changing how you think about afghanistan: a massive leak of military documents.
 

this is a series of reports and documentation based on a leak of some 90,000 records that detail activity in the afghanistan war. it is a co-production of the guardian, wikileaks, der speigel and the ny times.

here's the link to the main page:

Afghanistan: The war logs | World news | guardian.co.uk

here's an article introducing the series:

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation | World news | The Guardian

there's alot to read here, so with the collective's indulgence what i propose is that the thread develop as folk have a chance to read the material and process it.

suffice it to say that this dissolves entirely the sanitized, managed image of the afghanistan war that's been manufactured by the pentagon's department of marketing war.

sometimes it seems that we've become so passive about problematic information that we forget it's there, forget it's the case, forget altogether that we are being sold war like its a fucking product. it was the case with the bush people. it's still the case with the obama administration.

i think this leak is great.
but i'm only starting to burrow into the material.

I would like to add a few words starting with an explanation:

These are SIGACTS (Significant Activities) logs and usually documented by *someone* at a headquarters as events are unfolding and as such often reflect someone's initial opinion.

I don't see how this changes much though. We knew civilian casualties happenned, this shows that the military is doing diligance with regard to reporting these incidents.

edited

thanks, slims...i'm still just burrowing. i haven't reached any conclusions about anything yet. i don't usually have conclusions in mind as i start reading (believe it or not).

but it is obviously good to know more rather than less about what the documents are that form the basis of this information.

on the logs: when you say "someone" what do you mean?

what i think is of some interest here is the extent to which this material may reveal the artificiality of the marketing of the war domestically. how that may work is at this point not clear to me, but we'll see.

it's an interesting transnational collaboration, though, that lay behind this project.
personally, i'd like to see more of this sort of thing. each one helps push the nation-state closer to the ash-heap of history. but that's another story.

Here's how SIGACTS generally get entered into the database:

When something happens there is a lot of radio chatter/data between the unit in contact and their headquarters. Most units have someone who is basically the designated 'note taker' who is back at the headquarters and who writes down the relevant information as best as they can interpret it from the radio. They end up putting it in the Army version of google-earth so that other units will be aware of the situation. It is usually done fast and dirty and then forgotten about after the fact so the information often remains confused and only partially accurate with errors in both directions.

Sorry for the confused post, but I just got back home and am enjoying a nice bottle of wine.

Hey, look, another thread I won't be touching with a ten foot pole.

Have fun storming the castle!

awesome! then don't post anything else to the thread!
have fun not storming anything!

a link to der speigel's coverage of this material:
The Afghanistan Protocol: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

ny times coverage:
The War Logs - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

wikileaks:
Kabul War Diary

not surprisingly the white house is not pleased...

As a student of WWII, I am always surprised at our modern take on warfare and the propaganda surrounding it. I have no illusions about the difficulty of war, the death (sometimes unnecessary and innocent), or that the information surrounding military operations is managed by the department making war. I have not read these documents, and I won't. In short, I don't have clearance to read them, so I'm not supposed to see them.

My opinion of this theatre of operations is that we have become distracted by other untimely operations and this operation should have been brought to its conclusion years ago in a concentrated effort. Dragging it out has been costly to all involved and there is a strong political element to the length of this operation and the difficulty in concluding it.

As to that political element: There is little doubt these documents were obtained illegally and published by people who are against the war. These people believe their publication will hinder the efforts of our military, increase opposition to this operation, and ultimately remove coalition presence from Afghanistan. Most who will read these documents are already against the war and will read them in order to bolster their objections.

Because of this leak, troops will be in greater danger. Their missions will be harder and the risk of protracted engagements with even more civilian casualties will rise. So, little is gained from their distribution. Well, except the media just made another shit-ton of money off us suckers, who can't get enough "information".

I agree with Cimarron, I don't want any information that would endanger the men and women fighting overseas. Wither I agree or disagree with how the war is being handled, there are people fighting over there that could be put into even more danger because of this leak.

