An armored vehicle ran over a six-year-old boy’s legs: $11,000. A jingle truck was “blown up by mistake”: $15,000. A controlled detonation broke eight windows in a mosque: $106. A boy drowned in an anti-tank ditch: $1,916. A 10-ton truck ran over a cucumber crop: $180. A helicopter “shot bullets hitting and killing seven cows”: $2,253. Destruction of 200 grape vines, 30 mulberry trees and one well: $1,317. A wheelbarrow full of broken mirrors: $4,057.
A child who died in a combat operation: $2,414.
These are among the payments that the United States has made to ordinary Afghans over the course of American military operations in the country, according to databases covering thousands of such transactions obtained by The Intercept under the Freedom of Information Act. Many of the payments are for mundane incidents such as traffic accidents or property damage, while others, in flat bureaucratic language, tell of “death of his wife and 2 minor daughters,” “injuries to son’s head, arms, and legs,” “death of husband,” father, uncle, niece.
The databases are incomplete, reflecting fragmented record keeping in Afghanistan, particularly on the issue of harm to civilians. The payments The Intercept has analyzed and presented in the graphic accompanying this story are not a complete accounting, but they do offer a small window into the thousands of fractured lives and personal tragedies that take place during more than a decade of war.
The Price of Life
The data that The Intercept obtained comes from two different systems that the U.S. military uses to make amends.
The Foreign Claims Act, passed in 1942, gives foreign citizens the ability to request payment for damages caused by U.S. military personnel. But the law only covers incidents that happen outside of combat situations — meaning that civilians caught up in battles have no recourse.
Since the Korean War, however, the U.S. military has realized that it’s often in its best interest to make symbolic payments for civilian harm, even when it occurs in combat. Over the years, the Pentagon authorized “condolence payments” where the military decided it was culturally appropriate.
Such condolence payments were approved in Iraq a few months into the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and in Afghanistan beginning in 2005. They soon became part of the “hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency. To put it another way, in the words of an Army handbook, this was “money as a weapons system.”
Condolence payments are meant to be symbolic gestures, and today in Afghanistan, they are generally capped at $5,000, though greater amounts can be approved.
Payments under the Foreign Claims Act take into account any negligence on the part of the claimant, as well as local law. Douglas Dribben, an attorney with the Army Claims Service in Fort Meade, Maryland, said that officers in the field do research, sometimes consulting with USAID or the State Department, to determine the cost of replacing damaged property — “What’s a chicken worth in my area versus what it’s worth in downtown Kabul?”
Claims for injuries incorporate the cost of medical care, and in the case of wrongful death, the deceased’s earning potential and circumstances. “If I have a case of a 28-year old doctor, they are going to be paid more than we’d pay for a child of four,” Dribben said. “In Afghanistan, unfortunately, a young female child would likely be much less than a young boy.”
The system is imperfect, however. Residents of remote areas often can’t access the places where the U.S. military hands out cash. The amounts given out, or whether they are paid at all, often depend on the initiative of individual soldiers — usually the judge advocates who handle claims, or commanders who can authorize condolence payments.
In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents detailing about 500 claims made under the Foreign Claims Act, mainly in Iraq. These were the original, often hand-written records of incidents, their investigations, and the military’s ultimate decision to pay or deny the claim. Jonathan Tracy, a former judge advocate who handled thousands of claims in Iraq and then devoted years to studying the system, analyzed the entire dataset and found that the decisions often relied on over-broad or arbitrary definitions of combat situations, and that people who were denied claims were only sometimes awarded condolence payment. Yale law professor John Fabian Witt also noted that “relatively minor property awards for damages to automobiles and other personal property often rivaled the death payments in dollar value.”
“They present it as if it’s very black and white, as though there’s the circle of things we can pay for, and you decide if the incident is in or out of that circle, but that’s not the way it happens,” Tracy told The Intercept. “You’d have two different attorneys doing two different things and [civilians] who’d had much the same thing happen to them would get very different compensation.”
Last year the annual defense appropriations bill included a provision, championed by Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., which instructs the Pentagon to set up a permanent process for administering condolence payments. The measure is intended to prevent the delay and inconsistencies that marred the system in the early years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to improve record keeping, so that the Pentagon doesn’t start from scratch in each new conflict.
A defense official told The Intercept in an emailed statement that the Pentagon has not yet implemented the provision, but is “reviewing the processes related to ex-gratia payments to determine if there are areas where improvements can be made.”
Marla Keenan, managing director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, believes that “as the conflict in Iraq and Syria has escalated, they are starting to see a reason for this type of policy to exist. It’s unfortunate how a new context where this could be used is the impetus.”
