What's Getting Killed by America Worth?
Sept. 4, 2002 -- It was a beautiful spring day in Toronto — sunny, clear and cool. But to Paul Dyer, and possibly hundreds of his countrymen, April 23, 2002, was also one of the most painful days in their lives.
That afternoon, crowds gathered at a downtown Mormon church to pay their respects to Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer, 25, before he was buried with full military honors. Ainsworth Dyer was Canada's first soldier killed in combat since the Korean War, and Paul Dyer's only son.
Ainsworth Dyer and three of his fellow soldiers were killed in Afghanistan just a week earlier, when a U.S. Air Force F-16 bombed them while they were on a nighttime training exercise. Eight others were injured, two seriously.
At his funeral, mourners spoke of the poignant relationship between father and son. Family friend Christopher Chaggares said the hulking, gentle Ainsworth "towered over his father, but he always looked up to him." Others said Paul would cry every time his son flew away or came back and asked his fellow church members to pray for the safe return of his precious "baby."
In June, both Canadian and U.S. inquiries found the U.S. pilots were at fault. And Paul Dyer now says the U.S. military should compensate the families of those killed.
"I think the parents and families will have to do something," he told the Toronto Star. Noting Ainsworth often sent part of his paycheck home, the father said: "Give us something to help support us. Our children always helped us."
Shortly before Dyer's funeral, a poll found as much as 85 percent of the Canadian public thought their government should demand compensation if American pilots were at fault. But Ottawa has not made a plea, and it's unclear how much Paul Dyer will receive — if anything at all.
The United States actually has a curiously varied record on the values it assigns to the lives of its victims. In the last decade, victims' families have been compensated with as little as $200 for a lost loved one — and as much as $2 million.
Totals Vary
While losing a son is a tragedy, Dyer can take some hope from the fact that he is not an Afghan. Estimates of civilian casualties from the U.S. war in Afghanistan number as many as several thousand, and while activists and a number of politicians have called for compensating the losses of the innocent, hardly a handful have received anything.
Those Afghans who have received compensation got a relative pittance. In the most recent instance, an errant bomb strike on a wedding in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province on July 1 killed 48 civilians and left 118 others wounded.
A week after the attack, victims were promised a total of about $18,500 — $200 for each individual killed, and $75 for each wounded person.
Nearly six months earlier, on Jan. 24, U.S. commandoes raided the village of Hazar Qadam, also in Uruzgan province, killing at least 16 people in a raid on what was believed to be an al Qaeda or Taliban hideout.
The Pentagon later acknowledged it had made a mistake, and that it had likely killed pro-American Afghan fighters. Each of the families of the victims received at least $1,000.
The amounts paid to the Afghan victims strike an extreme contrast with the amounts paid for other U.S. military mishaps.
When American fighter jets mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, during the 1999 Kosovo conflict, killing three people and wounding 27 others, the United States agreed to pay $4.5 million in damages to the families of the victims. This amounts to $150,000 per victim.
After a U.S. Marine jet clipped a ski-lift cable near the city of Cavalese in the Italian Alps on Feb. 3, 1998, 20 people in a gondola plunged to their deaths. A little over a year later, the victims received a total of $40 million — about $2 million each.
And in 1988, the U.S. warship USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian A300 airbus carrying 290 people in the Persian Gulf. In 1996, Washington volunteered compensation of $300,000 for each wage-earning victim, and $150,000 for each non-wage-earners, in a settlement that totaled $131.8 million.
The Numbers Don’t Add Up
The obvious discrepancy in the price of human life might be explained by the difference of the impact of a cash settlement in dollars in each of the countries.
However, this is hardly the case, said Marc Herrold, an economics professor at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied such discrepancies. "The amounts paid to the Afghans are paltry and insulting, even far below what should be given using the discounted future earnings approach," he said.
Assuming that the dead in the wedding party were mostly young, around 15, they would have a remaining working life of about 25 years, he said. That means their families would have lost earnings of at least $3,300, he said.
Herrold noted that some people have used ethnic and religious factors to rationalize the discounted amounts of compensation as well.
He said the amount paid to Afghans rivaled the small amounts offered by the American chemical company Union Carbide in 1984 after a gas leak occurred at its plant in Bhopal, India, killing an estimated 20,000 people.
