If the Taliban came to your house in the night, fully armed, and demanded food, would you feed them? You may have no choice. This does not make you a combatant. But it can leave you at risk of another visit in the night and detention by U.S. special operations...

A Global Post report last week found that not only did recent US airstrikes in Kunar province, Afghanistan, kill as many as 67 civilians, but also that some journalists were prevented from investigating what happened. Jean MacKenzie reported that two Al Jazeera reporters were detained and...

A Senate Armed Services Committee report released Friday found that many Afghans subcontracted to guard U.S. bases have links to the Taliban or criminal networks. Many of these individuals are accused of serious abuses against civilians, including murder, robbery, kidnapping, and bribery. Lack of oversight in the hiring...

A big revelation from Bob Woodward's new book Obama's Wars is that the CIA maintains a 3000-strong Afghan paramilitary force that conducts cross-border operations into Pakistan. Though news to the U.S. public, these abusive paramilitary forces are unfortunately far too well known to many Afghan civilians.

The recently Wiki-leaked military logs from the war in Afghanistan offer a level of transparency about civilian casualties that countless investigations, several military tactical directives, and hundreds of news reports have not. By not addressing these issues openly earlier and providing a minimum of accountability, ISAF has sabotaged...

With General Stanley McChrystal's ouster, his successor General David Petraeus has suggested that he will review specific tactical restraints, even though the overall strategy and direction of the Afghanistan war will remain the same. As he begins his review, the tactics General Petraeus should...

Three times as many civilians were killed in suicide attacks and IED explosions by insurgents as were killed in air strikes by international forces in 2009, according to a report released today by the human rights unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). And yet...

Last Wednesday evening at 2pm, international forces raided a clinic in Wardak province run by one of the largest NGOs in Afghanistan, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA). They forced entry into several rooms, tied up local staff and some family members of the patients, and ordered even bed-ridden...

In a week where security in Afghanistan seems headed anywhere but up (rocket strikes on Kabul, a Taliban frontal assault in Logar province today), the question on many a commentator's lips has been: where is this all going?

Some of the strongest analysis on stabilizing Afghanistan recently...

Two civilians were killed in an IED attack in Kapisa province today, the latest in what was already a bloody week for Afghanistan. On Monday, 10 civilians were killed and 29 others wounded in an IED attack in Herat province. On Wednesday, at least 5 people were killed by...

Since the new UN estimates on civilians killed so far in 2009 were released on Friday, I've been getting questions on whether these numbers are helpful, or even accurate, in describing the conflict: What's the value of the obsession with body counting?

In one sense, these numbers offer a...

The UN issued its mid-year review on civilian deaths this morning. More than 1000 Afghan civilians have been killed so far this year -- 24% more than in the first part of 2008. Two key take-aways from the report:

1) Numbers of those killed by insurgent attacks are...

On Monday Al Jazeera made public a new Taliban code of conduct, which includes much talk about winning over the "civilian Muslims" by limiting civilian bloodshed. "The utmost effort should be made to avoid civilian casualties," the book says. Is it likely to make a difference?

Past experience suggests...

Investigators in Western Afghanistan are sifting through the rubble to determine how many civilians were killed in crossfire and airstrikes in Farah province on Monday. Current estimates range from a few dozen to well over a hundred.

Shortly after the incident, General David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander...

This week I've had a lot of meetings at the Kabul headquarters for the NATO mission here, ISAF. Everyone in Kabul, but especially the military types, are humming about a new "comprehensive strategy" for Afghanistan.

A quick survey of the event coverage and op-ed sections of most US newspapers...

I've written generally in the last few blogs about the compensation and victim assistance issues that CIVIC analyzed in our recent report. Let's take a concrete example of the type of harm and redress we're talking about. A few months ago, I met several families who lost relatives and friends...

I arrived back in Kabul this week. With the snow already melting, many fear that spring - and with it a spring offensive by the Taliban - is already on its way. If past years are any guide, those bearing the lasting costs of an escalation in the conflict will...

For the last year, I have been living in Afghanistan interviewing civilians harmed in the conflict for the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC). We spoke with 143 survivors of airstrikes, suicide bombings, IEDs, convoy shootings, and other incidents of war. What they told me, as well as what...