US military Afghanistan civilian, payments in Afghanistan in recent years

 US military Afghanistan civilian, payments in Afghanistan in recent years.

The U.S. military has made about $2 million in condolence payments to civilians in Afghanistan over the past five years, according to Pentagon data that sheds new light on how officials have sought to address the impact of unintended injury and death in America’s longest war.

The catalogue of “ex gratia payments,” which has not been made public previously, shows that the amount of condolence offerings has fluctuated in recent years, peaking in 2016 with nearly 300 payments totaling $1.4 million. Individual sums have varied dramatically, ranging from $131 to $40,000.

The tally obtained by The Washington Post, which also includes “battle damage” outlays and payments to families of local partner forces killed in the line of duty, provides a rare glimpse into the military’s uneven, typically opaque handling of the civilian toll of battlefield operations.

But activists said the military must do far more to mitigate civilian harm, calling on the Pentagon to standardize and increase amends payments under a more transparent system, even as the United States seeks to wind down nearly two decades of counterinsurgent wars.

In recent years, operations have been conducted largely from the air, meaning that troops have little up-close interaction with adversaries — and the noncombatants who are sometimes caught in the crossfire.

Daniel Mahanty, director of the U.S. program for the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), said the Pentagon has become more responsive but that “the process has been stymied by a lack of transparency or consistency and internal doubts about the value of the program.”

Those factors have made it “impossible to know where the military stands on providing condolence payments to survivors and victims, and making it nearly impossible to know how to pursue a claim,” Mahanty said.

The new data, which details payments from 2015 to 2018, comes as the Trump administration seeks to conclude the long campaign in Afghanistan with plans to withdraw additional troops ahead of hoped-for peace talks and reduce involvement in other areas that have dominated Pentagon officials’ attention since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Together with 2019 data made public earlier this summer, the information provides new insights as the Pentagon develops its first-ever military-wide policy on preventing and responding to civilian casualties, an initiative that began in 2018 amid scrutiny over a massive discrepancy between estimated death tolls recorded by the U.S. military and outside groups.

In the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, for example, the watchdog organization Airwars estimates that at least 8,200 civilians have been killed since 2014. The U.S. military puts that figure far lower, around 1,380.

The Pentagon has made amends payments to civilians for decades, since at least the Korean War, but they have generally been distributed in an ad hoc manner, varying significantly between conflicts and incidents. It has typically been difficult for civilians to seek out such payments.