[Reader-list] The crumbling myth of 'smart wars'

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A fghanistan war logs: Shattering the illusion of a bloodless victory
Real picture of a conflict longer than Vietnam, or either world war, refutes
the idea of a 'revolution in military affairs'
 
Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk,     Sunday 25 July 2010 22.04 BST
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A US marine and his translator meet Afghan villagers. While politicians and
military commanders talked of the battle for 'hearts and minds', the war
logs show a very different reality. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
More than a decade ago, when the cold war was well and truly over, American
and British strategists began to celebrate what they called a "revolution in
military affairs". Information technology and "precision weapons", products
of the microchip, would lead to a new, western, way of warfare. Public
opinion, it was said, would no longer tolerate civilian or military
casualties.

The logs we publish today, a detailed chronicle of a violent conflict that
has lasted longer than the Vietnam war, longer than the two world wars,
shatter the illusion that conflicts could be meticulously planned and
executed, and the assumption that bloodshed would be acceptable only in very
limited quantities.

They demonstrate, too, that despite the opportunities provided by new
technology, media groups with a global reach still cannot offer their public
more than sporadic accounts of the most visible and controversial incidents,
and glimpses of the background.

Donald Rumsfeld and his fellow neocons in Washington translated the
"revolution in military affairs" into "shock and awe". When that didn't work
in Iraq, General David Petraeus rewrote the US army's field manual. The
British army belatedly followed suit, as the two countries providing the
vast majority of troops to Afghanistan set out a modern counter-insurgency
strategy, a battle for "hearts and minds", a war "among the people, for the
people". Above all, civilians would be protected.

That is what government officials and military commanders have been saying
for years and what they continue to say. The reality, as the logs show, is
very different. They provide unprecedented insight, through the wood and the
trees, painting a picture, via a myriad micro-episodes, of brutality,
cynicism, fear, panic, false alarms and the killing of a large number of
civilians ­ many more than of foreign troops or insurgents ­ by all sides in
the conflict. And, inevitably, "friendly fire". It is a story of deep-seated
corruption by senior members of the Afghan police, of black operations by
coalition special forces engaged in assassinations of dubious legality, of
spies, and of unmanned but armed drones controlled by "pilots", including
private contractors, sitting in front of computers thousands of miles away
in air-conditioned rooms in the Nevada desert.

It creates an illusion of war games isolating the drones' controllers,
national military commanders and politicians in their offices in London or
Washington from the real violence and confusion on the ground in
Afghanistan.

Sophisticated communications and weapons systems, which often provide false
comfort, can lead to information overload and excess firepower adding to the
confusion ­ the fog of war ­ rather than clearing it away. This war of the
future, as military strategists now describe it, costing billions of pounds
a year, is no conventional conflict with fixed positions on a battlefield, a
clear enemy and friendly forces.

The Taliban-led insurgents soon realised they were on a hiding to nothing
when four years ago they first engaged British, US (though few of those were
so exposed at the time) and other foreign troops in open gun battles. They
adapted their tactics and their weaponry, resorting to increasingly powerful
improvised explosive devices (IEDs) which are now responsible for well over
half of the deaths and serious injuries to foreign troops in Afghanistan.
There are increasing signs, however, that insurgents, growing more
confident, are reverting to rifles, putting more pressure on foreign
soldiers by shooting at them from a distance.

According to the logs, special forces have killed "high value" targets
without any attempt to capture them. The records say that British soldiers
killed or wounded civilians on occasions by firing "warning shots". They
describe how US forces have killed British troops and Afghan forces by
mistake, and how Afghan soldiers have killed their comrades by accident.
They describe the difficulty in promoting "hearts and minds", in dampening
suspicions in a country where central government and its officials, let
alone foreign forces, are distrusted, and where tribal loyalties and ethnic
divisions cross internal administrative boundaries.

Military and government spokesmen may have covered up, misled, simply been
ignorant of what was taking place. This is why the publication of the logs
are so important.

Military commanders and officials no longer try to maintain the fiction
which they were tempted to not so long ago. They came to admit that the war
in Afghanistan is messy. The logs reveal just how messy it really is.

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