Part 5 (1/2)

CHAPTER 9.

The Afghanistan war logs

Cybers.p.a.ce 25 July 2010

”We are saddened by the innocent lives that were lost as a result of militants' cowardice”

US ARMY M MAJOR C CHRIS B BELCHER, AFGHANISTAN.

One night in Afghanistan, five heavy rockets, fired from a new type of weapon, came shrieking out of the darkness on to a religious school, a madra.s.sa, completely reducing it to rubble. When the a.s.sault helicopters landed and US special forces came tumbling out, they discovered they had killed seven children. Their real target, a top al-Qaida fighter, escaped. This event, one of many during the benighted Afghan war, took place on 17 June 2007, and was described in the following way by the US army's special operations command news service: Airstrike in Paktika BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan.

Afghan and Coalition forces conducted an operation in Paktika Province's Zarghun Shah District late Sunday, which resulted in several militants and seven civilians killed and two militants detained. Credible intelligence named the compound, which contained a mosque and a madra.s.sa, as a suspected safehouse for al-Qaida fighters.Coalition forces confirmed the presence of nefarious activity occurring at the site before getting approval to conduct an airstrike on the location. Following the strike, residents of the compound confirmed that al-Qaida fighters had been present all day.Early reporting [suggests] seven children at the madra.s.sa died as a result of the strike. ”This is another example of al-Qaida using the protective status of a mosque, as well as innocent civilians, to s.h.i.+eld themselves,” said Army Maj Chris Belcher, a Combined Joint Task Force-82 spokesman. ”We are saddened by the innocent lives that were lost as a result of militants' cowardice.”

The real story only emerged from the text of a leaked military log obtained by WikiLeaks three years later, and published worldwide by the Guardian Guardian and its partners the and its partners the New York Times New York Times and and Der Spiegel Der Spiegel. The field report was among the 92,000 allegedly turned over to WikiLeaks founder Julian a.s.sange by US soldier Bradley Manning.

The log disclosed that there had actually been no ”airstrike” (whose reconnaissance cameras might indeed have been less inaccurate). Instead, what had happened was a trial of a powerful, if potentially indiscriminate, new missile system a GPS-guided rocket volley that could be fired from the back of a truck up to 40 miles away, known as HIMARS (high mobility artillery rocket system). The a.s.sault was not launched by ordinary ”Afghan and Coalition forces” but by a shadowy troop of US killers known as Task Force 373, whose targets were written on a special list. And the rocket attack was not prompted by general ”nefarious activity”, but by the hope that a top listed target, Commander Al Libi, was on the premises.

