Afghanistan war logs
Junior
4,853 Posts
So, anybody checked out the Wikileaks yet with all the leaked military files?
Unsurprisingly Wikileaks seems to have been crushed under the number of hits it's received but the Guardian's got an easy to use clickable map with what they mark as 300 of the key incidents:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/interactive/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-events
While you'd no doubt have similar stories from any major conflict it does fascinate and horrify me reading the actual details of the day to day incidents.
Also, from a media point of view, always interesting to see how the three papers offer different interpretations on the same files.
The fog of war is unusually dense in Afghanistan. When it lifts, as it does today with the Guardian's publication of selections from a leaked trove of secret US military logs, a very different landscape is revealed from the one with which we have become familiar. These war logs ??? written in the heat of engagement ??? show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up and sanitised "public" war, as glimpsed through official communiques as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting.
The war logs consist of more than 92,000 records of actions of the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009. The logs were sent to Wikileaks, the website which publishes untraceable material from whistleblowers. In a collaboration with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, the Guardian has spent weeks sifting through this ocean of data, which has gradually yielded the hidden texture and human horror stories inflicted day to day during an often clumsily prosecuted war. It is important to treat the material for what it is: a contemporaneous catalogue of conflict. Some of the more lurid intelligence reports are of doubtful provenance: some aspects of the coalition's recording of civilian deaths appear unreliable. The war logs ??? classified as secret ??? are encyclopedic but incomplete. We have removed any material which threatens the safety of troops, local informants and collaborators.
With these caveats, the collective picture that emerges is a very disturbing one. We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported; of hundreds of border clashes between Afghan and Pakistani troops, two armies which are supposed to be allies; of the existence of a special forces unit whose tasks include killing Taliban and al-Qaida leaders; of the slaughter of civilians caught by the Taliban's improvised explosive devices; and of a catalogue of incidents where coalition troops have fired on and killed each other or fellow Afghans under arms.
Reading these logs, many may suspect there is sometimes a casual disregard for the lives of innocents. A bus that fails to slow for a foot patrol is raked with gunfire, killing four passengers and wounding 11 others. The documents tell how, in going after a foreign fighter, a special forces unit ended up with seven dead children. The infants were not their immediate priority. A report marked "Noforn" (not for foreign elements of the coalition) suggests their main concern was to conceal the mobile rocket system that had just been used.
In these documents, Iran's and Pakistan's intelligence agencies run riot. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is linked to some of the war's most notorious commanders. The ISI is alleged to have sent 1,000 motorbikes to the warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani for suicide attacks in Khost and Logar provinces, and to have been implicated in a sensational range of plots, from attempting to assassinate President Hamid Karzai to poisoning the beer supply of western troops. These reports are unverifiable and could be part of a barrage of false information provided by Afghan intelligence. But yesterday's White House response to the claims that elements of the Pakistan army had been so specifically linked to the militants made it plain that the status quo is unacceptable. It said that safe havens for militants within Pakistan continued to pose "an intolerable threat" to US forces. However you cut it, this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain is about to hand over gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national government in Kabul. Quite the contrary. After nine years of warfare, the chaos threatens to overwhelm. A war fought ostensibly for the hearts and minds of Afghans cannot be won like this.
Unsurprisingly Wikileaks seems to have been crushed under the number of hits it's received but the Guardian's got an easy to use clickable map with what they mark as 300 of the key incidents:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/interactive/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-events
While you'd no doubt have similar stories from any major conflict it does fascinate and horrify me reading the actual details of the day to day incidents.
Also, from a media point of view, always interesting to see how the three papers offer different interpretations on the same files.
Comments
Army feels that support is ebbing, calls for pulling-out get louder.
As a calculated risk, it decides to ride the bad press involved with slaughtering civilians, to reveal how totally fucked-up everything is.
The whole region is at risk of descending into chaos!
Public opinion changes.
Emmanuel Goldstein lives on, and must be brought to justice.
Re-commence two minutes hate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/wikileaks-war-logs-back-story
(Too long to post apparently).
It IS a horrible job but someone has to do it.
I'd say it's a good thing that at least these events are now documented in such logs.
All leaks are on purpose. No?
