 Hi everyone. Delighted to welcome you to the Future Security Forum, which is the premiere annual event of New America and Arizona State University's Future Security Project. I am Sarah Holowinsky. I'm the Washington Director of Human Rights Watch, also an adjunct professor or professor of practice at ASU. And I'm here with the amazing Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal. And I think, I mean, I think you are going to have their bios. And I think everyone pretty much knows about their amazing work, particularly on civilian casualties. So what I want to do is just get right into this discussion, especially because in fact, we are having this discussion around the time of so many civilians in harm's way in Afghanistan. I think all of us are probably involved in some sort of evacuation efforts. And I think with those evacuation efforts, with the anniversary of 9-11 coming up, and certainly with what we're seeing in Afghanistan, I think it's giving us all a time to reflect when we are not frantically trying to get Afghan out of Afghanistan on U.S. policy on civilian casualties over the past 20 years. And I was recently asked about what I saw, if I saw any progress on U.S. policy in this way. And I have to say that I was, I was sad to say that I had not seen a ton of progress. But I'm wondering just in this big picture, I mean, this is a hard question. But can I just open it up to you two to say, do you see progress on U.S. policy on civilian casualties? Azmat, do you want to take this first? Sure. So right now, I would actually say that if we're looking at civilian casualties from U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, the last week or since the Taliban takeover, you're probably seeing the lowest numbers, civilian casualties from U.S. combat operations than we've seen in the last 20 years of this war. So if that is a result of a policy to withdraw, then yes, we are seeing progress when it comes to civilian casualties. But if we're to look at, even in recent years, what's been happening in Afghanistan, which is that Afghan forces have basically been fighting and their lifeline has been air support from the U.S. And that air support, which has been essential to that tenuous hold that the Afghan government has on the country, has been exacting incredible human losses. So even though the entire world is really watching what's happening in Kabul right now, this is pretty unique. We haven't seen world attention on this war in many years. And even though it's receded from the spotlight until just now, this war was continuing at record pace. During the negotiations, the United States in 2019 dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. And those bombings as well as years before that have been exacting incredible human tolls in rural areas. So rural populations make up nearly three quarters of the country. And even though most media coverage centers, primarily on some of the stories of those in Kabul, when we think about civilian casualties, we're less likely to hear from some of these Afghans in rural areas who don't necessarily have cell phone access, who don't necessarily, you know, they can't DM me. They can't write me letters like so many in Kabul have been able to. They don't speak English. You're unlikely to see them on your TV screens. But there is a generation of women and girls who've grown up and boys, youth in rural areas, who've grown up without really knowing any peace. And I don't just mean suffering civilian casualties from U.S. bombings. I mean from Taliban attacks, Afghan forced night raids, kidnappings, the kinds of violence that has plagued this war and yet has not generated the level of attention that it should have by the American public. Yeah. Anand, what do you think? Yeah, just to add to that, I recently did a survey in a place in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan in an area called Sangin. Some of you may know Sangin was one of the most dangerous places in all of Afghanistan for foreign troops, for the British and for the U.S. Marines. And so I was able to do something like a house-to-house survey and to try to estimate how many people, how many civilians have died in the last 20 years. On an average, each family lost between 10 to 12 people, 10 to 12 civilians. And most of these incidents actually weren't in mass casualty events. So there were airstrikes were important, of course, but there's a lot of just somebody being caught in a crossfire, snipers, roadside bombs, mortars. That's got to be multiple events for each family. That's not like one traumatizing event that is traumatizing over and over. I mean, a woman that's the subject of my article on southern Afghanistan, she lost 16 members of her family in 16 different events. So over the course of 20 years, and this is the case again and again. And what's extraordinary about these events is almost none of them have been recorded, partly because they're just in the ones and twos. So they don't like, if it's a big airstrike that kills 50 or 100 people, then we'll hear about it. But a lot of these deaths that are in the ones and twos are not recorded at all. So when you see, for example, the UN giving estimates of civilian casualties, those are grossly underestimating the number of civilians who are dying in the countryside and heavily over-representing those that are dying in mass casualty events. I just want to jump into to reinforce what he's saying, which is that there has been so much work looking at, you know, what has been happening in a lot of these rural inaccessible areas by particular kinds of journalists. You know, I would call out Andrew Quilty at the Intercept who recently did a study in Wurlap