Very good piece, Sunny. Thanks.

In #3, you quote Glenn Greenwald from salon.com. Here’s some context, so people don’t get the mistaken impression that he’s being dismissive of the leak:

“It’s hardly a shock that the war in Afghanistan is going far worse than political officials have been publicly claiming… This leak is not unlike the Washington Post series from the last week: the broad strokes were already well-known, but the sheer magnitude of the disclosures may force more public attention on these matters than had occurred previously.

“Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world… WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall [of secrecy], enabling modest glimpses into what The Washington Post spent last week describing as Top Secret America.”

They’ll act as an amazingly accurate bullshit detector, if nothing else. If you spy anyone reacting to the leak with any of the following gambits –

- This just shows that we don’t have enough men and materiel in-country. Obviously, simply exceeding the Soviet Union’s occupation force is insufficient – maybe we need to double Soviet troop numbers.
- The public shouldn’t be seeing this stuff. It’s misleading, not like No.10′s propaganda machine.
- These leaks are so one sided and unfair. If only somebody would leak more of the Taliban’s execution videos or photos of their horrific atrocities, we’d appreciate that blah blah.
- Okay, so these revelations make the war look unwinnable. Even if victory is impossible, we must keep troops in Afghanistan and – (Cough, cough, mumble) …total defeat of extremists and democratic liberalism throughout the region.
- Why are people shocked that the US are operating assassination squads under the worryingly vague title “Black Ops”? Military units charging around somebody else’s country killing the fuck out of whoever they like in complete obscurity is fine, nothing to worry about.
- Okay, so coalition forces are regularly rubbing out hundreds of civilians with total impunity, but what did you expect? War is hell, man…

…You’ll know to instantly disregard their opinions as fatally compromised.

Beyond that, I’d say it’s pretty important – if you have US officials essentially admitting that the war is an unwinnable catastrophe, then there’s going to have to be a significant ratcheting down of propagandist calls for perpetual occupation until some undefined point of victory.

Makes for some interesting reading. It partly demonstrates how hard it is for a lot of ordinary soldiers to operate under the stress and expectations of the region. Alongside that it raises questions about the use of some less conventional government bodies in warzone situations.

That said, I’m not convinced that this changes much about the bigger picture.

We could take the view that frankly there is only so much we can do (the “unwinnable war” view) so we should cut our losses and stop being responsible for deaths in Afghanistan. But that’s an abdication of our responsibility.

On the other hand we could hope that by the time we withdraw the local forces will be capable of holding back outside and taleban forces. But at this stage I think the military view is that they need more training, more men, and more equipment first – and that upon withdrawal civilian and other casualties will rise.

These documents don’t help with that bigger picture.

What they should result in is questions being asked not about afghanistan as such, but about how western forces are trained and supported and how non-military organisations operate alongside military forces in conflict zones.

Alas I fear that is more complicated a rallying cry than “Bring our boys home”

The problem is that pulling out of Afghanistan is also likely to cause major long-term problems. India will dive in strongly, as will Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan will once again become a battlefield between competing factions until the brute force of the Taliban asserts itself again.

I suspect the brute force next time will be exercised by the Tajiks (in coalition with other smaller ethnic groups) against the Pashtun. Without the help of Pakistan, the Taliban will be defeated, but only after appalling inter-ethnic bloodletting and ethnic cleansing on a scale way beyond anything seen in the Balkans during the 90s.

If we pull out, we’ll be guilty of facilitating a terrible series of crimes against humanity.

Afghanistan (and its quarrelsome neighbours) has become virtually the gold standard when it comes to defining what an unwinnable conflict is – as the Russians, amongst others, found to their cost?

The toxic mix (in the region) of poverty, lack of education and sexism, allied to a particularly nasty form of religious fundamentalism is more than a match for even the most well equipped military force – as an aside, is the professionalism of our soldiers sufficient motivation for them to accept that they might be maimed or killed in a war they neither want nor understand?

Soldiers must also face the reality that innocent people are being killed by them in the pursuit of a rather nebulous end point – the sooner it is over, the better.

Things may be better under Obama’s administration (though probably not by much). The fact that George Bush was incompetent and conducted everything badly is widely known.

Yes, but Bush didn’t actually command things, did he. Civilian deaths are still all too frequent (and those are just the killings that the bastards will admit to).

‘Soldiers must also face the reality that innocent people are being killed by them in the pursuit of a rather nebulous end point – the sooner it is over, the better.’

Unfortunately bringing them home won’t be the end of it for the soldiers: there’s decades of post-traumatic stress disorders, depression and other mental illnesses, unemployment and suicide to look forward to even for those without physical injuries. The sooner we start ‘fixing’ what the last government broke the better.

[8] “there’s decades of post-traumatic stress disorders, depression and other mental illnesses, unemployment and suicide to look forward to even for those without physical injuries” – quite right, and given the unpopularity, or at least the lack of understanding of this conflict I doubt if many damaged squaddies will garner much public sympathy 5 or 10 years down the line?