Finding the Data
The United Nations only began keeping track of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009; using a conservative count that requires three sources for each incident, the U.N. now reports that more than 17,700 innocent Afghans have died in the past five years of fighting, the majority of them killed by the Taliban or other groups fighting the Afghan government and coalition forces.
Looking at compensation paid out under the Foreign Claims Act or in condolence payments is one way to get a window into the damage caused by the U.S. presence. Yet it’s difficult to draw conclusions from the military’s records, which are muddled and incomplete, by their own admission.
Every cache of documents released comes with caveats. For example, The Nation obtained thousands of pages’ worth of records for payments for condolences and other “battle damage” in 2013. Asked for total figures, a military spokesman told the magazine, “I could wade through the numbers to the best of my ability but my numbers would be a guess and most likely inaccurate.”
The Intercept received several years’ worth of recent data on condolence payments from the military through a Freedom of Information Act request. These records come from a military database keeping track of the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, a special pot of spending money for “goodwill” projects.
The database entries are sparse, giving only the basics of who was killed or injured, with no detail on when or how the incident occurred. Location is given only at the province level. Nonetheless, the data represent the Pentagon’s clearest accounting of how much money it spends on condolence payments. (This data does not include “solatia,” which, just like condolence payments, are compensation for death and injury. But they are paid out of a unit’s operating funds, and the Pentagon has said previously it does not have overall figures for solatia.)
According to the data we received, in fiscal years 2011 through 2013, the military made 953 condolence payments totaling $2.7 million. $1.8 million of those were for deaths, and the average payment for a death was $3,426. Payments for injuries averaged $1,557.
Some payments are for multiple people harmed in one incident. For instance, the largest single payment, from 2012, offers $70,000 for “death of a mother and six children.” The largest payment for a single death occurred in 2011, when the father of “a local national” who was killed was given more than $15,000. Some family members received as little as $100 for the death of a relative.
Asked about records for payments made before 2011, the Pentagon directed questions to the press office for coalition forces in Afghanistan, which did not reply to repeated inquiries from The Intercept.
Also through the Freedom of Information Act, The Intercept received Foreign Claims Act data from the Army, which handles Afghanistan for the entire U.S. military. As with the condolence payments, the database doesn’t include the documentation behind each claim. Rather, it shows a quick synopsis, date and amount for each claim filed.
In all, the Army released 5,766 claims marked for Afghanistan, filed between Feb. 2003 and Aug. 2011, of which 1,671 were paid, for a total of about $3.1 million. Of those claims, 753 were denied completely, and the rest are in various kinds of accounting limbo.
This is only a portion of the claims that were actually made and paid. Douglas Dribben, the attorney with the Army office, described the database as “G.I.G.O. — Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
Judge advocates in the field are supposed to regularly update the database with claims received and paid, but spotty Internet access and erratic schedules often made that impossible. Tracy, the former Army attorney, said that in Iraq, he had to enter all the claims he received weekly. In practice, “that never really happened,” he said.
A 2010 guidance for claims officers takes a pleading tone: “We know [claims] payments are not your only mission and the last thing you really want is another report but in all honesty the last thing any of us want is an unauthorized expenditure of funds.”
A more reliable estimate, Dribben said, comes from Army budget data, which reflects the amount of money transferred out to the field to pay claims. The Army Claims Service did not provide that information, but a training guide from 2009 states that for that fiscal year, the Army had paid $1.35 million in 516 claims in Afghanistan, with 202 denied.
The total for Iraq that year was over $18 million; overall, Afghanistan saw fewer and smaller claims than Iraq, because of remote geography and fewer U.S. troops deployed. Prices for replacement goods or lost wages were generally lower, Dribben said.
The claims synopses typically contain missing words, garbled grammar or obvious errors in the various entry fields. Most refer to a “claimant.” Some are entered in the first person. A few dozen have no synopsis at all. Many are completely enigmatic: what happened when “claimant feared soldiers would open fire and panicked?” The claimant was paid more than $3,200.
“Each one took maybe 30 seconds to enter,” Tracy said. “There wasn’t really room or time to put in a narrative.”
The database categorized just 18 payments as wrongful deaths between 2003 and 2011 — very likely an undercounting, Dribben said. The average of those payments was about $11,000; the highest was $50,000, paid to someone in eastern Afghanistan, because “coalition forces killed his father.”
