Analysis: Afghan hearts & minds -- Part 2

WASHINGTON, June 8 (UPI) -- Taliban insurgents are challenging U.S.-led forces for the moral high ground in Afghanistan by avoiding mass casualty attacks and calling for an international commission to investigate civilian deaths in the conflict.

Analysts and experts say the battle for this vital hearts-and-minds territory is the key to winning the war in Afghanistan, and U.S. and NATO forces are handicapped in it.

They are held to higher standards by the local population, and have had problems with their system of payments to assist non-combatant victims of the fighting.

But more than anything else, says Brian Glyn Williams, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, allied forces are hampered in dealing with civilian casualties by their reliance on air power.

"Any time you call in close air support in a populated area," he said, using the military term for the use of air power to win firefights on the ground, "you are going to have the probability, eventually the certainty, of bystanders being killed."

Williams, who recently completed a research project on the Afghan insurgency for a think tank advising the U.S. government, told United Press International that with insufficient numbers of troops of the ground, U.S. and NATO forces active in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east would have to call in close air support "several times a week" to overwhelm insurgents.

But he said the use of such tactics was "a dangerous game."

The inevitable collateral damage meant that "increasing reliance on air power is the main complaint from Pashtuns" who had been displaced by the fighting, and one of the major factors fueling anger at foreign military forces, and thus potentially generating support for the insurgency.

"It's right up there with nepotism and corruption" in turning Pashtuns into what Williams called "POA's -- pissed-off Afghans" -- the key constituency whose hearts and minds could ensure victory for either side in the insurgency.

Williams said the U.S. and NATO dilemma mirrored that of the Taliban themselves, who also were relying on a key weapon that almost inevitably killed bystanders: the suicide bomb.

Williams said that when, during field work in Afghanistan earlier this year, he arrived in the town of Gardez hours after a suicide bombing there, "The sense of outrage was palpable."

"The people there were simmering with fury ... one guy spat at the ground as he was talking about it."

Williams says his research shows that the Taliban have deliberately avoided the kind of mass casualty suicide bombings that have become the savage hallmark of the conflict in Iraq because they understand that such attacks could cost them popular support.

But while the Taliban and U.S. forces face similar challenges in limiting the numbers of casualties, other analysts say that the battle over perceptions of the issue is an unequal one -- and the West is at a disadvantage.

U.S. and NATO forces "are quite rightly being held to a higher standard" on the question, analyst Peter Bergen of Georgetown University and the New America Foundation told UPI.

As an example, he contrasted the reaction when a U.S. military vehicle killed six people in a road traffic accident in May 2006 -- sparking widespread rioting and anti-Western violence -- with the absence of reaction to the killing of nearly two dozen civilians by a suicide bomb attack aimed at Bagram airbase during a visit this year by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

"There tends to be a lot less outrage from Afghans when the Taliban kill civilians," he said. As a result, U.S. and NATO forces had a steeper hill to climb in terms of how Afghans perceive the civilian casualties issue.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar last week made a direct attempt to capitalize on the issue when he called in a Web statement for an independent commission to investigate civilian deaths.

Williams, Bergen and other observers, while noting the strategic significance of the issue, dismissed the posturing.

In a statement, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, an advocacy group for civilian casualties founded by slain U.S. aid-worker Marla Ruzicka, labeled Omar's comments "hypocritical."

"The Taliban should practice what they preach," said CIVIC Executive Director Sarah Holewinski, adding that if the group "truly cares about Afghans, it should immediately stop using them as human shields and their homes as hideouts."

But CIVIC and other groups also say that the perception issue is complicated by problems in the system U.S. forces have established to make payments to civilian casualties.

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In part three next week: Problems in the U.S. system of payments to non-combatant casualties.