This item claims, “The Ministry of Defence has also been criticised for not doing enough to attend to the mental health of Territorial Army soldiers and other reservists returning from the front line”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7532775/Military-medical-facilities-not-prepared-for-increase-in-casualties.html

There is further concern that military medical facilities are ‘not prepared for increase in casualties’ (same source).

@Sunny:

“Things may be better under Obama’s administration (though probably not by much).”

Wasn’t this month the deadliest month ever since 2001 in Afghanistan? If anything, things are getting worse, which is what happens the more it becomes apparent that this war is nonsense.

“I have to admit I’m increasingly of the view that even Afghanistan is unwinnable.”

This has been evident since the word go.

“India will dive in strongly, as will Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan will once again become a battlefield between competing factions until the brute force of the Taliban asserts itself again.”

These countries have to be encouraged to join in rather than presented as a problem. And bear in mind that pre-2001, Pakistan had its militants under control (from around 1989 onwards). If anything has shaken up the region, it’s this criminal war.

“That will once again destabilise the entire South Asian region.”

The region is more unstable than it has been in decades and the war has already destabilised the region beyond recognition.

‘Do the Afghanistan war logs change anything?’

Depends on how the MSM reports them to the sort of person who puts up Facebook statuses supporting Armed Forces Day.

If Afghanistan is unwinnable, we have to deal with the existence of a global network of fanatics, erroneously using Islam as a cover for their political fascism. Though I sympathise with people’s concern when they read some of the stuff to come out of the 90,000 odd leaked documents, we should remember to put realistic thinking cap on and remember that the Taliban is an unceasing collection of criminal killers who won’t stop until every family has to give up a son in the regions they are strong.

No, we can’t be in Afghanistan forever, but just remember that when we do leave, if the Taliban and its networks haven’t been destroyed the Middle East, and possibly further afield, will suffer as a consequence.

It took years for me to see this, I once only saw “US foreign policy hawks” and the “US bankrolling criminals and dictators” before, however now I see the war effort transcends political pigeonholing; that is, though Bush – a “neocon” – began this war, doesn’t make it a neocon war, and though neocons support this war, doesn’t mean it is a “neocon” war.

End of.

An addendum to my last comment: Wikileaks in Afghanistan

It used to be argued that if the US withdrew from Indochina, it would leave the region at the mercy of bloodthirsty Communists who would subsequently spread throughout the region. Do the same people that oppose withdrawing from Afghanistan think that the US should have stayed in Vietnam for even longer than it did? The logic seems much the same.

When the Khmer Rouge took over neighbouring Cambodia, US hawks argued that their warnings about the effects of withdrawal had been vindicated – though others might point out that as it was the US that destabilised it in the first place, any undoubtedly doomed attempt to stay there for longer could hardly have improved things.

Yet after the Pol Pot’s defeat, the US (and UK) gave substantial covert support to the exiled Khmer Rouge – an act which should cause us to question whether our leaders are ever really acting with the humanitarian motives they claim to hold.

@14 Richard P.: “It used to be argued that if the US withdrew from Indochina, it would leave the region at the mercy of bloodthirsty Communists who would subsequently spread throughout the region.”

Your argument is essentially whether governance is determined by the domino effect. The counter argument is that sustained warfare prevented the effect when the US withdrew from Indochina. I don’t know enough of that history to draw a conclusion.

I do know that parts of Pakistan are not controlled by central government. Less reliably, I am told that the Pakistani secret service is dominated by Taliban sympathisers and that there may be a few dodgy generals. And it is no longer a secret that Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Thus, whilst I have not drawn conclusions about domino effects in the past, I am not complacent about potential ones in the future.

Carl @12
…… we should remember to put realistic thinking cap on and remember that the Taliban is an unceasing collection of criminal killers who won’t stop until every family has to give up a son in the regions they are strong.
There was a guy on Channel 4 News last night being interviewed who was saying it was looking like the Taliban was becoming a movement with great momentum.
I didn’t catch his name, but what he said sounded ominous.

Endgame in Afghanistan: ‘It’s taken a year to move 20km’

Who’d still sign up if they had seen footage like this?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/jul/29/afghanistan-war-us-military

Sunny: ’2. There will be a attack on Wikileaks by foreign policy hawks. Indeed it has already started over in the US and with some here. This would be an attack on democratic values and free speech and should be resisted.’

No. If it’s true that Assange and WikiLeaks published the names and identifying details of Afghans who gave US forces information on the Taliban, then WikiLeaks acted disgracefully. This will have one effect only- it will enable the Taliban to find and murder the people named.

There’s certainly an argument that whoever leaked the footage of the Apache helicopter shootings in Iraq acted to bring a possible crime to light, but publishing the details of informants is a totally different matter. That kind of information has to stay classified or people get killed. If Assange did publish these details, as the New York Times is saying he did, then both he and his informant- probably Bradley Manning- have acted appallingly and I’m afraid they deserve to face a court. It doesn’t matter whether you are pro or anti the Afghan war: you don’t have the right to give the Taliban the data they need to murder Afghan civilians.