War (from the comfy seat of my Laz-e-Boy COMMANDER (c)) is nasty and not something I want to put my nose into. I also don't want my friends and family (and members of TFP who are currently fighting or on leave from their tours there) being put into danger because of trumped up hacker who thinks he is a "freedom fighter" throws detailed information about our troops on the internet.

Personally I think the guy/girl/"they" that did this should either A) be beaten down by those he/she/they put into danger or B) go serve in an active war zone when the enemy knows what you are doing before you do it. See how they like it.

NY Times has said that they are not going to post any information that will "put our troops in danger", but if they know there is revealing information on a public domain, don't you think the enemy has access to that same information?

Interesting. I'd love to read it, but I think that like Cimm I'm not qualified to read it nor am I qualified to have a grasp on the opinion I will have from reading it.

We've seen what happens when unqualified people get to put their opinion out there for things like budget votes and you wind up with an incapacitated state government ala California.

I'd like to not see that happen to the US Military.

i don't buy that argument at all. first, there's absolutely no support for the accusation--neither of you has looked at the material, so how on earth would you know whether it compromises anything?
second, wikileaks has redacted the materials that's been released so far and there's another group of about 16k files for redaction.

third, the material released covers the period 2004-2009.

fourth: the packaging of war for domestic consumption strikes me as being about the most anti-democratic imaginable thing. better that consent for war has to deal with a sense of what is really at stake. what i've found interesting about these logs so far is the degree to which they reflect something of the floating surface of war, so the reality of rumors and intel and accidents and deliberate killings, failures and problems, limits of co-operation and problems with alliances (pakistan)...and this not because of a war-movie kind of voyeurism. more because it is chaos and ugly and should not be undertaken without a clear objective, war. and afghanistan was undertaken without a clear objective or a coherent strategy. it is a policy fuck up of very considerable proportions and it is a policy fuck up that is predominantly owned by the right.

so of course there's a problem with the release.

o security security. horseshit. most all the whining is about political self-interest channel through some hypocritical invocation of the Abstract Troops who are Being Endangered.

and so what if the people behind wikileaks oppose the war in afghanistan?
does that mean the information released isn't real?
what is the point of this "objection"?

better to know what's going on more than less and not to rely on marketing departments that sell war like its a kind of deodorant.


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edit ( a little later):

the interpretive questions that hover around these files are real. i'm pleased that slims added some information above about them...for what it's worth i am reading alot of this material and it's quite helpful to know more rather than less about the status of the documents.

rb-

It compromises things because it exposes previously hidden mistakes in war which led to the death of non-combatants. "Wounds" will be reopened in the minds of villagers. Vengenace could occur against current troops, who had nothing to do with that event. That's how it endangers. I'm not implying that the taliban now knows that Private Bob is going for a smoke at 5:00 on the corner of Al Jazeera and Enshallah.

cimmaron: my wager would be, were i a wagering feller, that the folk in situ have very dense communication networks (informal in particular) and that if a local is killed by an american or other nato patrol, everyone knows about it pretty much straight away. and i imagine that if the area is question is one in which the taliban has support, so operates, so draws from in terms of personnel, they would have known pretty much straight away as well. you can also assume that the command structure in which the hypothetical patrol was inserted knew pretty much right away, as did everyone connected socially to everyone in that hypothetical patrol. so pretty much everyone would know in the effected place pretty much right away.

the people who don't know such things are folk like you and i.
that's in part because we're being managed. consent control. which is way democratic.

it's like you and i are the enemy in a war that's the marketing of war.

We are on a need-to-know basis, and we really need to know.

I am surprised the military doesn't have encryption and passwords on files. And it doesn't break up the files by year and store them in a more secure method, but still quickly searchable and accessible by those that may need the intel.