Correction, March 4th, 2015: This article originally stated that “The United States and its allies do not tally civilian deaths in Afghanistan.” In fact, international forces have kept a database recording civilian casualties since 2008. That information has been only sporadically made public. According to Science Magazine, the military’s figures are generally lower than those of the U.N.
The Intercept’s Margot Williams and Josh Begley contributed research to this report. Eric Sagara, formerly of ProPublica, also contributed.
Photo: Rahmat Gul/AP; Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
Our found was 37 Million dollars per year. they was saying we don’t care how you well pay the money for the victims. we just want to finish our target.
Hey i was working for Afghan Civilian Assistance Program ( ACAP) moorhen 1 year. I have more evidence the is report. we ware implementing USAID projects.
They hate us because of our Freedom
Guilty sniper or thirsty Empire?
“… The Soviets identified mineral deposits in Afghanistan during their decade-long occupation. What is new is the volume and precision of mineral-related information. Afghanistan has been mapped using what is known as “broad-scale hyper-spectral data” — highly precise technologies deployed by aircraft that, in effect, allow U.S. military and geological experts to peer beneath Afghanistan’s skin and paint a picture of its vast mineral wealth. According to Jim Bullion, who heads a Pentagon task force on postwar development, these maps reveal that Afghanistan could “become a world leader in the minerals sector.”
http://www.mining.com/tag/afghanistan/
Just watched a segment of the damages the USA has done to Vietnam due to Agent Orange and it was stated that Vietnam asks for reparations for the damages to no avail. The country suffers many with being born crippled and to date 18 billion dollars were paid out to soldiers who suffered from this defoliating agent. So why on earth would the FDA now approve this Agent Orange for Monsanto as a pesticide since the plants no longer react to Roundup? Have we completely lost it?
Whew!! We should be glad all the next of kin of those many hundreds of innocent people in Pakistan who were droned didn’t know where to put in a claim. That would have been 1/100th of the cost of a new F-35. Sarcasm intended.
There’s some evidence that US money ends up with airstrike victims in Yemen and possibly Pakistan. See https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/12/secret-cash-pays-us-drone-mistakes/
http://www.propublica.org/article/hearts-minds-and-dollars-condolence-payments-in-the-drone-strike-age
Feb 9, 2015 The Globalization of War (and How to Resist It) – Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky joins GRTV once again to discuss his new book, “The Globalization of War.” We discuss the threat of nuclear warfare, NATO’s use of proxy terrorist armies to destabilise sovereign nations, and how people can fight back against the US-NATO war agenda.
http://youtu.be/WYUfpdAcJkQ
BW: Reporting live from Afghanistan. The army helicopter I’m in has just been surrounded by the largest Jihadis I’ve ever seen. Gunner, do something!
Gunner: We’re not supposed to shoot unless we can identify them as Taliban. Are they armed?
BW: I can’t tell, but some of them seem to have horns.
Gunner: Got ’em. Better not to take chances. Boy are you going to have a story to tell when you get back to the newsroom!
It seems like a system like this would offer a great way to pay off informants in a less-suspicious way (basically, military money laundering!). I wonder how often it’s put to that use?
How do you think they ended up with so many innocent men in Gitmo? Their informants scored twice. Once when they got paid, and twice when they got rid of the men they did not like.
Will the intercept be releasing this data?
“We know [claims] payments are not your only mission and the last thing you really want is another report but in all honesty the last thing any of us want is an unauthorized expenditure of funds.”
By all means, let’s not spend money on the victims, we need it to perpetuate the war so we can give money to future victims. Oh, that’s right, there’s always more money for war. Small wonder the suicides among veterans aren’t more frequent.
Who knew that Afghanistan was apparently some sort of utopia and beacon for Human Development and rights prior to US forces arriving.
I’d love to know what sort of payments the Taliban and ISIS has made to their victims or the victims families. In the name of fairness of course…
Hey Scott, I didn’t realize we voted for or paid taxes to the Taliban and ISIS, but I can see that at least YOU want to use them as your go-to standard. Well, go to.
.
Scott,
you sound like you do not understand where organizations like ISIL, al Qaeda and Taliban came from.
They were created by your CIA,
as part of our (USA’s) efforts to destabilize the tenuous fragile equilibrium in those countries.
Unfortunately for the locals,
their leaders refused to do the bidding of our CIA,
so we destroyed their communities.
and smart people like you feel that these unwashed locals haven’t suffered enough.
.
FYI —
In 2006, the US State Department considered standing up a US Commission on Iraqi war losses, human and property.
This was to be a response to the wild accusations floating around about how many Iraqis we had killed, how much destruction we had wrought, and some of the corollary consequences.
