Rarely does a report warn its readers to take its data with a grain of salt. But that’s exactly what a new Brown University study does with what they say is a deliberate undercount of the civilian deaths from ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At least 132,000 civilians have died since 2001, say researchers at Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Between 12,000 and 14,000 of them died in Afghanistan. Another 120,000 died in Iraq. If you want to include Pakistan in that mix — and since the U.S.’ shadow war there is an adjunct of the Afghanistan conflict — add another 35,000 deaths, although the report says it can’t “disaggregate civilian from combatant death” there, which is kind of a big deal.

No one can say with certainty how many civilians have died in these wars. But even by the Institute’s own admission, the death toll is far higher. The Institute only counts direct violence that killed civilians — bombings, gunshot wounds, missile strikes, whatever. It doesn’t include indirect deaths, as occur when war creates refugees that can’t find food, clean water or adequate medical care. Nor does it include the lost limbs and emotional suffering that are a part of every war. Nor does it attempt to count civilian deaths in U.S. shadow wars like Yemen or Somalia.

And its data is reliant on existing tallies from the U.S., the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations and media reports. Some of them lack precision and aren’t able to go where conditions are most dangerous. Many of them disagree about exactly who is a civilian non-combatant: the National Counterterrorism Center, for instance, categorizes Afghan police and security contractors as civilians killed by terrorism. (The U.S. doesn’t officially keep body counts — at least not for U.S.-caused civilian deaths.) Think of the Institute’s data as a tally of civilian-death tallies.

The Institute gives an undercount in order to avoid an emotional and highly politicized debate about responsibility for civilian suffering. “To give exact figures, or to use a methodology which depends on more accurate and complete information about civilian death than is available,” writes researcher Neta C. Crawford, “would be to imply a level of precision that is not possible at this juncture.” A debate about precision in tallying would also “obscure the larger picture of enormous suffering on the part of the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.”

And how. In 2004, the British medical journal Lancet published a survey claiming that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as the result of the war. Its estimates relied on samples of indirect death, like poor access to medical care in certain areas; compared them with pre-war death tolls; and extrapolated. It was also roundly castigated. “This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board,” wrote Slate’s Fred Kaplan.

Except that the Brown report isn’t without its own agenda. One section of it refers to “Alternatives to a Military Response to 9/11,” which include “alternative policing and political approaches.”

Additionally, the report pegs the total cost of the wars to the U.S., when veterans’ care and other expenses are included, at nearly $4 trillion.

What conflict researchers tend to call “excess deaths” aren’t the only things the Institute opts to avoid. It doesn’t make judgments about which combatants caused more civilian casualties. If the U.N. is correct, 82 percent of the 368 civilian deaths in March — a new high — were attributable to the Taliban. Nor does it attempt to categorize which direct deaths were caused by which methods of war, something a 2009 King’s College report tallied for Iraq.

Civilian deaths have wartime implications. Not only do they erode the perceived legitimacy of combatants, but economic research last year showed they directly inspire new enemies from the victims’ loved ones. The U.S. Army is working on a new manual for preventing civilian casualties. Even the Taliban has had to pay lip service to avoiding civilian deaths (.pdf), although that hasn’t restricted its recent assassination campaign.

The Institute’s report might serve as a baseline for discussing civilian deaths in these long wars. But at least it’s up front in highlighting how little we actually know about that crucial statistic — something it doubts is likely to change with time: “[W]e may never know the full human toll of these wars with any certainty,” Crawford writes, “and even post-war surveys, which may be possible in a few years, will likely be incomplete.”

Photo: Watson Institute for International Studies/Rawa.org via Wikimedia