Second, I think the entire war should have been fought using covert ops who kill the enemy without a trial or a second thought. They might accidentally kill some innocents, but that will just keep the enemy off-guard. You wouldn't see the massive propaganda ability of having a huge foreign army invading Muslim countries being used to recruit new fighters.

Third, this is pretty crappy journalism. Find something interesting in the files and report that, but just getting lots of files doesn't do anything. Watergate was news because they did some real journalism and found out that laws were broken. This isn't Watergate.

And I remember a speech from the movie 'A Few Good Men' that sums up my feelings: A Few Good Men (1992) | Movie Clip - World that has walls | Destination Hollywood Tribute

the production of this piece isn't so simple as "getting a bunch of files".

check this short blog from jay rosen @ nyu;s journalism school:

PressThink: The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization

if this guy's right, we're watching something quite interesting happen to the way in which journalism gets done.

to wit:

Well, I suppose that's the difference between the Old Journalism and the new. "Journalism," being, generally, the production and publication of a record of events.

In the Old Journalism, you had a greater locus of control: publishing was prohibitively expensive and laborious. In the New Journalism, it's cheap and easy.

When "journalism" is accessible instead of something requiring an Ivory Tower, you tend to get different versions of events.

i think the new aspect of this is the co-operative ventures that are being fashioned between older journalism outlets and newer on the order of res publica (which seems like a traditional reproduction of the old apparatus outside the social hierarchies of the old apparatus, so a way for younger writers to maybe go around them--or at least get access), and, more radically, wikileaks. the position that wikileaks placed ny times/guardian/der speigel in is also quite interesting, in that you get the benefits of fact-checking/vetting from the older mode (which is really important) but staged in a manner that blows apart older forms of editorial control (the decision to suppress information resulting in its disappearance: now there's more transparency)---all this a context (wikileaks) that's outside state controls--so which is not beholden to the political pressures in any given nation-state.

this last part seems particularly important for the united states, which has operated for far too long with very strict political controls on certain types of information--and none at all on others (lindey lohan goes to jail! gasp!).

at the level of principle, then, i'm all for blowing apart the capacity of nation-states to control information in the ways they've come to be able to do since the vietnam period--so all of the neo-con information management games that took shape since thatcher's falklands adventure introduced the notion of a press pool--not to mention the odious populist right propaganda machine that took shape across the clinton period, which presupposes bad information.

btw i'm still working my way through the actual information that's available. there's alot. is anyone else actually reading this stuff?

I've been reading & trying to understand what I've been reading.
I got sidetracked a bit going back & reading other wikileaks material.
I need a bit of a break after reading this:

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/...ction_KEY=2724

This was the first time I read this..about twenty minutes ago.

rb-

It's very telling that you didn't know how to spell "Lindsay Lohan". I don't know what it says, but it's very telling. :)

Seems like a Lessons learned article.. places where they saw problems.. the only thing is.. that now that this information is out there.. (the oppositon can use this information and change there habits.. hold up we used this here and if we move it over here we can catch them unawares and "kill" off more men..

I like the idea of what wiki leaks bring to the table of information sharing..

I more then likely wont like the outcome...

the issues raised by the leak are political. they have to do with the pending vote on funding for the afghanistan adventure. the materials leaked do quite alot of reframe the debate about what the war looks like, what's going on, where things have gotten to. they also make it pretty obvious that the scenario there is civil war. maybe that's why the political class feels compelled to act as though this is all old news:

washingtonpost.com

which is the infotainment management tack of the day.
yesterday was more about endangering people.
whatever works, i suppose.

And this is an example of why I sit within the above belief.

There's no way we'll know the connections that happen before and after the documentation of the events.

