Presentation made to a symposium titled Documenting Mortality in Conflicts, organised by WHO/CRED with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and held in Brussels, 6-7 November 2008.
This slightly amended web version (published 2 February 2009) has been updated to reflect the latest statistics in the IBC database.
Example 2: Using detailed monitoring to observe policy outcomes
Jan 2006–Sep 2008
To further illustrate the utility of such cross-tabulation, here is an example of the kind of timely yet substantive understanding afforded by paying close attention to the details in reports:
Ever since its introduction by General Petraeus in early 2007, our project has allowed a kind of veracity-check on the claims made for the raft of tactics, not all of them military, generally known as the “surge”. This meant that premature claims of lowered violence attributed to the surge could be almost immediately and successfully challenged.1 Ultimately, as conditions genuinely improved — or to be accurate, became less bad — on the ground, those challenges became largely moot.
1 See eg. Counting Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Washington Post, 1 Oct 2007).
2 IBC has since revisited this in its 2008 year-end report, Post-surge violence: its extent and nature (28 Dec 2008).
One of those ‘less-bad’ conditions has been the noticeable reduction in the number of Iraqi police killed on a monthly basis. However, a relatively simple query of our database reveals that accompanying this reduction has been an additional number of deaths among members of Awakening councils, or local self-defence militia.2