The war in Afghanistan between the Taliban and the US-led coalition in 2001–2021 was closely monitored for civilian casualties. The UN, international and Afghan NGOs (non-governmental organizations), local and international media and, eventually, the coalition itself, kept a close tab on types, frequency, and context of casualties. Investigators and reporters mostly had easy access to the site of incidents. Civilian casualties caused by the coalition (International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)) were of particular concern in the West because the force was authorized by the UN, thereby obligated to operate within the bounds of international humanitarian law.

As a result, we have a great deal of raw data as well as analysis on the subject. The foundational analytical work is Neta Crawford’s Accountability for Killing (2013) and reports by Brown University’s Cost of War project. Crawford shows that organizational imperatives to keep their own casualties down led ISAF in the early period to adopt methods of warfare that entailed high risk of large civilian casualties (such as dropping a 2,000 pound bomb on a village compound where a Taliban was hiding). This predictably caused high civilian casualties; hence the civilian toll was the result of a “normal accident” rather than “genuine accident,” Crawford argues. When ISAF moved to a counter-insurgency mode of “winning hearts and minds,” it became important to reduce the civilian cost of operations, and so ISAF did. Civilian casualties from airstrikes, in particular, came down drastically during General Stanley Mc Chrystal’s tenure as force commander (2009–2010). Tactical gains must not defeat strategic objectives, as he repeatedly told his troops.

What does the massive book by Thomas Gregory add to this well-known and already well told story? The author, a lecturer in international relations at Auckland University has trawled the internet for information about civilian casualties, scrutinized military field manuals and tactical directives and interviewed numerous ISAF military personnel. His exhaustive research confirms that ISAF was able to adjust operational methods and reduce civilian casualties when strategic military priorities required this.

The distinctive feature of his work lies in the application of a critical security studies lens. It is a wide lens, he tells us, covering gendered theories of war, poststructuralism, and postcolonial studies. It prominently includes Michel Foucault’s work on biopower (management of populations that systematizes chances of life or death), Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics (systems fostering “living-dead” in colonial regimes and occupied Palestine), and Judith Butler’s work on “grievable” and “ungrievable” lives.

What new insight does this lens provide? Gregory tells us that counterinsurgency is a variant of biopolitics because its objective is to control the population. Economic projects in contested areas, for example, become “biopolitical interventions” (p. 61). We also learn that there are hierarchies of lives in war: the enemy is dehumanized, and some lives are more “grievable” than others. His main thesis is at first glance more novel: Restrictions on the use of force to spare civilian lives were not driven by humanitarian concerns but followed a “necropolitical logic that was concerned with winning wars in the most efficient manner “(p. 230). Measures to protect civilians thus became a means to pursue the war; protection was, in effect, weaponized. Even ISAF’s data counts on civilian casualties, designed in part to adjust tactics that would reduce the toll, were drawn into what Gregory calls “a specific assemblage of violent intentionality” (p. 230), or as he writes with alliterative flourish—“coalition counts were complicit in the creation of corpses” (p. 266).

It should come as no surprise that the coalition’s main mission was to kill or capture insurgents. Their efforts to avoid “normal accidents” and reduce what in legal terms would be unnecessary loss of civilian life by adjusting military tactics, were from a legal and ethical perspective a positive development. Gregory acknowledges this point. More controversially, he maintains that protection constitutes a tool of war because it promotes the illusion that wars can be made humane and, by implication, more acceptable. Tracking civilian casualties to use firepower more precisely and reduce so-called collateral damage “helped to rehabilitate the conflict….because [it] suggested that coalition violence could be controlled so that insurgents could be eliminated without harming innocent civilians” (p. 259). Similarly, ex-gratia payments to families whose members had been mistakenly killed served to mask and thereby maintain the conflict. By giving the impression that the problem was managed, protection and compensation “allow us to have our wars and to keep on killing civilians, without needing to confront the consequences” (p. 06).

Is the inference valid? The claim that restricting the methods of warfare by protecting civilians makes wars more legitimate and/or likely is usually posed in relation to the development of international humanitarian law. It is an old debate, which Gregory does not pursue in depth. If he did, he might look at two major, current wars, one in Europe and one in occupied Palestine and consider a dialectic approach. If humanitarianism facilitates and maintains wars, is the opposite also true? Does untrammelled warfare with no regard for civilian lives shock us into stopping the slaughter by exposing the true nature of war? When hitting civilian targets in Ukraine, Russian authorities offer few if any references to provisions in international humanitarian law for “necessary” or “proportional” violence. In Palestine, the entire civilian population has become the target. There is no mask of protection to weaponize. Does this make the violence illegal and illegitimate? Undoubtedly yes. Has this stopped the violence or even reduced its intensity? Evidently not. The hopeful era of the “Responsibility to Protect” seems long gone.

Gregory’s book reads in large part as a cri de coeur against the pain and suffering of war. His claim that protection of civilians has a downside by facilitating further violence could—if not further scrutinized and contextualized—serve to undermine the case for humanitarian constraints on military action, thereby increasing the civilian suffering that he deplores.