Put the rest of that into scope of macro big picture battlefield, I'd be selling myself short thinking I totally had a grasp and understanding of what was happening there.

o i think it'd be naive to imagine a total grasp is had by anyone, at all, anywhere really. like most all of real life, but more intense and chaotic, war is a temporal process, so it's never really "present" simultaneously anywhere. what i think we can know is a collage. no collage is ever complete (so every collage is what it is, a collection and organization of fragments) and in some cases the fragments that were adjacent in real time are important for context & so for understanding, and in other cases the collage produces the understanding.

i think that's just the way we are in time-space, and that's what knowing is like so long as we're dealing with processes. you can know the outlines (so for war, you can know, say, the broad strategic situation or you can know the logistical chains) but you can't really "know" events. you know fragments. you make stories about them ex post facto.

all this nonsense about certainty. i don't know where it comes from. well, i do, but i can't figure out why anyone takes it seriously. except that it makes being in the world seem a bit less scary because it allows the illusion of stability. there's recurrence but no stability. not really. not when you think about it.

anyway, my biggest objection with the way this information was framed is a version of the above: it was presented as "the reality" when in fact much of it is a documentation of 92,000 or so pictures of reality. there's no objectivity, and these documents make no pretense to them, nor should anyone make a pretense that they do.

but they do present a picture that's entirely out of phase with the marketing of the war. so it's a problem for political consent. personally, i oppose the war so am fine with that.

second, we've seen a series of responses from the war marketing machine to the leak. they've been simultaneously poo-pooed (o "we" already know all this) and declared a Danger to Our Boys. so they're not secret secrets. how's that work? and now you're seeing another push-back: o these documents aren't "the whole story" well no shit. and adding factoids to them arbitrarily isn't the whole story either. it's just another story.

problems of interpretation, of judgment and the data its based on: they never, ever go away.

My 2 cents:
I have severely conflicting reactions.
As you may know, I generally distrust large institutions of any kind. So I'm not the slightest bit surprised that, apparently, the military and the govt were feeding us inaccurate, unduly optimistic information about how the war situation was going. And for liars or spinners who otherwise aren't accountable, sunlight is a good thing.

On the other hand, even people like me with libertarian tendencies recognize that military operations are one thing that it has to be the govt who does it. And so far as I can tell, the release of this stuff will endanger both our soldiers and the Afghans and Pakistanis who have been helping them.

Talk about conflict.

The WSJ is reporting that the military has identified the GI who stole the documents. Firing squad - no matter how one feels about the war, this breach is treasonous. Examples need to be made.

I wonder if he'll be tortured first.

EDIT: No, I don't think he will be. He's not brown enough.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...LEFTTopStories

it's interesting the twist the leak has put the administration into, isn't it?

they're floating canard after canard trying to make the problems with the policy logic that informs the afghanistan war---which translates into a strategic problem---which translates into alot of useless, unnecessary death and destruction and attrition---disappear back under a rug of some kind.

because **that** is the problem that's revealed through this leak of documents.
well that, and the fact that we in the publick have been played for chumps in the marketing of the war. but we're so used to that here in the united of states that it doesn't even get a rise out of folk.

so clearly, shoot the guy who leaked the documents.

jesus.

edit:

http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/?p=6255

what is said in this blog post is also the case.

I agree 100% with Cimarron29414.

I will say this, what he did was not treason, but is closer to sedition. He disobeyed orders, stole government classified documents (that contained intel of an active war), released said documents to the public (and our enemies), and conspired to steal more (before he was turned in by a hacker, which is ironic in it's self). I'm sure there is a whole buttload of other laws he broke, but those are the major ones. We should pat this guy on the back and give him a cookie? Fuck no.

This guy not only broke the law, he broke MILITARY law. How far would this guy have went if he wouldn't have been caught? This may not be "current" intel about our troop movements, but would that have stopped him? Seems to me his crimes started escalating as he got away with it. He was PROUD of what he did and wanted to damage the military more. I think given enough time, this guy would have stepped up to the crime of Treason.

I don't like the war or what has become of it. I don't agree with it and only support the solders fighting it, not our government's view on what we are fighting for. That doesn't make it less of a heinous crime because I don't support the war.