Shortly after the incident, he said, the Wall Street Journal's Barry Neuman wrote that Indians don't expect compensation for lives lost in the Bhopal poisonous gas leak because "the certainty of reincarnation satisfies the Hindus; for the Muslims, what God wills, God wills."
In contrast, he said, the Times of India has noted that about $40,000 was spent on the rehabilitation of every sea otter affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
In fact, after the friendly-fire incident in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, many villagers did expect either direct-cash payments or community-improvement projects, in keeping with custom and culture.
The Only Thing That Matters
The discrepancy in payout to victims of U.S. military mishaps actually comes down to one simple thing, Herrold said. "Clout. The Afghanis, they have no clout. [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai, he has no clout."
The $18,500 released in response to the attack on the wedding, in fact, reportedly came from the hands of Afghan officials. The officials were members of Karzai's government, which was installed and backed by the United States.
The State Department has denied distributing any money to victims of military action, but an official did acknowledge that aid was being distributed to the area in response to the attack.
On the other hand, Afghan victims of the earlier raid on Hazar Qadam got more money than victims of the later strike on the wedding party. "They were really kind of hush payments," said Herrold.
The payments received by victims' families were reportedly paid for by the CIA, which made cash payments through local Afghan officials. "It seems they were away on their own," said John Sifton, a researcher working on a study of civilian casualty reports in Afghanistan for the activist group Human Rights Watch. "The speed with which the money was handed out in Afghanistan was sudden."
During the early days of the war, it was not uncommon for special forces and CIA agents to carry cash — usually used to buy warlords' allegiances, Siston said.
The Pentagon has never issued a formal apology to the families of those killed.
In fact, in a response to a recent inquiry about compensating victims, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Ted Wadsworth told ABCNEWS, "It is a well-established principle of international law that nations are not liable to compensate for damages occurring in the ordinary course of combat. DoD policy and practice have generally been consistent with this legal principle."
The Big Fish
In contrast, when the United States offered to compensate Beijing for the 1999 attack on its Belgrade embassy, the arrangements were much more formal. The payments came directly from a branch of the State Department, USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
It was also a quid-pro-quo, with Beijing agreeing to pay $2.87 million for damages to American diplomatic missions in protests that followed the mistaken American strike.
China is one of the United States' most important trading partners, and at the time of the airstrike, bilateral relations had already been rocked by charges of Chinese spying and human-rights abuses, and lobbying from labor groups against its imminent entry into the World Trade Organization.
In Italy, lawyers won $2 million for the families of each victim. The victims — seven Germans, five Belgians, three Italians, two Poles, two Austrians and one Dutch person — had their compensation paid for by both the U.S. and Italian governments under a NATO agreement that covers civil and criminal activities of its troops in foreign countries.
The lawyers had wanted the payouts made directly though a congressional appropriation, but that proposal died in a conference committee.
At the time, Italy was not only a NATO ally, but an important air base for U.S. military aircraft operating over the the former Yugoslavia. The U.S. presence was already quite unpopular there.
It took Iran nearly a decade to settle its case against the United States, and that decision only came after the country had filed cases with the International Court of Justice and the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal. As part of the agreement, Iran dropped its claims in the courts, and the State Department insisted that the money would go directly to the victims' families.
It Could Happen to You
The situation for foreign victims of U.S. military action actually isn't all that different than that of victims of tragedy in the United States, said Bill Monning, an expert in international law at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
He pointed to the tragedy of Sept. 11. The families of those victims, he said, had received a lot of support, though there are still outstanding issues on federal compensation payments.
"[But] people in Oklahoma City, even federal employees didn't necessarily qualify for that kind of compensation," he said.
While Herrold might have attributed the differences in compensation to "clout," Monning uses the term "political impact." The attacks on Sept. 11 struck high-profile sights like New York, and the Pentagon, he said. "It raised it to another level of popular outrage."
However, Herrold said the way in which Washington assigned relative values to life was more worrying in the international sphere, because it might even guide foreign policy.
These equations probably guided the way a war was run in Afghanistan, he said. "Afghans are at the bottom of the totem pole, below Palestinians, below Iraqis," he said.
In terms of life expectancy, lifetime earnings — "we're talking about very low prices here." And that sort of calculus, he said, was deceiving.
"It's a really dangerous game," he said.