On Monday, as most readers are probably aware, WikiLeaks released an enormous trove of U.S. military reports from Afghanistan. First, the local angle: There is some Canadian content, though very little. One incident report claims that an air attack by friendly forces killed four Canadian troops on September 3, 2006 during Operation Medusa. At the time, those deaths were officially reported to be caused by Taliban fire, and indeed there is a small amount of literature describing those soldiers' last moments. The Canadian military denies the report.
Next, a little bubble bursting: The purported Pakistani intelligence-Taliban link is not as strong as some of the hyped articles have it. The New York Times' coverage has opted to focus on the Pakistan angle, citing intelligence reports from the WikiLeaks cache which report that Pakistan's ISI is in cahoots with the Afghan Taliban:
The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders. (link)
The key word in that run-on sentence is "suggest," as in the evidence does not prove that the ISI supports the Taliban. Indeed, the evidence for the connection is rather poor, according to Declan Walsh, a Guardian reporter with plenty of experience in Afghanistan and who was part of the Guardian team for the WikiLeaks report. The reports:
fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials -- and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred. (link)
American diplomat Peter Galbraith, formerly stationed in Afghanistan, is more credulous. While he admits that some evidence is poor (noting "surely the ISI did not plot to poison Kabul-bound beer, an enormously complex operation with limited pay off since U.S. troops are not allowed to drink alcohol in Afghanistan") he observes that the documents "show a continued relationship between the ISI and the Taliban."
What follows is a summary of the highlights of the revelations of the Afghan war diary, mostly taken from the Guardian team's analysis.
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Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation
Nick Davies and David Leigh
The Guardian - Sunday 25 July 2010
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency. ...
The war logs also detail:
- How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.
- How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
- How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
- How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date. ...
The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.
Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.
At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots ...
Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties." ... (link)
Declan Walsh on the Pakistani ISI:
At least 180 files contain allegations of dirty tricks by the powerful agency with accounts of undercover agents training suicide bombers, bundles of money slipping across the border and covert support for a range of sensational plots including the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, attacks on Nato warplanes and even poisoning western troops' beer supply. ...
But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred. ...
[A] retired US officer said some [Afghan] NDS officials "wanted to create the impression that Pakistani complicity was a threat to the US". And more broadly speaking, "there's an Afghan prejudice that wants to see an ISI agent under every rock". ... (link)
Walsh also writes on what the leaked files show about the Afghan insurgency's weaponry for attacks against US/NATO aircraft:
The US military covered up a reported surface-to-air missile strike by the Taliban that shot down a Chinook helicopter over Helmand in 2007 and killed seven soldiers, including a British military photographer, the war logs show.
The strike on the twin-rotor helicopter shows the Taliban enjoyed sophisticated anti-aircraft capabilities earlier than previously thought, casting new light on the battle for the skies over Afghanistan.
Hundreds of files detail the efforts of insurgents, who have no aircraft, to shoot down western warplanes. The war logs detail at least 10 near-misses by missiles in four years against coalition aircraft, one while refuelling at 11,000ft and another involving a suspected Stinger missile of the kind supplied by the CIA to Afghan rebels in the 1980s.
But if American and British commanders were worried about the missile threat, they downplayed it in public – to the extent of ignoring their own pilots' testimony. The CH-47 Chinook was shot down on 30 May 2007 after dropping troops at the strategic Kajaki dam in Helmand...
Later that day Nato and US officials suggested the helicopter, codenamed Flipper, had been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade – effectively, a lucky hit. ...
But US pilot logs show they were certain the missile was not an RPG and was most likely a Manpad – the military term for a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. ... (link)
The Guardian's Nick Davies looks at a heretofore obscure American unit called Task Force 373, used for targeted assassinations and captures. Interestingly, he also summarizes an incident where official statements contained lies about the deaths of civilians, again showing US-led deception efforts:
The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list. ...
[O]n 4 October [2007], [TF 373] confronted Taliban fighters in a village called Laswanday [in Paktika province]. The Taliban appear to have retreated by the time TF 373 called in air support to drop 500lb bombs on the house from which the fighters had been firing.
The final outcome, listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 US wounded, two teenage girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed, four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.
The coalition put out a statement claiming falsely to have killed several militants and making no mention of any dead civilians; and later added that "several non-combatants were found dead and several others wounded" without giving any numbers or details...
In spite of discovering that the dead civilians came from one family, one of whom had been found with his hands tied behind his back, suggesting that the Taliban were unwelcome intruders in their home, senior officials travelled to the stricken village where they "stressed that the fault of the deaths of the innocent lies on the villagers who did not resist the insurgents and their anti-government activities … [and] chastised a villager who condemned the compound shooting". Nevertheless, an internal report concluded that there was "little or no protest" over the incident. ...
