Exposing a 'wicked' war

[unhappycamper]

Exposing a 'wicked' war
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Shamshad Ahmad

Whatever their intent, WikiLeaks' massive disclosure of a vast array of material, ranging from tactical reports from small-unit operations to strategic analyses of the political and military situation in Afghanistan, contains a clear indictment of how, and why, the US has been fighting this endless war.

At first glance, questions arise as to the very authenticity of these reports, which have neither been verified independently nor disowned by official circles in Washington. Those who had the time and spunk to browse through the entire data are left with the mystery of who could have access to such a vast and diverse range of intelligence with enough time and resources to collect, collate and transmit it to its unauthorised recipients without detection.

But the leaked papers shed no new light on the Afghan reality. The shocking truth was known to the world all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it may be has just made the most powerful case yet for an early end to the inglorious Afghan war.

Despite the enormous details, what is revealed in WikiLeaks is of little surprise. It is not much different from what most people already knew or believed about the war in Afghanistan, which everyone, even the US and its allied Nato governments and military officials, acknowledged has not been going well. WikiLeaks' portrayal of the Afghan war shows the US as being badly caught in an unwinnable war.

The leaked reports, mostly written by soldiers and petty intelligence officers, make no new revelations, as such. However, they do provide graphic accounts of hundreds of unreported incidents involving indiscriminate, at times "accidental," killings of innocent civilians by the coalition forces in Afghanistan. The reports also contain detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive American "black" special operations unit called Task Force 373 against what US officials considered "high-value insurgent and terrorist" targets. Actual victims in these secret operations were invariably non-combatant civilians, including small children.

[lunatica]

1. Yeah, but what about the glory of war? And the benefits of war?

Does the leaks bother to detail that? No. All these leaks do is talk about the bad stuff just to make war look bad.









:sarcasm: