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13 October 2005

Dangerous Statistics: Estimating Civilian Losses in Afghanistan

Felix Elwert

There are tougher tasks than appeasing the human subject review board. A few weeks ago, I met Aldo Benini at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in Philadelphia. Benini has worked for various humanitarian organizations over the past decades and specializes in what strikes me as the most dangerous subfield of social science statistics: he collects, analyzes, and models data on the direct and indirect casualties of war.

I had come across Benini before when I saw a presentation on his work with the Global Landmine Survey, which involved building quantitative models to assist the ongoing mine cleanup in Vietnam. Recently, Benini has been working on estimating the number of civilian victims during the first nine months of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan following 9/11/01. There, field staff visited all 600 communities directly affected by fighting (both airstrikes and ground combat). This survey improves on previous estimates in the news – not least by being a virtual census of the affected communities, employing trained interviewers, and using standardized questionnaires. It’s hard for me to imagine more dangerous conditions of data collection (but, wait, Benini currently works on a similar project in Iraq).

The resulting study establishes a number of important findings. It’s also methodologically interesting. All told, 5,576 residents were killed violently between 9/11/01 and June 2002. Another 5,194 were injured. These numbers are considerably higher than previous estimates. I’m not going to rehash their entire analysis* here. But with respect to the methodological focus of this blog, I’d like to highlight the authors' conclusion that there's evidence that modern war apparently facilitates considerable underreporting of civilian losses.

*Including an interesting zero-inflated Poisson model for the concurrent and historical factors affecting the distribution of civilian victims in Afghanistan.

Posted by James Greiner at 4:50 AM