The leaked war log gave the following account (abbreviations have been expanded): Date 2007-06-17 21:00:00 2007-06-17 21:00:00 Type Friendly Action Friendly Action t.i.tle 172100Z[ulu time] T[ask] F[orce] 373 OBJ[ective] Lane 172100Z[ulu time] T[ask] F[orce] 373 OBJ[ective] LaneSummary NOTE: The following information (TF-373 and HIMARS) is Cla.s.sified Secret / NOFORN. The knowledge that TF-373 conducted a HIMARS strike must be kept protected. All other information below is cla.s.sified Secret / REL[ease] ISAF. [International Security a.s.sistance Force]Mission S[pecial] O[perations] T[ask] F[orce] conducts kinetic strike followed with H[elicopter] A[ssault] Force raid to kill/ capture ABU LAYTH AL LIBI on N[amed] A[rea of] I[nterest] 2.Target Abu Layth Al Libi is a senior al-Qaida military commander, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) leader. He is based in Mir Ali, Pakistan and runs training camps throughout North Waziristan. Collection over the past week indicates a concentration of Arabs I[n] V[icinity] O[f] objective area.Result 6 x E[nemy] K[illed] I[n] A[ction]; 7 x N[on] C[ombatant] KIA 7 x detaineesSummary H[elicopter] A[ssault] F[orce] departed for Orgun-E [base] to conduct link-up and posture to the objective immediately after pre-a.s.sault fires. On order, 5 rockets were launched and destroyed structures on the objective (NAI 2). The HAF quickly inserted the a.s.sault force into the H[elicopter] L[anding] Zone. I[intelligence] S[urveillance] R[econnaissance] reported multiple U[n]I[dentified] M[ale]s leaving the objective area. The a.s.sault force quickly conducted dismounted movement to the target area and established containment on the south side of the objective. During the initial a.s.sault, dedicated air a.s.sets engaged multiple M[ilitary] A[ge] M[ale]s squirting off the objective area. G[round] F[orce] C[ommander] a.s.sessed 3 x EKIA squirters north and 3 x EKIA squirters south of the compound were neutralised from air a.s.set fires. The a.s.sault force quickly manoeuvred with a SQ[ua]D[ron] element on the remaining squirters. The squirter element detained 12 x MAMs and returned to the objective area. GFC pa.s.sed initial a.s.sessment of 7 x NC KIA (children). During initial questioning, it was a.s.sessed that the children were not allowed out of the building, due to UIMs presence within the compound. The a.s.sault force was able to uncover 1 x NC child from the rubble. The MED[ical] T[ea]M immediately cleared debris from the mouth and performed CPR to revive the child for 20 minutes. Due to time restrictions, TF C[omman]D[e]R launched Q[uick] R[eaction] F[orce] element to action a follow-on target (NAI 5). They quickly contained the objective and initiated the a.s.sault. The objective was secured and the a.s.sault force initially detained 6 x MAMs. The GFC recommended that 7 MAMs be detained for additional questioning. The TF CDR a.s.sessed that the a.s.sault force will continue SSE. The local governor was notified of the current situation and requests for a.s.sistance were made to cordon the A[rea of] O[perations] with support from A[fghan] N[ational] Police and local coalition forces in search of H[igh] V[alue] I[ndividual]. A P[rovincial] R[econstruction] T[eam] is enroute to AO.1) Target was an A[l] Q[aida] Senior Leader 2) Patterns of life were conducted on 18 June from 0800z 1815z (strike time) with no indications of women or children on the objective 3) The mosque was not targeted nor was it struck initial reports state there is no damage to the mosque 4) An elder who was at the mosque stated that the children were held against their will and were intentionally kept inside UPDATE: 18 0850Z June 07 Governor Khapalwak has had no success yet in reaching President Karzai (due to the President's busy schedule today) but expects to reach him within the hour (P[resident] o[f] A[fghanistan] reached later in the afternoon ~ 1400Z) The governor conducted a Shura [consultation] this morning, in attendance were locals from both the Yahya Yosof & Khail Districts He pressed the Talking Points given to him and added a few of his own that followed in line with our current story The atmospherics of the local populous [sic] is that they are in shock, but understand it was caused ultimately by the presence of hoodlums The people think it is good that bad men were killed The people regret the loss of life among the children The governor echoed the tragedy of children being killed, but stressed this could've been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area The governor promised another Shura in a few days and that the families would be compensated for their loss The governor was asked what the mood of the people was and he stated that ”the operation was a good thing, and the people believe what we have told them”

There is less clipped military jargon than usual in this war log entry. The report is untypically loquacious, and in relatively plain English, because the slaughter of the seven children turned into quite a scandal, and because President Karzai was making ever louder protests about the civilian death toll from US operations in Afghanistan. But otherwise the report is representative of the kind of doc.u.ments that surfaced when the Afghan war logs were first published on 25 July 2010. On that day, Der Spiegel Der Spiegel made the activities of the killer squad Task Force 373 its cover story, headlining it ”America's secret war”. In the made the activities of the killer squad Task Force 373 its cover story, headlining it ”America's secret war”. In the Guardian Guardian, Nick Davies unearthed much detail about TF 373's 2,000-strong target-list for ”kill or capture”. The hit-list appeared as yet another cryptic acronym in the war logs, JPel the ”joint priority effects list”.

Davies wrote: ”The United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights, Professor Philip Alston, went to Afghanistan in May 2008 to investigate rumours of extrajudicial killings. He warned that international forces were neither transparent nor accountable and that Afghans who attempted to find out who had killed their loved ones 'often come away empty-handed, frustrated and bitter'. Now, for the first time, the leaked war logs reveal details of deadly missions by TF 373 and other units hunting down JPel targets that were previously hidden behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.”