An example of him should be made and I stand by that statement.

i don't see this leak as anything remotely like treason. nor sedition for that matter. nor espionage. none of it. i see it as an act of whistle-blowing, the sort of thing that a person of conscience might do in order to stop or impede stupid or unethical or otherwise reprehensible actions from being carried out by the corporate person for whom he or she worked. i see it as an ethical action. as a political act. in a civilian context, this guy would be protected by whistle-blowing laws from any prosecution at all. that is the way it should be.

no organization, particularly not one charged with killing people, should be above critique.

i don't know what's going to happen to this cat in reality--what's clear is that prosecuting him is going to be a political problem.
i expect nothing will happen to him.
which is as it should be.

but if this is treason, then i say: there should be alot more of it.

Contrary to belief of some, intelligence is not designated "classified" just to put one over on the public.

um...what?

rb-

I've tried a few times to fashion a response that might bridge the difference between our views, but I believe the gap to be too large. I always appreciate reading a differing point of view and I thank you for contributing it.

You are looking for a witch to burn, rb, as you are doing in your Gulf spill thread, and that witch is main stream media and the government's "propaganda machine." As much as you like to trumpet your "objectivity," THAT is your true objective, and it is purely subjective. You are willing to whitewash any reason that correspondence is designated "classified" to support your position, even though, as hard as it may be for you to believe, you are not qualified to come to any conclusion. You will arrive at point "C" from point "A" by circumventing point "B;" what you lack in context or understanding of the truth of the situation you will fill with articles from other unqualified people, as long as they support your hypothesis and run counter to the "official" stance, which is the real target of your inquisition. In your mind, the "official" position MUST be wrong, based on your belief that anything "official" MUST be a ploy to manipulate the public; you will embrace any "unofficial" account with open arms, though, for no reason other than it is counter to the "official" account.

Frankly, this thread belongs in Tilted Paranoia, and not Tilted Politics, as it's currency is speculation, not information. The documentation may be authentic, but the "conclusions" drawn from said documentation without proper context or understanding of the instances at hand will be about as valid as a fundamentalist's interpretation of scripture.

And with that, I bow out of this thread. Reply if you wish, or not; I won't be returning.

I have a question for this thread... did anyone actually believe the crap the government was spouting allover the news saying that the war was going well? I mean... how can you not realize when a war is being fought this long... that something is going wrong?

You act like the government pull a big blanket over everyone's eyes and went "Nothing to see here, move along, everything is dandy." Where is this blanket? Seems like to me that everyone I talked to before this leak was saying the same thing, "This shit has gone on to long and we can't win here."

If you actually believe the media hype, then I have less faith in your intelligence that I did before this thread.

cimmaron--disagreement's not really a problem. it isn't for me, actually.
i understand the position that you and eden have outlined.
i wrote the post above as a counter to it, really.
both arguments seem internally consistent.
i doubt that many people read threads on a messageboard while actively trying to make up their minds about how they want to react to something, but if they do and this issue is a concern, they've got the two basic positions. there we are.


i was thinking about it afterward (in a meeting during which i was supposed to be doing something else) and figured out the obvious insofar as my position is concerned: i opposed the war in afghanistan from the outset. i still oppose it in principle, though it seems not to matter so much now..ten years in nearly, it doesn't matter in the same way. at this point, it seems to me that there's a kind of sullen pragmatism...figure a way to get out as quickly as possible without creating a scenario that would immediately implode.

that shapes my view of the leak.

i can understand other positions. for example had i been in the military i am not sure i'd see this as i do. maybe. can't say, obviously. or if i supported the war. it's possible to view this as a purely procedural matter too i suppose. but that's a position i'm probably furthest from. the discussion would likely become technical--would the act of leaking these documents technically fall under treason or something else under military law? and it'd be short because i don't know much of anything about military law.


