Anatomy of an escalation

The rhythm

For six months the country bled at a steady rate. Then it didn’t.

Between 49 and 71 reported deaths a month from April to September. In the first sixteen days of October: 182. The last week of the series, 11–16 October, holds 162 deaths, more than any full month.

Where

Six provinces hold half of all deaths.

Kandahar (67), Kabul (57), Kunduz (54), Badakhshan (46), Paktia (40) and Baghlan (35): 299 of the 568. But they die for different reasons. Kandahar and Paktia are the border; Kunduz and Baghlan, the resistance; Kabul, the capital where the state hunts and the drones arrive.

Four Afghanistans

It is not one war. It is four.

The same 804 dots, split by who fights whom, tell stories that barely touch: a border, a resistance, a state and a street.

1 · The border

94 events, 169 dead. 146 of them in October.

Until August the border with Pakistan produced two to five incidents a month. In August, 16; in September, 12; in October, 50. Drones, artillery and clashes between the Taliban army and Pakistan’s Frontier Corps along 1,200 kilometres of the Durand Line.

2 · The north

The resistance is small, steady, and lives in Kunduz.

The Afghanistan Freedom Front and the National Resistance Front: 84 events, 154 dead. Checkpoint ambushes, bombs under vehicles, almost always in Kunduz, Takhar and Baghlan, sometimes in Kabul. Islamic State–Khorasan, which dominates the headlines, appears in 10 events.

3 · The state

When the target is a civilian, the perpetrator is the state seven times in ten.

251 events with civilians as the target; in 176 the actor is a Taliban government force. The General Directorate of Intelligence arrests and disappears people (53 events). The Vice and Virtue police detain barbers for shaving and women for going out without a guardian (40, mostly in Kabul and Herat). Few deaths; the pattern is disappearance.

4 · The street

People still protest. Sometimes they pay with their lives.

123 protests and riots, 30 in Kabul and 19 in Badakhshan. Unpaid workers, traders, women of the Purple Saturdays movement indoors, farmers against poppy eradication. On 30 June in Khash, Taliban special forces fired on farmers: at least 8 dead.

October

Eight days.

What follows is the week that changed the scale, day by day, with the events on the map.

9 October

Drones attributed to Pakistan strike the TTP leadership in central Kabul. Two dead. The first strike on the capital.

11 October

The Taliban response: 19 clashes in one night along the whole border, from Kunar to Helmand. 34 reported dead.

12 October

Pakistan bombs Taliban positions by drone at Spin Boldak (Kandahar) and Bahram Chah (Helmand): 11 and 10 dead. 24 for the day.

13 October

Seven young Afghan men shot dead by the Frontier Corps while trying to cross the border in Helmand.

14 October

Jaji, Paktia: the longest clash. 25 reported dead.

15 October

Spin Boldak, 39 dead: the deadliest day of the period. In Kabul another strike kills six civilians, a journalist among them.

16 October

UNAMA confirms 37 Afghan civilians killed and 425 injured in the border clashes of 11–16 October. The extraction ends there.

What remains

The dots are precise. What is missing between them cannot be seen.

ACLED records what some source reported; where nobody reported, there is no dot. Deaths are the most conservative figure available: a floor. 568 is what is verifiable, not what happened.

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