The intent was to refute those exaggerated calims.
.
The Secretary of State determined that the data collected would make our unwarranted imperial invasion look bad, so the proposal was turned down.
Evidently even the wildest claims were understated.
.
Wow, Pal!!
Talking about naked racism, we should reimburse based on a victim’s “Human Development?”
Do you happen to believe, we should apply the same concept here at home? Let’s say if NYPD car damages one’s yard fence, we should check your “Human Development” first to see how “advanced” (And I am pretty sure, you mean how white) the victim is and pay accordingly?
Do you know that some of us measure “Human Development” as “how far away from racism?”
At least they got something, even if a token payment. In Vietnam we killed hundreds of thousands with chemical weapons and hundreds of thousands more have birth defects because of it. And we paid not a dime for these war crimes.
Reminds me of the scene in “A Tale of Two Cities,” in which the Marquis’ coach runs over a child on a Paris street, and he tosses a coin to the grieving father, “with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some common thing, and had paid for it”.
you left out the most relevant part: first, the irritation the Marquis feels at hearing the wailing of Gaspard (the bereft father), second, the Marquis’ instinctual grasping of his sword-hilt to mete out further violence; and then after the coin is flung back into the carriage, the murderous fury of the Marquis at the audacity of the peasants.
This is why they have a Disposition Matrix, Terror Tuesdays, NDAA, USA PATRIOT Act, NSA, etc.
See Chapter 7 of Book 2 of Tale of Two Cities:
http://literature.org/authors/dickens-charles/two-cities/book-02/chapter-07.html
We have a lot of knitting to do.
Army Vet here, OEF 10-11 Wardak Province, Nerkh District. In the height of fighting season and Ramadan, Taliban and HiG (Hezb-e-Islami-Gulbuddin) forces would routinely send children near our convoys, and when we reached their desired Kill Zone, they would open up on us, and only shoot the children. The families would then take their dead or wounded children to either our COP or to the District Center outside our COP, and demand medical attention and money. We would give both, and then in the night the Taliban or HiG forces would return to the houses of those who lost their children and take the money by force. This practice happened many times throughout deployment. I’m not saying that is the the sole reason of civilian casualties in war, but don’t think that American forces are the sole culprit in this.
It’s very true that the Taliban and other groups were responsible for the large majority of civilian casualties.
The Taliban and HiG are indigenous to the area, are they? Anthony, the bloody tracks lead back to Washington.
See:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/20/afghanistan.weekend7
The HiG were the indigenous people of the Nerkh valleys. They were there during the Russian invasion, and were the ones to expel the Russians from that region all together. The Taliban routinely attacked the HiG, butchering them and their families in the night. The HiG fought both us and the Taliban, and we did the same. It was triangle warfare up until September, when the HiG approached us with a peace treaty that they would guard our COP, JSS, and OP in return for our air, artillery, and ground support in their campaign against the Taliban. For a month we fought alongside HiG members who, for the past 10 months, aggressively tried to kill us. It was weird to say the least, but when the brass says jump we don’t even ask how high. We left in October, and the unit after us, with the help of the HiG, successfully expelled the Taliban from the region. After that, the HiG turned on Americans again, and continued their war on our forces.
(The HiG are not directly mentioned the article you sent, Vivek, but they were the Afghan warlord who shelled Kabul in 94 when the Taliban took power, ultimately losing the support of Pakistan and the world as a viable leader, allowing the Taliban to take charge of the country. Gulbuddin, as I have read, is a hot head who would fight anyone for a morsel of power.)
I never said that any trail of blood doesn’t lead back to Washington. Remember, America was brutally attacked on September 11th, 2001, and that was answered with brutal force. War is not pretty. War is not for people to look into and wonder. War is meant to be fought by rough, hard men that can get the job done. I’m not saying to unleash the hounds and have a complete disregard for human life, but what I am saying is that if you so avidly research war, I’d say to go down to your local recruiting station and sign up as Infantry. Deploy to a war zone, and then come back and let me know how much you agree with ROE that has been set out with a political agenda and not an agenda to win a war and save American lives. I promise that you will come back with a completely different understanding on how war works and how the enemy functions.
Older Vet here…
>”Remember, America was brutally attacked on September 11th, 2001, and that was answered with brutal force. War is not pretty.”
9/11 was a brutal ‘criminal act’ that, as I understand it, had little to do with the Taliban and even less with the people of Afghanistan. Fuck that war … you should not have been there in the first place, Anthony.
Amazing that Anthony doesn’t seem to understand that the “enemy” is the US ruling class that sends people like him to kill and injure and traumatize people like him.
