‘The DISAM Journal, Winter Issue, 2001.
37 See Ben Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973,” Vietnam Generation (1989), accessible from www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html; Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs over Cambodia,” The Walrus (Toronto), October 2006, pp. 62-69.
38 In The Walrus magazine in October 2006, we stated that newly-released Pentagon bombing data revised dramatically upwards the heretofore accepted total of 539,129 tons of U.S. bombs dropped on Cambodia. The total of the individual bombing load figures entered in the database's records of 230,516 aircraft sorties over Cambodia indicates that from 1965 to 1975 Cambodia would have been the target of 2,756,941 tons of U.S. bombs, nearly 5 times more than previously believed. The Phnom Penh Post reported a similar figure: “The [data] tapes show that 43,415 bombing raids were made on Cambodia dropping more than 2 million tons of bombs and other ordinance including land mines, experimental weapons and rockets” (April 14-27, 2000). However, this tonnage data may be incorrect. In new work using the original Air Force SEADAB and CACTA databases, Holly High and others have re-analyzed the total Cambodia tonnage figures and argue in a forthcoming article that the total tonnage dropped on Cambodia was at least 472,313 tons, or somewhat higher. While both data sets derive from the same U.S. Air Force database, the one we used for Cambodia had been decoded by an independent contractor, as was the database the U.S. provided to Laos. The resulting GIS databases for Cambodia and Laos have been used extensively in both countries to guide de-mining efforts there, and have proven accurate for that purpose. As we did not ourselves decode the Cambodia data from the original Air Force tapes, and so far have been unsuccessful in our efforts to contact the independent contractor who did so, we cannot yet be certain as to how the total tonnage field was calculated. It remains undisputed that in 1969-73 alone, around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs fell on Cambodia, one-sixth of the total bombing of Indochina (six million tons over nine years). This figure excludes the additional bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia by the U.S.-backed air force of the Republic of Viet Nam, which also flew numerous bombing missions there in 1970 and 1971. William Shawcross reported that from 1970, “Cambodia was open house for the South Vietnamese Air Force,” and subsequently “the South Vietnamese continued to regard Cambodia as a free fire zone” (Sideshow, pp. 174-75, 214-15, 222-23.)
39 Miguel and Roland, Long Run Impact, p. 2
40 Grolier, 1996, cited but not fully referenced in Miguel and Roland, Long Run Impact.
41 Over four years, this group conducted 1,835 missions and captured 24 prisoners, but did not find the Viet Cong command center. Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 64.
42 The Australian, Jan. 15, 1966, quoted in Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, p. 285.
43 Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 331, 191.
44 Kissinger made the case for escalation, stating “our analysis was that the Khmer Rouge would agree to a negotiated settlement only if denied of hope of military victory.” Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, 476.
45 “Efforts of Khmer Insurgents to Exploit for Propaganda Purposes Damage Done by Airstrikes in Kandal Province,” CIA Intelligence Information Cable, May 2, 1973; for more details see Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (New Haven, third edition, 2008), 22; and Kiernan, “The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973,” Vietnam Generation 1:1 (1989), 4-41; see www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html
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