Who counts? The war on terror requires an accurate body count, so U.S. policy can be held accountable. (margin notes).

THE SUDDEN RESURGENCE OF VIOLENCE IN Afghanistan that was "Operation Anaconda" claimed eight American lives and a number of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters that remains in dispute. You will scan media reports in vain, however, for any accounting of the family members killed with these fighters in the mountains near Gardez. A few weeks before Anaconda began, an unmanned CIA Predator drone launched a Hellfire missile into a group of Afghan tribesmen, killing at least three.

Apparently, the group aroused suspicions by being armed in a country where virtually every adult male carries a weapon and because one of them was tall enough to maybe be Osama bin Laden. That same week Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld acknowledged, without apology, that another U.S. raid had been undertaken in error and that the tribesmen killed had been members of friendly militia forces.

How high is the death count growing? According to one study, as of December 29, there had been at least 3,959 civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It will be hard to confirm or deny these figures. That's part of the problem. There seems to be little interest on the part of the U.S. government or the American media to find out for sure how many have fallen in this war on terror.

Of course, the raw numbers won't tell us if America "won" the war against the Taliban. Are the Israelis "winning" because their loss of 300 or so pales in comparison to the more than 1,000 Palestinian deaths? And a straight review of the numbers won't legitimize or delegitimize the campaign against the Taliban. No one, least of all most Afghans, is sorry to see them fall from power.

So what do the numbers tell us? For one thing, they begin to suggest how much collateral damage will be acceptable to U.S. policymakers as they execute this global fight against terror. Despite the obsession with body count bookkeeping that typified the Vietnam War, American leadership of late has claimed not to be all that interested in tracking the numbers as air and artillery bombing claimed civilian lives in Panama, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. Most Americans and a lazy mainstream press allowed the feigned indifference of Pentagon planners to pass unmolested.

If our cause is just, does it matter how many fall? The uncomplicated answer is, well, yes, it does. Certainly to the actual human beings who make up those body counts--and the families they leave behind--it matters. But leaving aside even the powerful interest of just war teaching on proportionality and civilian immunity, we as the American people have a more selfish reason to keep good accounts of the casualties our policies inflict.

A few hard questions have to be asked based on this unpleasant record-keeping: How deadly accurate are our "smart" bombs really? How much "collateral damage" is caused by the use of indiscriminate weapons like cluster bombs? Do our methods indicate that U.S. strategists place a different, lower value on the lives of people in the developing societies we have been confronting in recent conflicts?

Whatever the intent, the effectiveness of U.S. policy cannot be deemed a success if this demonstration war in Afghanistan simply intimidates enough of the globe's malcontents into leaving Americans alone for a few years, even a few decades. We claim an interest in a justice and decency that must be measured in lifetimes, not election cycles. Our foreign policy and the military muscle it directs must reflect that. Other people are counting up the corpses now, people who may begin feeling their own righteousness seething for an accounting if they perceive that different measures of the value of human life are being applied because of the accident of geography.

As Catholics, we have been taught to value all life and to see all people as our brothers and sisters. We grieve for those lost on September 11 in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, but our church includes a family that transcends the illusory boundaries of national frontiers. We need to stretch our spiritual imaginations just a little to grieve, too, for those innocents who have been lost in Afghanistan and who may be sacrificed in future campaigns in this war on terror.

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.