====

fugly---> this is better than i thought.

so i assume you were initiated into the Mysteries of what "classified" means when you were in the military yourself...
you may not have noticed, because i doubt you've actually read much of anything in the thread that i've written---not that i care particularly---but the only interpretation of the leaked materials i've advanced is all about uncertainty as to the status of the information that's in the documents.

but you'd actually have to read to get to that.
and why bother reading when you're SO sure a priori that you know what's going on.

Jesus christ if these morons don't stop leaking this shit they're gonna turn off our internet! Then what???

I don't quite understand the juxtaposition of these two arguments: 1)This information is meaningless because it is intelligence at it rawest, least vetted form. Even if it weren't meaningless, it is comprised of only things that we all already know, that the current and previous admins have been completely forthright about, so that this leak isn't a big deal. 2)This leak is a big deal and soldiers will be placed in harm's way (implicitly moreso than already) by this information, and also that the person who leaked it should, at the very least, be punched in the nuts.

How can this info be common knowledge, but still endanger our troops?

With respect to the endangerment of the troops, I hold the leaker in slightly higher regard than I do the folks who got us in this mess in the first place and now won't show the political backbone required to admit that it ain't going well.

rb, here is my issue. I'm pissed all around. I'm pissed that, from what it appears, I was lied to by the government about the progress of the war. I'm pissed that someone who swore to uphold our country's laws chose to violate them because he thought he knew better. I'm pissed that someone decided on his own, without expertise that could have informed his decision, to endanger people who are fighting for this country and those who assist them in doing that.

Ther'es more than enough piss-off to go around.

But still - if the soldier thought the info needed to be released even though he knew it was illegal for him to do that, then he can do what he thinks is right , and pay the legal price for it. That' s what civil disobedience is, and it has a long and respectable history. But I'm not going to cry any tears about his jail time.

filtherton-

I think you may have mischaracterized a portion of the position. What is common knowledge is that, in general, war is dirty, bloody, and foggy - and that mistakes will be made which harm people not wishing to be involved. So, reading details of the dirt, blood, and fog in practice doesn't enlighten to that fact. However, reading the details might expose tactics, methodologies, communication streams, perhaps process timelines - things that ~may~ be of value to an adversary trying to wage war against us. As I haven't read the documents, I don't know if this sort of information is contained, I am speculating. I hope that clarifies what I view the position to be.

rb-

I spent a little more time thinking about it and thought I might take a crack at framing my position with regards to the acts of the GI. When I think of a whistleblower, I think of a person who takes only the evidence of a violation and then exposes it (and only it), as the purpose of their action is to expose a particular criminal or civil wrong and make it right.

In this case, we have a single individual who downloaded and distributed close to 100,000 classified documents, which is hardly a defined -er- whistle blow? This person didn't take the communication stream of a village slaughter or something like that - it was a mass download of communications with a huge array of subjects and events. So, the motivation appears to be dramatically different than whistleblowing.

As the congress, for better or worse, authorized military action in the Afghan theatre - it is a legal military operation (I find that concept as bizarre as you, but I think you know what I mean), so 100,000 documents pertaining to that operation could hardly be considered exposing an illegal act. It appears to me as if the GI wishes to undermine a massive military action.

There's been talk that some informants' names and villages were included and exposed in these documents. So, there may be indigenous people who are now in danger because of this leak. I can't confirm that that information is there, and it might not be the case. Certainly, it could make it difficult for our troops to get new informants for fear that someone back in the states will leak their name, even 5 years later.

I think this GI probably views himself as a whistleblower, but his conduct doesn't seem to meet that definition.

For the record, my (evil Libertarian :) ) view is that all wars should go through the Constitutionally defined process. Congress must declare war on a nation-state. This vietnam, iraq, afghanistan, somalia, kosovo style of diplomacy is a cop-out. No clear objective. I think that when Congress is forced to debate and then formally declare war, I believe it would bring objectives into sharp focus and shortens the military campaign. As we have it, our objective is "to kill people in the land we are in, but only if they try to kill us. Go home when enough time has passed without someone trying to kill us." Welcome to a decades long "war".