I've spent the last few days going through the classified Afghan War incident reports that were leaked to Wikileaks. Wow. Most of the press accounts focus on things like drone attacks or civilian collateral damage. But when you look at the reports over time, a very clear pattern emerges--this is a typical guerrilla war, and the US is losing it, very badly.
In a guerrilla war, of course, the counter-insurgent is no longer a military organization using military force against an opponent----the counter-insurgent is nothing more than a policeman, and reading the Afghan "incident reports" is like reading LAPD Gang Unit files---except of course that the LAPD has to follow legal procedures that the US Army doesn't, and the LA gangs don't ambush the LAPD using AK-47's or roadside bombs.
The first thing that strikes you reading the reports is the sheer number of incidents. There are over 8,000 reports covering improvised explosive device attacks, (the favorite tactic used by the insurgents), and another 8500 covering IED's that were found and defused before exploding. There are some 27,000 reports in the category "enemy action" involving exchanges of fire between insurgents and friendlies. In the vast majority of incidents, no friendlies are killed; in cases where there are fatalities, there are only usually one or two per attack. But the sheer number of attacks makes the casualties mount--in relative terms, Afghanistan is far more deadly to US forces than Iraq. Although the Iraq War has more US casualties, the American force in Afghanistan is smaller, and so a higher percentage of troops in Afghanistan have been killed or wounded than in Iraq. This is not a minor war.
In going through the reports chronologically, a clear pattern emerges. In the first few years of the war, the vast majority of the insurgent incidents occurred in "Regional Command East", the area of Afghanistan closest to the Pakistani border. Beginning in 2006, however, an increasing number of attacks began happening in other areas of Afghanistan, and increasing numbers of weapons caches were being found throughout the country--indicating that the insurgency itself has been expanding. Today, there is no area of the country that is safe for US forces, and nobody moves anywhere except in large heavily-armed protected convoys (which are often ambushed).
The earliest weapons caches found by US forces were obviously leftovers from the 1979-1989 war with the Russians (one report even mentions the discovery of an old Soviet Army ammo dump by US troops which still contained usable munitions and weapons). In addition, US troops were finding caches of ordinary chemicals used to make explosives, such as potassium nitrate fertilizer, sugar, aluminum powder, and potassium chlorate, as well as bomb triggers made from cellphones, doorbell ringers and garage-door openers. In the last few years, a number of munitions (landmines and mortar shells, mostly used in IEDs) have appeared that are of Chinese, Italian, Iranian or Pakistani manufacture. But a quite high proportion of the munitions used by the insurgents in their bombs seem to be captured US weapons or, especially, unexploded American ordnance that is recovered from the battlefield (one report mentions a local farmer who turned in a large number of unexploded mortar shells that he found in his field after a firefight). And even today, a large amount of chemicals and homemade explosives are routinely recovered. As far as small arms, the vast majority that are found are Russian AK-47s and RPG-7 rocket grenades, most are old and are probably from the 1979 Soviet war. US troops also continue to find small numbers of World War Two-era guns--including British Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles and Soviet PPsh submachine guns--in insurgent caches. So the insurgents have not been beating us with sophisticated modern weapons provided by the Iranians--they have been beating us with 30-year-old leftover AK-47's, and with cellphones and garage-door openers rigged to our own munitions.
The reports also give a pretty good idea of how the US counter-insurgency works. Informants seem to be everywhere, and many weapons caches and arrests seem to be made through informants and information obtained through interrogations. US forces also conduct large "cordon and sweep" operations, where they seal off an area and systematically search everyone in it, using electronic biometric-storage devices to find suspects, and using "X-SPRAY" devices to detect the presence of explosive nitrate residues on people. The US arrests and detains people on the slightest suspicion--reports indicate that children as young as 11 and 14 have been arrested and questioned, and sometimes detained in the camps. The number of people being held in US detention camps must be massive.
There are several incidents indicating that the US has resorted to treating every Afghan as a potential enemy---a certain way to lose the popular support which is all-important in a guerrilla war. In one report, the reporting American trooper makes the telling comment, of an arrested Iraqi Afghan, "He is like all the others, just another terrorist." In one incident, American troops fired on and injured Iraqis Afghans who were digging alongside a road, thinking they were planting an IED--only to find out that they were just innocent civilians digging an irrigation ditch. Several reports mention finding the uniforms of Afghan army and security forces in insurgent caches, and other reports mention incidents where Afghan Army members have been detained and questioned--indicating that the US cannot even completely trust its own military allies. Reports also describe almost 50 popular demonstrations, protests and riots directed against the Kabul government or the US occupation. One report describes an incident in which civilians threw rocks at an Afghan patrol which then responded with lethal gunfire--indicating that the Afghan Army and the Afghan Government have little popular support.
All in all, the reports depict a situation in which the insurgency has been expanding over the past few years, both in intensity and in geographic area; in which Americans are subject to ambush and attack at any time and every place, where US troops treat everyone as an enemy; and where efforts to win "hearts and minds" are failing. For those old enough to remember Vietnam, most of this will be eerily familiar.
As a publisher and editor, of course, I feel an utter obligation to publish these reports, and have selected about 350 pages worth that seem to exemplify the situation (there are over 91,000 pages of reports at Wikileaks in total). Although the reports are still classified by the military and publishing them is technically illegal, my conclusion is that the genie is already out of the bottle, and the Pentagon would just be wasting its time going after me for publishing material that is already accessible to the public--any conceivable harm to "national security" is already a moot point. I've contacted the Florida Chapter of the ACLU for advice (I haven't heard back from them yet), but I'm pretty sure that I'll be safe in publishing the documents.
But on the off chance that I do find myself up on espionage charges, or get renditioned to Libya to get tortured, someone please send a commando squad to rescue me. ;)