The Guardian Guardian/WikiLeaks publication smoked out profound divisions about these tactics among the occupying coalition. ”The war logs confirm the impression that this is a military campaign without a clear strategic direction, under generals struggling to cope with the political, economic and social realities of Afghanistan,” says Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, until June 2010 the UK government's special representative to Afghanistan and from 2007 to 2009 its amba.s.sador to Kabul. ”The truth is that the military campaign in Afghanistan is not under proper political supervision or control ... Nato's Joint Priority Effects List [the so-called kill or capture list] is not subject to genuine political oversight. It is driven by the military. The situation has deteriorated further since the war logs came out. General Petraeus has stepped up the campaign of slaughtering Taliban commanders, without a clear strategy for harvesting that politically, and in defiance of his own field manual's a.s.sertion that countering insurgency is 80% politics.”

A hitherto veiled face of the Afghan war was thus revealed in the story of TF 373 and the hit-lists. Another veil was lifted to reveal the relentless toll taken on perfectly innocent civilians by the jittery troops riding in convoys. The foreign troops not just Americans, but also British, Germans and Poles were understandably terrified of roadside bombs, or of suicide bombers driving up to them in cars or on motorbikes. In theory there are strict regulations about the graded series of warning steps that soldiers have to take in Afghanistan before firing to kill. These are the procedures governing EOF ”Escalation of Force”. In reality, as log entries repeatedly implied, some soldiers tended to shoot first and ask questions later.

The field reports almost never contained any direct admissions of misbehaviour: these entries are written by comrades, and designed to be viewed by more senior officers. But the Americans were a little less inhibited when giving accounts of the conduct of their allies than they were when writing up their own behaviour. As a result, David Leigh and his colleague Rob Evans were able to tease out cl.u.s.ters of what looked like excessive use of force against civilians on the part of certain British units. They identified a detachment of the Coldstream Guards which had recently taken up position at Camp Soutar in Kabul. The Coldstream Guards' unofficial blog described their mood at the time: ”The overriding threat is that of suicide bombers, of which there have been a number in the recent past.”

Four times in as many weeks, this unit appears to have shot civilians in the town in order to protect its own members. The worst was on 21 October 2007, when the US soldiers reported a case of ”blue-on-white” friendly fire in downtown Kabul, noting that some unknown troops had shot up a civilian vehicle containing three private security company interpreters and a driver. The troops had been in ”a military-type vehicle that was brown with a gunner on top ... There were no US forces located in the vicinity of the event that may have been involved. More to follow!” They updated a short while later, saying ”INVESTIGATION IS CONTROLLED BY THE BRITISH. WE NOT ABLE TO GET THE COMPLETE STORY. THIS EVENT BELONGS TO THE BRITISH ISAF FORCES.”

It took another three months' stalling, after the WikiLeaks logs went public, before the Ministry of Defence in London admitted these Kabul shootings had indeed taken place. They confirmed the British patrol had shot dead one civilian and wounded two others in a silver minibus. It was claimed the minibus failed to stop when the soldiers signalled for it to do so.

A few days after the minibus shooting, on 6 November, the British reported around midday that they had wounded another civilian in Kabul in broad daylight with what was at first claimed to be a ”warning shot”. At the end of the afternoon, the Americans heard the man had died, and there might be trouble: ”There could be some demonstration, the civilian was a son of an Afghan aviation general, his wedding was planned for this evening with numerous people.” They later updated: ”It was not the wedding of the dead person. The wedding for this evening was planned for his brother but now it is cancelled. The family will get the dead body tomorrow morning.” Again the British army eventually confirmed this WikiLeaks disclosure after a long delay: the official British version is that the general's son had ”accelerated” his Toyota towards a patrol, leaving the soldiers only time for a shouted warning before firing at the car. The car then skidded to a halt and a man fell out, they say.

These events, and hundreds like them, together const.i.tute the hidden history of the war in Afghanistan, in which innocent people were repeatedly killed by foreign soldiers. The remarkable level of detail provided by the war logs made it accessible for the first time.

However, while the European media focused on the sufferings of civilians, the New York Times New York Times tended to take a more strategic approach to the Afghan war. One of their major interests was to study the large and often surprising quant.i.ty of evidence in the war logs that US efforts to suppress the Taliban were being hampered by Pakistan. There were repeated detailed entries telling of clashes or intelligence reports in which Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, appeared to be the villain, covertly backing the Taliban for reasons of its own. tended to take a more strategic approach to the Afghan war. One of their major interests was to study the large and often surprising quant.i.ty of evidence in the war logs that US efforts to suppress the Taliban were being hampered by Pakistan. There were repeated detailed entries telling of clashes or intelligence reports in which Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, appeared to be the villain, covertly backing the Taliban for reasons of its own.

The Obama administration had a relatively sophisticated response to this information, which it was aware the papers had discovered. It used the situation to project a message. As the logs were published at 10pm GMT on Sunday evening, a White House spokesman emailed newspapers' Was.h.i.+ngton correspondents a note not intended for publication under the subject line: ”Thoughts on WikiLeaks”. They even attached some handy quotes from senior officials highlighting concerns about the ISI and safe havens in Afghanistan. ”This is now out in the open,” a senior administration official told the New York Times New York Times. ”It's reality now. In some ways, it makes it easier for us to tell the Pakistanis that they have to help us.” A spokesman stated in public: ”The safe havens for violent extremist groups within Pakistan continue to pose an intolerable threat to the United States, to Afghanistan, and to the Pakistani people.”

The British prime minister, David Cameron, on a two-day trip to India, chimed in, in what seemed a synchronised way. Speaking to a business audience in Bangalore two days after the war logs were released, he signalled the same hard line. ”We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country [Pakistan] is allowed to look both ways and is able to promote the export of terror, whether to India or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world,” he said. ”That is why this relations.h.i.+p is important. But it should be a relations.h.i.+p based on a very clear message: that it is not right to have any relations.h.i.+p with groups that are promoting terror. Democratic states that want to be part of the developed world cannot do that. The message to Pakistan from the US and from the UK is very clear on that point.”

It was a surprising turn of events, confirming what most investigative journalists know instinctively, that full disclosure of hitherto secret information can stimulate all kinds of unexpected outcomes. The Guardian Guardian summed up in an editorial the purpose of its co-operation with WikiLeaks: summed up in an editorial the purpose of its co-operation with WikiLeaks: The fog of war is unusually dense in Afghanistan. When it lifts, as it does today ... 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 Guardian 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 cla.s.sified as secret are encyclopedic but incomplete. We have removed any material which threatens the safety of troops, local informants and collaborators. 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 cla.s.sified 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 ...In these doc.u.ments, Iran's and Pakistan's intelligence agencies run riot. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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.

What the paper did not dare advertise, for security reasons, was that the world would shortly be presented with a far bigger trove of leaked doc.u.ments, detailing similar truths about the bloodbath in Iraq.

CHAPTER 10.

The Iraq war logs

Cybers.p.a.ce 22 October 2010

”You know we don't do body counts”

GENERAL T TOMMY F FRANKS.

The Iraq war logs were all about numbers. Both the US administration and the British prime minister refused to admit how many ordinary Iraqis had been killed since the mixed blessing of their being ”liberated” by US and UK troops. General Tommy Franks had notoriously been quoted in 2002 saying, ”We don't do body counts” a year before he led the US military invasion of Iraq. He may have really meant that he was not going to fall into the over-optimistic trap of the Vietnam war in the 1960s, when US generals had claimed to have slaughtered virtually the entire military manpower of North Vietnam several times over, before admitting eventual defeat.

But because the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 turned into an unplanned bloodbath, ”We don't do body counts” became the unspoken mantra of Bush and Blair as well. Authorities meticulously recorded that 4,748 US and allied troops lost their lives up to Christmas Day 2010. But western governments claimed for years that no other official casualty statistics existed.

The publication of the huge leaked database of Iraqi field reports in October 2010 gave the lie to that. The logs disclosed a detailed incident-by-incident record of at least 66,081 violent deaths of civilians in Iraq since the invasion. This figure, dismaying in itself, was nevertheless only a statistical starting-point. It is far too low. The database begins a year late in 2004, omitting the high casualties of the direct 2003 invasion period itself, and ends on 31 December 2009. Furthermore, the US figures are plainly unreliable in respect of the most sensitive issue civilian deaths directly caused by their own military activities.

For example, the town of Falluja was the site of two major urban battles in 2004, which reduced the place to near-rubble. Yet no civilian deaths whatever are recorded by the army loggers, apparently on the grounds that they had previously ordered all the inhabitants to leave. Monitors from the unofficial Iraq Body Count group, on the other hand, managed to identify more than 1,200 civilians who died during the Falluja fighting.

In other cases, the US army killed civilians, but wrongly recorded them in the database as enemy combatants. It was as enemy combatants, for example, that the two hapless Reuters employees shot in Baghdad in 2007 by an Apache helicopter guns.h.i.+p the episode captured on a gun-camera video, and subsequently discovered and leaked to WikiLeaks were registered.

As so often, further journalistic investigation was needed to improve these raw and statistically dirty figures. Iraq Body Count, an NGO offshoot of the Oxford Research Group and co-founded by a psychology professor, John Sloboda, had dedicated itself for years to counting up otherwise unregarded corpses. They were able to cross-check with the leaked military data. The group says: ”The release and publication by WikiLeaks of the 'Iraq War Logs' provided IBC with the first large-scale database we could compare and cross-reference with our own. For most of its incidents this military database is as detailed as IBC's, and quite often more so. Its release in such a highly detailed form enabled us to carry out some preliminary research into the number of casualties that the logs might contain, that have not been reported elsewhere. IBC was consequently able to provide an initial, but fairly robust, estimate that, once fully a.n.a.lysed, the logs would reveal another 15,000 civilian deaths (including 3,000 ordinary police) beyond the previously known death toll.”

The numbers contained in the war logs proved not only to generate that extra 15,000 casualties, but also to be broadly comparable with the IBC's own unofficial figures. At the end of 2010, IBC concluded that the full total of doc.u.mented civilian deaths from violence in Iraq since 2003 now ranged between 99,383 and 108,501. The increased confidence that the public can have in these numbers can be presumed to be directly due to the whistleblowing of Manning and a.s.sange, along with the dedication of IBC researchers, and the hard work of journalists from three news organisations. Future historians may be able to a.s.sess whether that work might make future American and British military adventures any less reckless and b.l.o.o.d.y.

Another aspect of the war logs statistics which is likely to be exceptionably reliable because the US army had no reason to play down the figures is the appalling total of civilians, local troops and coalition forces whose deaths were caused either by insurgent landmines or by internecine fighting. No fewer than 31,780 deaths were attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. Sectarian killings (recorded as ”murders”) claimed another 34,814 victims. Overall, the war logs detailed 109,032 deaths.

This total of dead broke down into the 66,081 civilians detailed above, plus 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces, and 23,984 people cla.s.sed as ”enemy”. At 31 December 2009, when the leaked database stops, the total was arrived at by the addition of 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers. Every one of those westerners who died had a name, a family and probably often a photograph published in their local newspaper along with grieving tributes. But these files showed they represented less than 3.5% of the real death toll in Iraq.

Such appalling bloodshed was justified by the US, the UK and their occupying partners on the grounds that they had at any rate rescued Iraqis from the brutal police state run by Saddam Hussein. It was therefore doubly disturbing when an a.n.a.lysis of the data by the Guardian Guardian's Nick Davies revealed that Iraq was still a torture chamber. The legacy being left behind by western troops was of an Iraqi army and police force which would continue to arrest, mistreat and murder its own citizens, almost as if Saddam had never been overthrown.

It was Bradley Manning's revulsion at the behaviour of the Iraqi police, and US military collusion with it, which had led him, according to statements in his chat logs, to think in 2009 about becoming a whistleblower in the first place. After being rebuffed in an effort to exculpate a group of improperly detained Iraqis, ”everything started slipping ... I saw things differently ... I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.”

Davies reported in the Guardian Guardian on 23 October: on 23 October: US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished ... The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.As recently as December 2009 the Americans were pa.s.sed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: ”The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound ... The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pus.h.i.+ng him to the ground, punching him and shooting him.” The report named at least one perpetrator and was pa.s.sed to coalition forces.In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found ”bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck” on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of ”bad kidneys”, was found to have ”evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen”.But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring torture allegations. They record ”no investigation is necessary” and simply pa.s.s reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries.