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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