Province and looked at 10 different night raids that killed more than 50 people, most of them young boys. And in each one of those incidents, and many of those incidents, by the way, were mass casualties, none of them, all 10 of them, none of them had ever been reported publicly. I found the same thing with one exception for most of the cases where, you know, in 2019, I spent a lot of time on the ground in Kandahar, Nangarhar, meeting people from Helmand. I wasn't able to because the pace of the bombing, to be quite honest with you, I couldn't go to the sites of the airstrikes in Helmand in 2019 because the bombing was so intense and the intelligence so faulty, that I was terrified I would die in an airstrike. I felt very, very scared and wasn't able to do the Helmand reporting in 2019 on the ground in Helmand. But I met families from Helmand. I met many people in Kandahar and Nangarhar, and they were telling me stories of even just innovations in war that I have not heard. And in the beginning, the first time a family told me that, you know, you're used to hearing stories that there might be airstrikes and then ground forces come in. But in 2019, I was hearing something I had never heard before, which was that there were night raids. People would come in, Afghan forces with, you know, these these individuals on the ground couldn't identify, you know, what foreign forces were with these Afghan forces. And they would extra judiciously kill people, they would conduct these night raids, shoot people, leave, and then the airstrike would happen. And that kind of reversal was something a tactic I had never seen. And, you know, we can talk about this war and different portions and time periods when it comes to civilian death. You know, there are many who say that 2011 was one of the years in which the United States perhaps made the most progress. And, you know, what I want to center on is that, you know, there's a certain number of things that distinguish 2011 from 2019. I think we've seen large-scale civilian deaths throughout this war. But some of the differences, you know, if we were to look at when has progress happened, or even, you know, when has there been more space to make changes? You know, there are really three things that have driven that. The first is when a foreign leader or foreign forces calls that out. So, you know, President Karzai, who's who really developed a reputation among Americans for being quite unhinged, that was the association he had among many Americans in his waning years, actually in those years was advocating for restrictions on civilian casualties to some success. I think that, you know, many Americans didn't like that he was holding up certain status of forces agreements, particular things to extract some of these changes. But foreign leaders pushing back has often been one reason when the U.S. military will take greater measures. It's a small one, but it exists. There is that space. And, you know, President Honey did not enable that same kind of pushback. In fact, certain members of his government, and I'm really in particular really advocated for some very aggressive tactics. You know, we know that women I remember in 2019 there was the arrests or at least the reports of arrests of women in Helmand province. And, you know, as we know about Afghanistan, you know, I did a lot of reporting back in 2015 that looked at the rise of the Taliban, which can be traced back to, you know, some incidents of women being captured at a checkpoint in Kandahar and Mullah Omar riling up the local population, you know, finding their bodies, riling up the local population to take back the country from these kind of corrupt regimes. So the kinds of tactics we've seen in recent years have escalated and a large part of that is pushback from the Afghan government. A second thing that you might find that really restricts or encourages military, probably even larger, the U.S. military to take more action on civilian casualties are U.S. deaths. So when more U.S. service members are dying in wars, you see far more accountability, far more criticism of where we're going, where the United States is operating, what is happening as a result of that. And you can look at this historically in terms of how the United States even began counting in civilian deaths in the first place, going from an era of carpet bombing to, you know, precise counting or attempts to count. You know, a lot of that has come out of large American losses. But the way that the United States fights wars today is that we put the minimal number of U.S. troops on the ground as possible, rely on partner forces and provide them air support. A lot of that air support can come via contractors. So we're really not losing U.S. service member lives in the way that we used to. So from the start of Operation Resolute Support in 2015 in Freedom Sentinel to now we've actually had 64 U.S. deaths in hostile combat. Compare this to the tens of thousands of Afghan forces who have died in recent years, despite having massive air support. And you kind of understand how this war was lost. At the same time, that air support was exacting incredible civilian casualties that really created space for the Taliban. To pull back up for a minute, there seems like a lot of these sort of bigger issues like transparency. Like nobody really knows what's going on in these rural areas, including because the United States is not reporting it out. Foreign leaders may not be seeing it. Maybe the new, maybe new governments in particular places where the U.S. is operating are not actually being all that hard or tough on the U.S. or perhaps being perhaps being complicit in some way. I'm wondering what's