How One Man With a Laptop Counts the Afghanistan War Dead
BY Nick Judd | Monday, November 22 2010
The New York Times' Noam Cohen had a story yesterday about Michael White, a programmer, whose iCasualties.org, where he keeps a tally of the dead and injured among coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is widely used by mainstream media outlets:
Without exactly trying, iCasualties has become a cog in the reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. Local newspapers like The Poughkeepsie Journal of New York, wire services like Agence France-Presse and international organizations like the British Broadcasting Corporation routinely use iCasualties data to provide context (the number of New Yorkers who have been wounded in Iraq, 1,503; the total number of British troops killed in Afghanistan, 345).
The indexes for Iraq and for Afghanistan, produced by researchers at the Brookings Institution to track a range of statistics to analyze progress (or lack thereof) in both countries, use iCasualties for their basic indicators about how the fighting is going.
“From our perspective, iCasualties is a pretty invaluable tool,” said Ian Livingston, a senior research assistant at Brookings who works on the indexes. “We count a lot of things, and it takes hours and hours to count things.”
“Having a site like iCasualties,” he said, “someone who has been compiling this data, has been fairly transparent and we can trust is a big help.”
Working from news articles and official reports, White puts in time that newspaper reporters and academic researchers don't have — but what he's doing is, in part, aggregating work already done by newspaper reporters and academic researchers.
Mr. White says he wanted to offer the public a way to assess independently the progress of the war:
“I think there is a need for some place you can go and say these are the figures. People have to agree on numbers. Right now, people don’t agree on numbers, whether we are talking about the economy, jobs, the deficit or global warming.”
Mr. White points to 2006 as the year when journalists felt confident enough to use iCasualties’s data as their own. “I had three years of doing it,” he said. “I was not just somebody out there doing a blog, but I took the time to build a database, to build, I don’t know what the word is, my own journalistic standards before putting it out there.”
While the database he makes available is limited in scope to what official sources like the Department of Defense decide to release and the hodgepodge of casualties noted by reporters abroad, forcing those sources to confirm casualties they otherwise may not immediately acknowledge, he's another example of how someone with time and a little skill can make it harder to spin a debate by altering the facts.