Body count's in the house

The return of a bad idea:

Army Deploys Old Tactic in PR War
By Michael M. Phillips - The Wall Street Journal

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, June 1 - Body counts are back, reigniting the decades-old debate about whether victory in war can be judged by measuring the stack of enemy dead.

In recent months, the U.S. command in Afghanistan has begun publicizing every single enemy fighter killed in combat, the most detailed body counts the military has released since the practice fell into disrepute during the Vietnam War...

U.S. officers say they've embraced body counts to undermine insurgent propaganda, and stiffen the resolve of the American public...

But ISAF -- which is led by the same American general -- almost never releases enemy-casualty figures for fights involving forces under its command...

[S]enior commanders in Iraq discouraged using enemy casualties as a public measure of success, according to a general involved in those decisions in 2005 and 2006.

In fact, the military kept classified its running tally of enemy deaths in Iraq between June 2003 and September 2007 -- 18,832 -- and only revealed the figure in 2007 when forced to do so under a Freedom of Information Act petition. That number hasn't been publicly updated.

In Afghanistan, counting bodies is now more prevalent than it ever was in Iraq...

The Army began a rethink when the 101st Airborne Division took over Afghan media operations in April 2008. Commanders worried the U.S.-led coalition appeared to be losing ground...

Commanders first decided to publicize body counts from major engagements...

In October, Col. Julian [who as Army press officer had shunned body counts at the start of the Iraq war] assumed responsibility for public affairs for a new unified command, U.S. Forces -- Afghanistan, taking over much of the work done by the 101st Airborne. He immediately ordered his staff to get ahead of their Taliban counterparts by reporting enemy casualties, no matter how small. From now on, he decided, news releases would provide ample detail about each fight to add to their credibility...

The U.S. does not, Col. Julian says, keep an official running tally of how many Taliban, al Qaeda and other insurgents are killed. A review of the record, however, shows U.S. officers have released details of at least 1,971 insurgent deaths since April 10, 2008, the day the 101st Airborne took over press operations... (link)

There seems little reason to expect a different outcome for the body count this time around. In the Vietnam War, generals with an eye fixed firmly on their careers following their one-year stints in Vietnam produced dubious "statistics for promotion and decorations," according to the finest historian of that war, Gabriel Kolko (Anatomy of a War, New Press 1994, p. 195).