going to happen now that the U.S. is out of Afghanistan, which of course was one of the, where everyone was focused on civilian casualties for so long. But the United States is in all of these other places. And Americans don't even know where U.S. troops necessarily are and certainly aren't going to be hearing about civilian casualties. So for those of us who care about U.S. policy on civilian casualties, I think there's going to be not as much of a hook. There's not going to be as much leverage to push. Anand, what do you see here? Well, the U.S. is involved in Syria, in Iraq, Somalia, parts of Northern and Western Africa as well. However, as Azmat said, these are mostly special operations or they are largely partnered with local actors. So it's a different dynamic than what we saw in the last 20 years in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan now, however terrible the Taliban rule will be for people, at the very least we'll say that people in the countryside will not be will not be dying. So that will be a positive thing that's come out of all of this. But just more broadly, I think, I guess I'm skeptical about the idea that a military force can really do a lot to mitigate civilian casualties. I mean, the U.S. isn't breaking, isn't committing war crimes for the most part. It isn't, there's all sorts of checks and balances within the targeting system. There's a lot of people there that are vetting targets. It's just that the reality is you can't fight a war without killing people. You can't fight a war without killing lots of civilians. And there's two different approaches people of states have taken. You have the approach of Russia and Syria, which says, well, to hell with the laws of war, let's just win this war immediately. And then they'll or Sri Lanka, for example, and they'll kill lots of people and commit horrific crimes. And then the war is over in two or three years. Or we have our approach, which is to try to adhere to the laws of war very meticulously, in which case a lot of these killings are in the ones and twos partly for that reason. But then the U.S. actually can't win these wars, because when Hamid Karzai was pushing back against the civilian casualties, a lot of people in the U.S. military were grumbling about this because it actually did impede their ability to fight an effective war. They're correct about that. But what that meant was it just dragged out the war for 10, 15, 20 years and we got to this point where they're lost anyway. So I mean, to what extent can any military actually get to a point where there's zero civilian casualties? It's impossible. Can they ever get to a point where large numbers of people are not dying in wars? I think it's impossible. So the U.S. militaries are around the world in different conflicts and we're so enured from the reality of warfare that I think us in the American public think that there can be such a thing as a clean war. There's no such thing as a clean war. There's only dirty wars and very dirty wars. And so we don't see that partly because most of these wars are being done by special operations forces and the CIA and third-party actors. So what about the transparency argument then? It does it feel like, I mean, it's a very tactical thing instead of saying we're going to focus, we as advocates are going to focus all of our attention on making sure that the American public knows that if you go into a war, there will be civilian casualties. Making sure that the State Department, for example, is working on diplomatic solutions, et cetera, so that the DOD isn't going into war and causing civilian casualties. Once you're actually there and you're doing this, I mean, special operations forces, nobody knows what they're doing or when or how or how many civilians are being harmed. So what is the solution to that? The Department of Defense has been creating a what they call a Department of Defense Instruction for some time now, which would be the first ever, I think, US policy on civilian protection and civilian casualties. And it seems to include a couple of, you know, at least hat tips to transparency. Sorry, there's a fly that is really annoying me right now. But what can we do? Is it really for investigative journalists like yourself and researchers to go out and try to find these stories or is there something more that we could be doing to understand the human cost of these wars? I think that the American public and the US military, it just depends on the war zone you're looking at. But in Iraq and Syria, you saw a really deliberate and sustained effort to report out what at least the civilian casual team was finding. Now, you saw a lot of lingo or you saw a lot of language around the idea that like, this is the most precise air war in the history of warfare. We've never seen anything like it. And while that may be more precise than historically, you know, there are still very large numbers dying and they were severely underestimating them. But you saw a level of transparency that frankly, really is just, you know, I think in the uncounted when Anand and I were writing the story into civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria, we called it one of the least transparent wars in recent US history because of that gap in civilian deaths. But I would actually change that now, you know, having spent enough time in Afghanistan to see the ways in which there has been an extreme lack of transparency there, like just the aggressiveness with which they have met very credible allegations of civilian harm is unlike anything I've seen. There is no team counting these things, putting out numbers. And so the idea that you might expect or see it as reasonable for