The logs include references to the tracing and killing of other targets on the Jpel list, which do not identify TF 373 as the unit responsible. It is possible that some of the other taskforce names and numbers which show up in this context are cover names for 373, or for British special forces, 500 of whom are based in southern Afghanistan and are reported to have been involved in kill/capture missions...
Some of these "non 373" operations involve the use of unmanned drones to fire missiles to kill the target...
Other Jpel targets were traced and then bombed from the air. ... (link)
Readers will notice in the above that nothing is said about the involvement of Canadian special forces.
Declan Walsh on Afghan-Pakistani tensions on the border:
Afghanistan war logs: Secret war along the Pakistan border
Americans caught in middle of flare-ups over disputed colonial boundary and attacks by Taliban from within tribal zone
Declan Walsh
The Guardian, Sunday 25 July 2010
The Taliban are not the only enemy along the fraught borderlands of the Afghan war. Secret intelligence files reveal severe tensions between putative allies who can be drinking tea one day and fighting each other the next.
The war logs detail hundreds of cross-border clashes along the lawless frontier with Pakistan, far more than previously reported. The most violent salvos came from US troops disregarding Pakistani sovereignty to fire on Taliban fighters sheltering in its tribal belt. ... (link)
Finally, the Guardian's David Leigh on the little-discussed role of the CIA:
Afghanistan war logs: Secret CIA paramilitaries' role in civilian deaths
Innocent Afghan men, women and children have paid the price of the Americans' rules of engagement
David Leigh
The Guardian, Sunday 25 July 2010
Shum Khan was a deaf and dumb man who lived in the remote border hamlet of Malekshay, 7,000ft up in the mountains. When a heavily armed squad from the CIA barrelled into his village in March 2007, the war logs record that he "ran at the sight of the approaching coalition forces … out of fear and confusion".
The secret CIA paramilitaries, (the euphemism here is OGA, for "other government agency") shouted at him to stop. Khan could not hear them. He carried on running. So they shot him, saying they were entitled to do so under the carefully graded "escalation of force" provisions of the US rules of engagement. ...
But the logs demonstrate how much of the contemporaneous US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false. ...
In another case the logs show that on the night of 30 August 2008, a US special forces squad called Scorpion 26 blasted Helmand positions with multiple rockets, and called in an airstrike to drop a 500lb bomb. All that was officially logged was that 24 Taliban had been killed.
But writer Patrick Bishop was embedded in the valley nearby with British paratroops at their Sangin bases. He recorded independently: "Overnight, the question of civilian casualties took on an extra urgency. An American team had been inserted on to Black Mountain … From there, they launched a series of offensive operations. On 30 August, wounded civilians, some of them badly injured, turned up at Sangin and FOB Inkerman saying they had been attacked by foreign troops. Such incidents gave a hollow ring to ISAF claims that their presence would bring security to the local population." ...
The US also realised very quickly that a Polish squad had committed what appeared to have been a possible war crime. On 16 August 2007 the Poles mortared a wedding party in the village of Nangar Khel in an apparent revenge attack shortly after experiencing an IED explosion. ... (link)
Thanks for this introduction to the materials, Dave.
The Guardian has so far had the best coverage by far.
Outrage in the U.S. mass media about the "Task Force 373" death squads is virtually non-existent. (Even some progressive alternative media are ignoring the subject altogether). Of interest to Canadians is that our own "JTF2" death squads have been doing the same things as their U.S. chums all along.
While the Canadian corporate media briefly mentioned their activity back in the early days of the war, a curtain of silence has "mysteriously" fallen over them in recent years. The JTF2 is now almost never mentioned, although they have never left Afghanistan.
What we need is a massive leak of documents form the Canadian war ministry.
If only the public could see the horrors of war...The United States learned a valuable lesson from the Vietnam defeat....Never again have the horrors and crimes of war pasted on the 6 o'clock news every night ever again.
Not long ago,I stumbled on a video seemingly filmed by U.S. soldiers on Youtube...I believe the name of the video was U.S. soldiers go insane in Iraq.
I deeply regret viewing this video...It made me physically sick...BUT it should have been pasted on the 6 o ' clock news...Unfortunately,journalism has mutated into propaganda...You NEVER see the truth on the news....It is a corrupted and bankrupt medium and mouth piece for the powers that be.
Many people in Canada and the US are immune to depictions of the "horrors of war"; just as they are quite willing to have their government and allies operate torture dungeons around the world, they cheer on the horrors of war inflicted on the "enemy". They've been raised on video games and realistic war movies; real war in a faraway land doesn't horrify them.