I wonder what Anthony has to say about the US government’s protection of the Saudis and Washington’s long and continuing collaboration with the Saudi dictatorship, and the extraordinary efforts by successive administrations, both parties, and the media to give cover to the culprits and their accomplices. What will it take for Anthony to realize the war on/of terror is a fraud, that it serves the imoerial policymakers’ and capitalist class’ political and economic objectives, and has nothing to do with fighting terrorism or keeping Murca safe?
Saudi Arabia, 9/11 and the “war on terror”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/02/06/pers-f06.html
Anthony, you need to watch the video of building 7 coming down. I didn’t believe there was anything to the different conspiracy theories until I saw the video of Building 7. It is so obviously being brought down by controlled explosion, not many people can see it and not change their mind. One of my best friends is retired special forces and he had the same reaction as most people do, “I never believed any of the conspiracy theories until now and something is obviously phony about building 7″.
Yankee go home, it really is that simple! When the British declared war on Hitler, ostensibly over the German but not the Russian invasion of Poland they were occupying and oppressing and corrupting more country’s than any other empire in history and they were proud of being the worlds biggest occupier (The city of London by different means still is). When General Washington who had 400 human slaves was fighting for freedom he was a British traitor and he cared nothing for the freedom of his slaves or the Indians who were exterminated or driven from the land he occupied. The Europeans were almost all evil invaders but the small country’s have learned, not so the British or French and the new top invader and corrupter is the USA, Yankee, go home.
Anthony,
you do a good job of regurgitating the false narrative you were fed by your chain of command.
.
In A’stan, we (you) were colonial invaders.
.
In the context of the core values of America,
as recorded in the Declaration of Independence,
you were the Redcoats.
Brutal.
The story about your enemies being to blame for all the atrocitiesagainst civilians,
that’s what it takes to keep men of conscience from examining theirs.
God bless.
.
Their hatred for America blinds them. You make an important point Anthony. Children mean nothing to those monsters and they will use them at every opportunity. And people like the ones who replied to you just eat up the terrorist propaganda. Can you believe there’s still some who think 9/11 was a controlled detonation even after experts have debunked it? Yeah me neither. I’m sorry for what you saw during your deployment. These people have no idea. They’re clueless
How many millions of breadwinners has the US killed in the last decade? Quarter century? Since WWII?
The death of one breadwinner affects multiple generations.
potential book title: “Afghanistan (The Great Game): Or, On The Issue of Harm To Civilians”
The real history of Afghanistan is kept concealed from Americans. The average American thinks that “war” and deprivation IS “the way of life” over there and that it has been so since the beginning of time.
Take a look at this piece by Malalai Joya from November 2009:
A troop surge can only magnify the crime against Afghanistan
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/30/obama-afghanistan-troops
Afghanistan, Another Untold Story – Michael Parenti
http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html
And check out this article by John Pilger in which he contextualizes the tragedy of Afghanistan in the larger narrative of imperialism:
Why the rise of fascism is again the issue
http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue
See also this piece by Greenwald from 2010:
http://www.salon.com/2010/04/12/afghanistan_35/
Excerpt:
“Nazis were executed for precisely what Washington is doing today.”
– Paul Craig Roberts
Cora:
America’s war on Afghanistan, the state terror that the US government inflicts on our brothers and sisters, has been illegal from the outset. You should have included this fact at the beginning of your article and consider appending it to the top of every on Afghanistan, to remind your readers. This violence by Washington isn’t defensive. America isn’t fighting terrorism or terrorists. The US officials and military are the terrorists. They seek world domination.
This might be the one case where I’d welcome executions.
lmao “world domination”. You’re an adorable terrorist wannabe
An unauthorized expenditure of funds? That’s the priority?? What of the billions that have literally been lost through corruption and shear incompetence? The measly millions paid out in “compensation” is a drop in the bucket compared to that. These people are sociopaths, incapable of empathy.
Uh, sheer.
quote”From broken mirrors to lost lives, the U.S. military has paid millions to ordinary Afghans for death and destruction during over a decade of U.S.-led military operations.”unquote
Not to mention the BILLIONS paid to the most monstrous, evil Corporate scum on the face of this planet..DYNCORP.
http://wemeantwell.com/blog/
And the worlds most infamous Corporate scumbag of all, Pug Winokur must be glowing with pride in his grave. Catherine Austin Fitts knows all too well.
Pug (towards the bottom — part of a foursome):
http://archive.fairfieldcountylook.com/index.php/parties/2329-family-centers-gatsby-on-the-sound