the US military or certainly in a place like Afghanistan, if you have that kind of mindset where there's been such a reluctance to answer questions about it, like I can't, I've been so frustrated in my inability to get answers from US forces in Afghanistan. And I've been lied to directly, like I cannot underscore enough the lack of transparency in the abject failure around transparency that US forces in Afghanistan have had. So if you have that kind of a mindset, what is the likelihood that any of these forces are ever going to be really candid? For example, that look, that's just a fact of war, this happens, they're going to happen in large numbers. Based on some of the attitudes that I've seen, at least out in country, it might be different if you're speaking to a senior sent com official, or you're talking to somebody at the office of the Department of Defense. You know, it's a different story, but those on the ground who are actually taking some of this data, they're not, they're not actually looking at the data, they're not collecting it, there's no aggregate analysis. I would say there's not just little will, but there's little, it might be even built to function that way. I think transparency is super important, investigator journalism is super important, but I think there's an even deeper problem, which is that most of these wars aren't really decided by the American public in any democratic fashion, right? We have authorization for the use of military force, we have a couple of them that have been around for 20 years, one of them was finally just canceled, another one's still extant, but how many Americans in any kind of public forum discussed the fact that the US is doing operations in Somalia? Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't, but this is not part of the democratic discourse. So war making has kind of moved into kind of a technocratic sphere, where lawyers and targetiers and generals and others are kind of deciding the direction of it, whereas it should be a public and civic activity that everybody collectively tries to decide on, I think that's the major problem. And one of the reasons why there is such little transparency I think is because there's a real recognition, maybe not explicitly, but implicitly within those engaged in war fighting that, you know, as soon as this stuff comes out into the public, it gets very messy and people can critique it, etc., other such things. So right now we have a situation where our government can go to war and most of us have no say in it, and I think that's really the problem. Or when you do see the public talking about it, it usually is after US death. So let's take a look at the example of Niger, right? The United States had been flying drones in different capacities in that region for several years, but it wasn't until a special operations forces raid in I believe 2017, in which at least I think four US service members died, that all of a sudden Congress said, what are we doing in these parts of Africa? How has this war really creeped? How has Mission Creep brought us to these different kinds of places? It was never a question when foreign civilians were dying. It only became a question when US service members did. And when you remove those deaths from the equation, you know, fewer American service members are dying in wars today than in our history. So when you remove that as well, you're unlikely to see public debate or public conversations around war. So how do we build in? I mean, you both know so well that civilian cost of wars and it is not just deaths and injuries. It is property and livelihood and trauma and infrastructure and that goes on for that will go on for generations. And so many of these, you know, if we are pulling out of Afghanistan, if we're not going to have a combat role in Iraq, I worry very much that these investigations that you were talking about, will they continue? Will we ever get fidelity on who has actually been harmed? Will the families ever receive dignity, some sort of amend, condolence payments, whatever it may be? So we know the cost of this. We know how weighty it is on these populations. How do we then take that and build it into the next decision that the United States makes about going to war? How do we take that cost and make it known? It's not a budget line item. Anand, do you have an idea? Do I? Yes. It's not my idea. He does. He's advocated before. I've heard him talk about bringing back the draft. Oh, the draft. Well, that was only partly in jest, I think. But I think there's a problem actually when most of us are completely sort of separated from warfighting that it is only going to be when body bags come back here that we're going to have a sense of where the war is. But I think here there's a role to be played, for example, by politicians and journalists. Others are trying to draw the connections between the consequences of these wars and the ways in which they'll affect us as well. For example, the war on terror, which was billed as a way to try to make the world and America safer. I think one could argue it's actually made the world and America less safe. For example, the invasion of Iraq caused all sorts of disasters, contributed in part to the rise of ISIS, contributed to a massive refugee crisis. It was not unrelated to what happened in Syria. You look at what happened in Afghanistan as well. I think what we're seeing today, these people are leaving or fleeing Afghanistan. Many people in Afghanistan welcomed the U.S. in 2001. Even people who today are opposed to the U.S., they welcomed the U.S. in 2001. But all of my friends I talked to now, they're desperate to get out of the country because of the failures