Who counts Helmand's lost children?
It is important to honour the hundreds of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, but appallingly, we don't even record civilian deaths.
It is now exactly six years since the catastrophic British intervention in Helmand. It was in March 2006 that 16 Air Assault Brigade deployed to the province in force. Prior to its move to the south of Afghanistan the British had had five fatal casualties. In Helmand itself neither the small US army force, nor the occasional SAS patrol had taken any casualties at all. The few Taliban were contained by the governor and his militia and Helmand was one of the wealthiest provinces, largely due to its opium crop. Exactly five years on and 404 military personnel British armed forces have been killed, and the US marines who entered the province to bale them out have taken several hundred more. The death of six British soldiers are of life-shattering consequence to their families. For Helmandis they will have little significance. They are concerned at the risk to themselves, from Taliban and indeed British and Nato forces. Yet civilian casualties inflicted by UK or Nato forces in the province are not reported or even counted by the MoD or Nato. We will know the names of our dead soldiers. We will never know who was the 404th Helmandi civilian to die. What we can be sure of is that it was a long time ago. When I served in Helmand, as a civilian adviser, the only dead person I saw was a six-month old child killed by a British soldier in an accidental shooting. In the few months I was in the province in 2007 the numbers of civilian casualties in Helmand exceeded by orders of magnitude all foreign military casualties. In just two Nato "collateral damage" attacks in Baghran and Hyderabad, both Helmandi villages, well over 100 people were killed. Matters have only become worse since then.