A report released over the weekend by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said the civilian death toll of the war there hit an all-time high in 2011. According to the report (PDF), 3,021 civilians died last year in fighting or violent attacks, up eight percent from the 2010 number and nearly double the figure for 2007. Civilian deaths rose for the fifth straight year.

The U.N. placed responsibility for the majority of killings squarely on the shoulders of the Taliban and allied anti-government forces, blaming them for more than three quarters of civilian deaths. Here’s a chart from the U.N. report attributing blame for civilian killings in 2010 and 2011, with blue representing anti-government forces’ responsibility and red representing pro-government forces’ responsibility:

Improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, which accounted for 45 percent of anti-government attacks in a six month period in 2011, caused more civilian deaths — 967 total during 2009 through 2011 — than any other tactic used by anti-government forces. But targeted killings, accounting for nearly 500 deaths in that period, and suicide bombings were also on the rise.

Aerial attacks accounted for the most civilian deaths caused by pro-government forces, which include the U.S.-led international coalition there. The U.N. report noted a nine percent uptick from 2010 to 187 such deaths in 2011. Night raids, which international forces continue to carry out over objections by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, saw a 22 percent drop in civilian deaths from 2010, down to just 63 in 2011.

The report paints a bleak picture for Afghan civilians, with injuries from fighting also on the rise. The report said:

As 2011 unfolded, ordinary Afghan people experienced growing intrusion into and disruption of their daily lives by the armed conflict in their country. Conflict and insecurity displaced 185,632 Afghans in 2011, an increase of 45 percent from 2010.

Thousands more Afghans lost their livelihoods and property, were denied access to justice, had their right to freedom of movement restricted or taken away, and had their access to food, health care and education compromised. The unremitting toll of civilian casualties coupled with pervasive intimidation affected many civilians directly, and many more indirectly, by fueling uncertainty, tension and fear.

With the first signs of possible peace talks and an imminent transition from U.S.-led forces to Afghan forces, the U.N. report called for both sides of the conflict to reaffirm and enforce international humanitarian law.

Reacting to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s announcement yesterday that U.S.-led international forces would shift from their lead role in combat operations to a primary role of training Afghan forces, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney resorted to distorting the announcement before a Las Vegas crowd. Calling President Obama “misguided and so naive,” Romney said:

Today, his secretary of defense unleashed such a policy. His secretary of defense said that on a day certain, in the middle of 2013, we’re going to pull out our combat troops from Afghanistan… So the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it. Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with and tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops?

But Panetta did not announce any troop withdrawals. He said that in in mid-2013 the U.S. and its allies will shift in roles from one of primarily combat to one of primarily training and advising local allies — a move many experts have said is a necessary step toward ending the war. And this plan isn’t necessarily all that new. U.S. commander of international forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen laid it out last month. In fact, Panetta even added, amid the same announcement that Romney misstated, that U.S. troops would remain at the ready to fight if needed. “It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be combat-ready; we will be, because we always have to be in order to defend ourselves,” Panetta said.

The White House’s recent drive to end the war in Afghanistan includes efforts to bring about a negotiated peace with various groups including, but not limited to, the Taliban. The strategy brought CIA director David Petraeus to hold exploratory talks with Ghairat Baheer, the son-in-law of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar despite Hekmatyar’s past support for the Taliban and al Qaeda attacks.

But the White House’s efforts to explore a negotiated settlement to the 10-year war in Afghanistan haven’t been welcomed by the administration’s hawkish critics. J.D. Gordon, a Fox News contributor and former Herman Cain foreign policy adviser said to Fox News’ Jonathan Hunt last Friday that negotiating with the Taliban was akin to doing business with Nazis:

JONATHAN HUNT: The Taliban are still trying to kill us on pretty much a daily if not hourly basis and now we’re going to talk to the Taliban. Where’s the logic in that?

J.D. Gordon: I don’t really think there’s a lot of logic other than the administration’s desire to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, which I could understand. [...] But I think negotiating with the Taliban is a mistake because, number one, they’re terrorists. And number two, they’re a lot like the Nazis. Instead of being supremacists for race though, they’re supremacists for their tribe and supremacists for their religion.

Watch it:

Gordon, whose foreign policy background includes serving as a public affairs officer at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and working at various right-wing pressure groups, continued his simplistic explanation of Afghanistan’s tribal politics with the observation, “If you look at Afghanistan you see it’s so much of a different country than the West.”

Gordon’s less than insightful analysis might offer some explanation for Herman Cain’s inability to lay out a cohesive foreign policy vision.

But while Gordon and Fox News choose to portray the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan as analogous to the European theater of World War II, Stephen Hadley of the U.S. Institute of Peace and John Podesta, chair of the Center for American Progress, argued in a ForeignPolicy.com column last week that the war in Afghanistan “will not end by military means alone.” Hadley, a George W. Bush administration adviser, and Podesta, chief of staff in the Clinton White House, concluded that “Efforts to reach a settlement should include an approach to Taliban elements that are ready to give up the fight and become part of the political process.”

The authors pushed back at critics, such as Gordon, writing, “Such an approach would not — as some have suggested — constitute ‘surrender’ to America’s enemies. Rather, convincing combatants to leave the insurgency and enter into the political process is the hallmark of a successful counterinsurgency effort.”