US Military Keeps Civilian Casualties Down By Calling Every Adult Male A Combatant

I have written earlier about how inaccurate and misleading those Pentagon images of the dropping of the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB) in Afghanistan are. We see those pictures but we have no idea what the impact and the casualties on the ground really are. As one commenter noted, it amounts to military porn. But according to US authorities, incredibly there were no civilian casualties from the MOAB.

Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Christa Blackmon points us to Sarah Shoker detailing how the US actually determines civilian casualties. The answer is shocking and it is certainly something that I nor most Americans are actually aware of. According to the official United States position, any male adult sixteen years or older is considered a combatant. It does not matter if he was unarmed, it does not matter if he was simply walking by the bomb target when it hit, it simply does not matter. Under US policy, if you are a male over fifteen years old and you die in a drone raid or bomb blast, you are considered a combatant.

This is a policy that has been in place in both Republican and Democratic administrations, during the Obama years and Bush II. So when you hear that some number of militants have been killed in a drone strike, that only means that that number of males were killed, with no knowledge of how many or any were actually militants. And when we hear that there were no civilian casualties from the dropping of the MOAB, that only means that we can’t confirm whether any women or children were killed, regardless of how many potentially innocent men might have been killed. And when you do hear that US military operations have kept civilian casualties to a minimum, it is a lie. Half the people just aren’t counted.