Posts Tagged ‘Afghan War’
Afghan war documents go online at WikiLeaks
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
A whistle-blower website has published what it says are more than 90,000 United States military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed between 2004 and January of this year.
The first-hand accounts are the military’s own raw data on the war, including numbers killed, casualties, threat reports and the like, according to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, which published the material Sunday.
Here’s the link. When I prepared this post, last night, their servers were pretty much swamped.
“It is the total history of the Afghan war from 2004 to 2010, with some important exceptions — U.S. Special Forces, CIA activity and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups,” Assange said…
The significance lies in “all of these people being killed in the small events that we haven’t heard about that numerically eclipse the big casualty events. It’s the boy killed by a shell that missed a target,” he told CNN.
“What we haven’t seen previously is all those individual deaths,” he said. “We’ve seen just the number and like Stalin said, ‘One man’s death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.’ So, we’ve seen the statistic.”
The website held back about 15,000 documents from Afghanistan to protect individuals who informed on the Taliban, he said.
The news-as-entertainment crowd, liberal or conservative – it matters not, will probably panic over this. As will their mirror-image peers in Congress.
The culture of government which has adopted the practice of classifying information as “secret” because it is embarrassing, damning or otherwise a potentially negative force upon the body politic – demands severe penalties for revelations. Our representatives in Washington DC have had this cowardly habit for decades.
The easier it becomes to collect data, the easier it is to lose control of it.
Letting women reach women in the middle of the Afghan War
Marine Cpl. Sarah B. Furrel, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines at a girls school
The Marines in a recent “cultural awareness” class scribbled careful notes as the instructor coached them on do’s and don’ts when talking to villagers in Afghanistan: Don’t start by firing off questions, do break the ice by playing with the children, don’t let your interpreter hijack the conversation.
Cpl. Michele Greco-Lucchina led a group during a “cultural awareness” exercise last month at Camp Pendleton, Calif.. And one more thing: “If you have a pony tail,” said Marina Kielpinski, the instructor, “let it go out the back of your helmet so people can see you’re a woman.”
These are not your mother’s Marines here in the rugged California chaparral of Camp Pendleton, where 40 young women are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in one of the more forward-leaning experiments of the American military.
Next month they will begin work as members of the first full-time “female engagement teams,” the military’s name for four- and five-member units that will accompany men on patrols in Helmand Province to try to win over the rural Afghan women who are culturally off limits to outside men. The teams, which are to meet with the Afghan women in their homes, assess their need for aid and gather intelligence, are part of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s campaign for Afghan hearts and minds. His officers say that you cannot gain the trust of the Afghan population if you only talk to half of it…
As envisioned, the teams will work like American politicians who campaign door to door and learn what voters care about. A team is to arrive in a village, get permission from the male elder to speak with the women, settle into a compound, hand out school supplies and medicine, drink tea, make conversation and, ideally, get information about the village, local grievances and the Taliban…
The idea for the teams grew out of the “Lioness” program in Iraq, which used female Marines to search Iraqi women at checkpoints. Over the past year in Afghanistan, the Army and Marines have assembled ad hoc female engagement teams, but the women were hastily pulled from work as cooks or engineers.
The women at Pendleton are among the first to be trained exclusively for the mission. “Every Marine wants to go outside the wire,” said Cpl. Michele Greco-Lucchina, 22, referring to assignments off the base. “We all join for different reasons, but that’s the basis for being a Marine.”
I expect the Marines to provide this sort of advanced and experimental engagement in ordinary human activities. As do the Marines I engage with in recurrent discussions about the history of war.
The US Marine Corps broke with official – and quite legal – segregation because it made for lousy soldiers, back in the day before the civil rights movement succeeded in pushing the rest of our nation in the direction of justice and sanity. Just a little bit, you understand.
Glad as hell to see this particular step forward receiving official support.