I don't think horror is a great political motivator or teacher anyway. More important than bringing home the horror, in my opinion, is bringing home the injustice and oppression that war is used to perpetuate. And the geopolitics: propping up thugocracies like the Karzai government through war, making the world safe for oil and other exploitation, while pretending to be defending "democracy".
In this case, a thousand words is worth more than a picture.
M. Specter: Thank you for your interest and comments. I am perhaps less confident than you that we actually know what the JTF2 is doing and for how long it has been doing it. Most of the information we get is pretty cloudy, it seems to me.
However, Philip Alston's comments regarding Canada are quite intriguing. He's the UN Special Rapporteur for extrajudicial executions and he says Canada is breaking international law in not being forthright in responding to his queries. Nothing was explicit, but to me that suggests that he has evidence that JTF2 is involved in the assassination squads. (Or is it CSOR?) Perhaps you know of more reliable information?
Sincerely, Dave M.
alan smithee: Thanks for reading and thanks for contributing. Personally, I have always been somewhat skeptical of claims that the media sparked opposition to the Vietnam war. Such assertions seem to me to be of a piece with those claiming that traitorous liberals are to be blamed for the American 'defeat.' I also don't see it as much of a defeat -- the US achieved its principle war aims and the Vietnamese revolution was laid waste. So the Vietnamese people largely lost, suffering under the cynical thugs who came to dominate the Vietnamese post-war scene.
Sincerely, Dave M.
Well, start with yesterday's Toronto Star:
Flowing from the leaks are reports that U.S. elite army and navy units use capture-or-kill lists neutralizing or eliminating enemy leaders. Canada's elite JTF2 special forces work seamlessly with U.S. counterparts in Afghanistan, reporting through a unique chain of command directly to the Chief of Defence Staff, the country's top soldier.
Special forces operations are so secret that even defence ministers are excluded from the information loop. But earlier this year a source familiar with JTF2 told the Star the unit works side-by-side with American counterparts to "pick up or pick off" high-value Taliban and Al Qaeda targets.
Concerns about prisoners taken in those clandestine operations were raised in 2007 by the respected International Committee of the Red Cross. In an unusual confidential briefing, it reported to Canada that three insurgents captured by JTF2 disappeared behind Afghan prison walls, where they were either killed or delivered to the U.S. for interrogation at "black sites."
Remember this infamous picture?
Caption: "Members of Canada's secretive JTF2 unit escort three detainees across the tarmac at the airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Jan. 21, 2002" [Toronto Star]
In an article last February 25, James Travers wrote: "In Canada, a January 2002 news photograph exposed the super-elite JTF2 unit transferring prisoners to the U.S troops, provoking a Parliament firestorm and damaging the career of then-Liberal defence minister Art Eggleton."
From CBC News July 15, 2005:
David Rudd, with the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, told CBC News the soldiers of JTF2 are not trained to take and hold ground. "What they do is infiltrate into dangerous areas behind enemy lines, look for key targets and take them out. They don't go out to arrest people. They don't go out there to hand out food parcels. They go out to kill targets."
From a Canadian Press article, September 17, 2005:
Canadian special forces soldiers in southern Afghanistan have killed Taliban and al-Qaeda rebels in multiple operations over recent months as they work secretly in small units, military sources say....
JTF2 commandos have joined counterparts from the United States and some Commonwealth countries, such as Australia, in fighting that has claimed more than 1,200 lives in six months, the Canadian defence sources say....
Some engagements are long-range; others are close-in. Some involve a degree of infiltration into enemy compounds and "behind enemy lines"....
The commandos, some of whom speak a smattering of area dialects, often work in collaboration with local citizens who know the lay of the land. Using specialized weapons, Canadian snipers have played their deadly cat-and-mouse games at night and in the 50-degree heat of Afghan summer days.
Many of their victims -- whom the chief of defence staff recently called "murderers and scumbags" -- never knew what hit them, one source told The Canadian Press.
From another article 8 days later:
"Our aim in all these operations is to capture where possible, in order to use the intelligence value that these detainees may have for us," Brig.-Gen. Ward said at a news media briefing. [TRANSLATION: We capture people and ship them to Bagram or Guantanamo to be tortured] "In every instance when our forces go into operations like this, we provide them with the authority to use whatever force is necessary to accomplish their missions. We have to expect that in those circumstances, casualties do occur. We have not suffered any casualties at this point, but casualties have occurred on the other side."...
He said Canadian soldiers sometimes interrogate detainees for short periods, but then transfer them to Afghan or U.S. officials. He said the Americans do not treat the detainees as prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, but as unlawful combatants who have fewer rights under international law. Canada has obtained specific assurances that the detention conditions meet the appropriate standards, Brig.-Gen. Ward said.