of the last two decades. All of these policies indirectly but very importantly affect American citizens. I think maybe that's part of the way we need to approach this. That makes a lot of sense. Ananda, I know you're also doing a lot of comparative work with other countries and how they are focused on international law. The United States has always said that it abides by international law. It is the gold standard for civilian protection. Can you tell us how other countries, particularly in, for example, Syria, where the U.S. is operating alongside other countries, can you tell us about this comparative work that you're doing and how the U.S. stacks up against other countries? The U.S. does abide by international law, but in part that's because it's designed, it's had a major role in formulating what counts as international law. There are human rights organizations that take a very different perspective of what counts as international humanitarian law. A perspective that's much more restrictive and the types of activities you can undertake in war zones. But the ultimate arbiter of whether the U.S. has committed a war crime is essentially the U.S. itself. It's not like a third-party court. That's almost never going to happen that the U.S. is going to be dragged to an international court to answer for certain crimes. A lot of international humanitarian law depends on the intent, for example, behind the attack, which ultimately is up to the targeters themselves to be able to say, so there's a kind of a black box in the targeting world where you don't really know the process of what's happening. But more importantly than that, I mean, there's an example in Syria where Aleppo, people may know, half of Aleppo was completely destroyed by the Russians and by the Syrian regime. And if you went to Aleppo, it would look like Dresden. It would just look like it's a horrific sight. And then Raqqa, which was the capital of ISIS. The U.S. is the one who led the war against ISIS in Raqqa. And if you go to Raqqa, it looks identical to Eastern Aleppo, completely destroyed like Dresden. People are living in ruins. And the U.S. actually, for the most part, adhered to their own standards of international humanitarian law and doing so. Whereas the Russians and the Syrians completely rejected it. They were targeting hospitals, et cetera. So one has to question if you have two armies operating under totally different norms and you get the same result at the end, it makes one question how valuable those norms are for fighting war. Now, this doesn't mean that we should just throw out international humanitarian law, but rather that it's sometimes a limited tool to be able to make sense of whether a war is just or whether people are being harmed or not. We have to leave people with some hope, because this is a really depressing conversation. And in fact, it's a really depressing time in the world, especially with regard to civilian protection. I'll ask for your recommendations to the Biden administration before we leave. But I want to know if you're seeing any progress. Are there any things in the world in U.S. policy that are giving you hope, new technologies, new norms, anything? I think the execution of the withdrawal was a disaster, obviously. And all three of us are involved in trying to help people deal with that disaster. But the fact that the war has ended is a very positive thing. And if we can somehow look past the immediate disaster and the administration needs to be harshly critiqued for their handling of this. But the fact that the war actually ended and that for millions of Afghans living in the countryside, life today is better than it was six months ago, just as a fact. It doesn't mean that they support the Taliban. But now they don't have to worry about somebody breaking to their house in the middle of the night and taking away one of their loved ones. Or they don't have to worry about every time they send their children to school, that maybe they'll hit a roadside bomb or they'll be an airstrike. That's a positive thing. And I think the turn in the last couple of years to questioning using the military to solve political problems, I mean, I think it's a small turn in that direction, but that's a positive thing. And that's something we should emphasize and try to try to foreground. And I would just emphasize that civilians can be impacted by US policy through combat operations. We can have casualties, but there's so many other kinds of US policies that can really negatively harm civilians, economic warfare, the kinds of sanctions that are currently being discussed, the withdrawal of certain kinds of money that would do little perhaps to actually affect the Taliban leadership and more to affect local populations, civilians who are really going to be struggling. There are going to be humanitarian crises. And I think that that's just on the forefront of my mind right now is that even if there are these, you know, these sort of pop, there is some kind of a positive sign of progress with the withdrawal in terms of civilian loss of life, that we would also be thinking about some of the humanitarian concerns of civilians as a result of some of these economic and other kinds of, you know, war by other means. Okay, so we have this very acute crisis right now with the evacuations and getting Afghans out. To your point, Anand, I think, you know, some Afghans in the countryside are probably feeling some relief. I think many tens of thousands of others are feeling real fear for their lives. In this acute moment, what are your recommendations to the U.S., to the UN, to the international community, or to the Taliban about civilian protection, about this thing that we are talking about? Well, right now, I think the U.S. should do a much better job letting Afghans into the airport. It's primarily been the U.S. that has blocked Afghans from getting into the airport. The Taliban, the main Taliban checkpoint in the south of the airport, will not allow people to pass unless they get the green light from the U.S. inside. So we bear responsibility to everybody who's trying to get into the airport to facilitate that. Asma, I assume you're in agreement. I mean, it's true. It's actually very heartbreaking, literally, Anand was following a convoy two nights ago. I was following one last night this morning, and at each turn, they were rejected in the exact scenario that he described, where they were counting on senior officials from the United States to give that go-ahead, and they didn't do it. And the kinds of people that these are people whose lives are at risk or who frankly, you know, oftentimes, it's impossible to deny how many people worked with Americans simply because they hoped that one day it would lead to some kind of asylum or some kind of path. And I think you're seeing how fraudulent that really was, that sort of luring of that idea, the dangling of this idea that people would be able to come at some point. I think it was dangled in front of people who are now seeing, you know, what that, what American words really are. So that's the acute crisis that we're facing right now. Now, in the long term, we haven't seen, at least from my perspective, we haven't seen a lot of progress on U.S. policy on civilian protection over the past 20 years. We've seen it ebb and flow. We've seen different kinds of changes. I think if you take it holistically, I'm not sure that you would say that we are so different now than we were during the invasion of Iraq, for example. Please feel free to disagree with that or to agree in your answer. But I want to know what is your, if you could sit down with President Biden today or General Austin and say, here is my recommendation on civilian casualties on the human cost of war that is civilian casualties. What is the thing that you want them to either know or do? Well, for me, as I said, I don't, I'm pessimistic at the possibility of tweaking warfighting in such a way as to save a few civilians here or there, because war means death and for soldiers and for civilians. And it's not like the U.S. is not trying to do various things to have these mechanisms in place. In my perspective, that doesn't matter because at the end of the day, so extraordinary numbers of people are dying. So the most important thing I'll tell President Biden is don't fight wars unless you really, really have to. Take, you know, the way we've gone into dozens of countries in the last two decades has been disastrous. And we need to, that's what we need to look at. That's the policy that we need to to be consider. And I'm sorry, as much just a quick look, presumably that means counterterrorism operations that are outside that are not really considered armed conflicts or wars, all of the military operations that we have going on around the world. Exactly. And it's been proven in the last 20 years that counterterrorism operations hasn't degraded the capacity of quote unquote terrorists over the last 20 years. And so we need to really, we look at it, look at the root causes of some of these phenomena, not look at just trying to kill people. I think it's also important to, you know, keep in mind that I'm an investigative journalist. I don't advise governments, but it's undeniable from my reporting not to acknowledge the ways in which American, the way that America has really primarily started to use this air war as a means to involve itself, to not see how that that how that has really been adopted by other countries, you know, whether that's Saudi Arabia, whether that's the UAE, other countries who are now using US weapons with no means to track or follow how they're using them, that we've essentially rendered this in this post 9 11 age in which the United States has the ability to and claim somebody as a quote unquote terrorist when there is no evidence of that, you know, we put people in this position where they're guilty unless they've proved their innocence and the threshold of the intelligence, it's really the intelligence that I'm finding so flawed so often is maybe right here, but the threshold for how much they would have to prove to show their innocence is up here. You know, what we're looking at are scenarios in which when the United States has invoked those kinds of arguments, you've seen other countries around the world borrow them and there's nothing the United States can say about it, right, because this is something that they've really engineered, I mean, it was always the case that national security would be invoked, you know, to cover transparency, but after 9 11, you know, we've seen that really escalated and we've seen the ability to treat everybody as guilty before ever providing any evidence to the public that that's the case and you can look even at, you know, for example, the recent war in Gaza and civilian deaths there and trying to understand, you know, why were particular places targeted? What was the intelligence underpinning this? They can ignore those questions because the United States has. We did end on a depressing note. I think I put that question way too far in the middle of the conversation, but thank you so much. So Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, you've got new work coming out. You're constantly working on these issues and you're such a wealth of knowledge for everyone so please do keep a lookout for their new work and thank you for attending.