WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

The Afghanistan war logs

Cyberspace

25 July 2010

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

US ARMY MAJOR CHRIS 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 madrassa, completely reducing it to rubble. When the assault 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 madrassa, 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 madrassa 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 shield 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 and its partners the New York Times and Der Spiegel. The field report was among the 92,000 allegedly turned over to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange 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 assault 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

Type Friendly Action

Title 172100Z[ulu time] T[ask] F[orce] 373 OBJ[ective] Lane

Summary

NOTE: The following information (TF-373 and HIMARS) is Classified Secret / NOFORN. The knowledge that TF-373 conducted a HIMARS strike must be kept protected. All other information below is classified Secret / REL[ease] ISAF. [International Security Assistance 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 detainees

Summary

H[elicopter] A[ssault] F[orce] departed for Orgun-E [base] to conduct link-up and posture to the objective immediately after pre-assault fires. On order, 5 rockets were launched and destroyed structures on the objective (NAI 2). The HAF quickly inserted the assault 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 assault force quickly conducted dismounted movement to the target area and established containment on the south side of the objective. During the initial assault, dedicated air assets engaged multiple M[ilitary] A[ge] M[ale]s squirting off the objective area. G[round] F[orce] C[ommander] assessed 3 x EKIA squirters north and 3 x EKIA squirters south of the compound were neutralised from air asset fires. The assault 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 passed initial assessment of 7 x NC KIA (children). During initial questioning, it was assessed that the children were not allowed out of the building, due to UIMs presence within the compound. The assault 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 assault. The objective was secured and the assault force initially detained 6 x MAMs. The GFC recommended that 7 MAMs be detained for additional questioning. The TF CDR assessed that the assault force will continue SSE. The local governor was notified of the current situation and requests for assistance 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 documents that surfaced when the Afghan war logs were first published on 25 July 2010. On that day, Der Spiegel made the activities of the killer squad Task Force 373 its cover story, headlining it “America’s secret war”. In the 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/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 ambassador 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 assertion 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 clusters 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 constitute 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 tended to take a more strategic approach to the Afghan war. One of their major interests was to study the large – and often surprising – quantity 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’ Washington 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. “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 relationship is important. But it should be a relationship based on a very clear message: that it is not right to have any relationship 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 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 communiqués as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting … The 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 – classified 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 documents, 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 assassinate 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 documents, detailing similar truths about the bloodbath in Iraq.