There was just a falling out between the General in charge, and the Commander in Chief.
might have something to do with the timing.
wot
The timing with McCrystal's ouster seems purely coincidental at least, insofar as Wikileaks couldn't have predicted the Rolling Stone article and its repercussions. Unless the Guardian article above is lying (no reason to assume it is), Wikileaks approached the NYT, DS and The Guardian in late May, weeks before the McCrystsal fiasco broke.
If anything spurred the timing, it was events on the ground in Afghanistan, which are partially what encouraged the military insider to leak the documents to Wikileaks to begin with. The site then made the decision to share these documents with the three news sources based on other events swirling around, namely the arrest of the whistleblower. I think these documents would have been leaked regardless of the change in leadership in Afghanistan. Shit, the war could be OVER and I bet they still would have leaked this.
I don't, for a moment buy Duderonomy's rationale. The longer this war stretches on, the less patient Americans get with it. No amount of bad news is likely going to reverse public opinion to suddenly say "we need a surge on top of a surge!" Remember, Obama just committed a ton of new troops and resources, earlier in the year, before any of this shit broke. There's no logic in thinking that the leak of a lot of bad news is going to harden American resolve. If anything, it'd sway public opinion towards thinking, "wait, wtf are we doing there again? Why are our soldiers being kidnapped and killed daily? Why do the Pakistanis look like they're stabbing us in the back?"
No fucking way this story works in the government or military's favor. The only possible spin is that they're already trying: "see, these documents prove that we needed to increase our commitment to Afghanistan." But that's not exactly a positive spin; it's simply trying to ameloriate damage and deflect from past mistakes to the present situation.
All you need, at this point, is something equivalent to either the Tet Offensive or a My Lai/Abu Ghraid fiasco and that might be enough to tip things over permanently to a quick American withdrawal with no resolution.
The whistle blower may just want more transparency. Possible.
more likely she has an agenda.
Every point of view is represented in the government and the military.
We can't know what that agenda is.
Some ideas include the ones you said and discounted.
Just because the leaks don't work the way they wanted to doesn't mean they weren't hoping.
Other reasons could be whatever the opposite of what you listed looks like.
Other reason include the desire to embarrass someone.
They may have been looking to embarrass Obama, Bush, mcChrystal... Who knows?
Why did wikileaks hold them 2 months, until the week mcChrystal retried?
That doesn't wash, logically, for me.
In this particular case I don't see why anybody has to do this job, or what exactly the job even is.
Despite his claims, Obama has never articulated the current mission or how we will know when it has been accomplished.
Can't you let the man live already?
Agreed.
l remember watching the speech where he called for more troops.
l thought he articulated the current mission and how it would be accomplished.
Do l remember wrong?
To me it was vague mumbo-jumbo.
The essence of a mission is that you can define when it's accomplished - I still haven't heard what that will be. It's not the establishment of democracy, it's not the defeat of the Taliban (whom we're negotiating with now) - what is it?
Stopping the bad guys getting tooled up with nukes b/w
Protecting the Western oil investments in those sand lots
Spreading democracy (free-market capitalism)? Stablising a country for foreign (multi-national corp) investment?
Or was it rooting out Bin Laden/destroying Al Qaeda? That seemed to shift to the un-connected Taliban without much debate. The US seemed to shift Teh War On Terror to Iraq without Saddam having been responsible for supplying Afghanistani Al Qaeda with their guns.
I'm just suspicious of the way that other countries are implicated in the leaks. USA has been arming and funding wars, divide & conquer, for yonks, yet get surprised when it happens to them. Surely if Iran is funding the Taliban, it's payback for US funding Iraq? Or just as likely free-market capitalism in action. It may not be the governments of Pakistan or Iran that are selling the guns, but if America is responsible for creating the demand, somebody will take the opportunity... it's the American dream.
Without spilling the blood, or losing money down a banking black-hole, China has been looking long-term. Chinese firms have bought up the mining rights from Afghanistan. USA owes China so much money, you'd have to travel through different dimensions to calculate it all. But USA is the country doing the dirty work in Afghanistan (with their junior partners).
Haliburton will want some new contracts soon.
edit: hope it's all just a massive cock-up though
That's not the mission and what oil is in Afghanistan or Pakistan?????