Justin Podur supplies background info about the JTF2, relying in part on David Pugliese's book, Canada's Secret Commandos: The Unauthorized Story of Joint Task Force Two, Esprit de Corps Books, 2002:
Graeme Smith of the Globe and Mail wrote on April 19, 2007:
M. Specter: Thanks for your response. I am familiar with the sources you quote, but I find they reveal very little of substance.
Setting aside the gossip and public relations blather relayed by Travers, we know only that the JTF2 has killed and captured (and transfered to who-knows-what in American hands) less than a handful of times during the Afghan war. We know this because of some reporting in 2002 and a surprise briefing in 2005. We don't know where they operate, except that they repaired a radio tower in Kandahar a while back. We don't know if they stay on bases or in villages alongside Afghans. We don't know if they operate alone or with other allied special forces or in tandem with Afghan special forces. etc. etc.
While the numbers cited in the CBC article you quote are dramatic, it seems they don't apply directly to the JTF2, but to all special forces. The Thorne article's mention of 1200 dead is similarly unhelpful for discovering the death toll attributable to special forces, much less JTF2. [note: preceding paragraph edited for accuracy - DM]
As for Canada's stats during that early campaign, Pugliese wrote in 2007: "JTF2 took at least three prisoners in January 2002 and another four during a raid several months later."
The Thorne article articulates my point well: "Beyond acknowledging that JTF2 is in Afghanistan, defence officials and the federal government have maintained their usual strict silence about the unit's exploits."
Earlier this year, the CBC reported: "There have been hints that JTF2 might be handling so-called high-value prisoners." Alas, only hints.
Sincerely, Dave M
Well, the JTF2 have been in Afghanistan longer than any other Canadian forces, and their numbers have doubled. There are now several hundred of these commandos doing secret ops in the country.
The little information that has been given to us indicates that they do work in concert with other forces, particularly the USA, that they have a special command structure, that they operate by stealth, and that they conduct assassinations and kidnappings of "Taliban" suspects.
I think if they had been spending their time teaching math to Afghan schoolgirls we would have heard a lot more about them by now.
CBC reports June 28, 2008:
M. Specter: As a stickler for accuracy (sort of one of the themes of this blog) I should point out that I don't know any sources that support these assertions:
"the JTF2 have been in Afghanistan longer than any other Canadian forces, and their numbers have doubled. There are now several hundred of these commandos doing secret ops in the country."
Sincerely,
Dave M
How can you possibly say that if you claim to be familiar with the sources I quoted above?
These facts are not in dispute as far as I know. And while actual documentation is hard to come by, the facts are at least credible enough to be accepted and reported by the mainstream media. Their sources are likely the military itself. I don't know why you have such a hard time believing them.
I have already quoted MSM sources, and posted a photograph, that say the JTF2 was part of Task Force K-Bar in 2001-2. Graeme Smith says they were deployed in late 2001, estimated at 250 to 300 strong at that time, and the government committed to spending money to double the size of the contingent by 2006. As Smith notes, the JTF2 is Canada's most secretive military force.
That to me indicates that the JTF were in Afghanistan long before ISAF was invented, and before any other Canadian forces were sent, and their numbers had doubled by 2006 to several hundred.
In other words, "the JTF2 have been in Afghanistan longer than any other Canadian forces, and their numbers have doubled. There are now several hundred of these commandos doing secret ops in the country."
What part of those assertions aren't supported by the MSM evidence?
M. Spector: Thanks for your patience. I think we might come to some understanding after clearing up a couple of facts. The Smith article you cite does not in fact report the number of JTF2 in Afghanistan. Smith (Globe and Mail, Apr 17/07 see: http://milnewstbay.pbworks.com/99786) reports on the TOTAL size of JTF2, not the size of the Afghan war deployment. He also reports that the TOTAL size of JTF2 had doubled by 2007 in accordance with the post-9/11 budget plan. Again, this did not refer to the size of the Afghan war deployment. The total size is now said to be about 600, making it unlikely that the force can deploy 'several hundred' at any one time. The 2001-02 K-Bar contingent of the JTF2 was officially acknowledged to be about 40 soldiers who served from Dec 5, 2001 to June 2002. I don't believe there has been any solid numbers given for the size since then.
But we don't know what sort of involvement they had from 2002 to 2005 -- perhaps none. In 2005 Lewis Mackenzie suggested they were back by the summer of 2005 in advance of the fall 2005 regular force deployment. While they have operated there frequently since 2005, have they operated there continuously? We don't know. Have they perhaps been spelled off by the Canadian Special Forces Regiment? Unknown.
In sum, my assessment stands: we don't know how long they've been there; their numbers in Afghanistan are not known to have doubled; and there are probably not hundreds of JTF2 on the ground there now.
Regards,
Dave M