The "explosive" Wikileaks collection will not have the same impact as the Pentagon Papers. The documents seem to amplify or confirm what many have suspected for years in terms of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with militants.
Exposing the truth is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to take Ellsberg's place, the goal is to inform the people of what their government is doing with the taxpayers' dollars.
Yes, we already knew about Pakistan's intelligence collaborating with the enemy. But did you know for sure that the Taliban were shooting down U.S. choppers with stinger missiles? I did not. I do now.
Seth Jones has talked about the heat seeking missiles going back to early 2008. The only reason I happen to know this is because he was on NPR a few months ago talking about it along with the Pakistan connection. Certainly didn't see much coverage of this in the mainstream media until now. Wikileaks does a good job getting people's attention at least. Too bad they weren't around in late 2002 / early 2003.
I don't think the problem was so much a lack of raw data (most of this information actually WAS reported in open source publications; just ignored), as much as a lack of any ability to analyze and draw conclusions from that data. This was true within the US Department of State, the CPA, the PCO, etc. Reporters and academia didn't have anyone better. Wikileaks would have been good if there were secret information not being published, but basically everything important was published openly with a 1-3 month lag time.
The only part of US society with any experience at all going into this in 2003 was the military, due to KFOR/Kosovo, and even that was exceedingly limited. Arguably, if the US had more experience in 2003, it might have been less willing to go into Iraq at all.
There were people who were just 100% anti-war in general, or anti Bush, or whatever, but because they were always screaming the same thing, they could be easily ignored -- kind of like calling every single death in a war murder, it degrades the term murder and makes actual murder much cheaper as a result.
Michael Yon (www.michaelyon-online.com) was probably the first to say things were actually going badly from 2003-2005, and then to document the surge and "awakening" which won Iraq.
If anyone won the war in Iraq, it was Iran. The surge only "worked" because Iran allowed it to work. In case the U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear facilities, you can count on losing Iraq once again.
Yon takes good photos, and he provides some interesting stories at the tactical level. But he's kind of completely clueless about the grand plan. He's nothing more than a "useful idiot", cheering for a campaign from which he gains very little.
It absolutely went from utter failure to just sort of failure with the surge and awakening.
No one really won (well, the Kurds, and maybe Iran), but sometimes making something really bad suck less is a victory. Given that the people who architected the turnaround were not the people who started it, I'd say they did a pretty good job with what they were given.
Going from utter failure to mere failure is not victory, it is disaster mitigation. What would a victory in Iraq even look like? Iran emerged as a regional power. Saudi Arabia continues to finance terrorism with petrodollars. Millions of Arabs hate the U.S. even more than they did 10 years ago. How could this happen? Where was Congress in early 2003? Where were the checks and balances?
Why is that any sane person who dares to criticize the U.S. foreign policy is labeled as "traitor", when the true traitors were the congressmen who failed to check the executive branch, the intelligence agencies' employees who could but did not blow the whistle, and overall the American people who engaged in hysteria and madness and abstained from rational thought after the 9/11 attacks.
The scary thing is that Pakistan apparently now produces "Stingers" as well (ANZA-II); probably superior to the other foreign MANPADS out there. We let them distribute thousands to the Muj in Afghanistan vs. the Soviets, and they apparently reverse engineered some.
The Anza range of MANPADs is based on Chinese MANPAD designs, themselves clones of Soviet/Russian MANPADs, and not on the Stinger. If you view photos of the Anza system the resemblance to Eastern Bloc weapons like the SA-7 Strela are quite clear, whereas it seems to share very little if anything with the Stinger.
Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD systems.
People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these days.
Sort of off-topic (it's highly doubtful the Taliban have the latest generation...), but which MANPADS would you consider top for the anti-blackhawk mission? The Starstreak?
Hard to say really, as it's been a while since I dove into this subject. But yes, considering the missile approach warning systems, directed infrared countermeasures and countermeasure dispensers available for use on helicopters today, it's probably fair to say that a beam-riding SACLOS missile like the Starstreak is likely to be amongst the most effective against helicopters.
Good point. I assumed that by "man portable surface to air missiles", they meant "stingers". My mistake. While I am at it, here's some info on Stinger Missiles:
To clarify for other readers, the Stinger is a U.S. made MANPAD (Man-portable air-defense systems). If the Taliban have any, they are 20 year old missiles left over from the war with the Soviets, and they are most likely non-functional, since they have a limited life time. It would be embarrassing to the U.S. to loose aircraft to Stingers, but if there are any left that still work, there probably aren't very many, and the risk is limited. It's more likely that the Taliban has managed to acquire newer MANPADS (probably a Soviet design). This would be especially scary if these missiles were being supplied by the ISI or the Iranians, since it's then possible that the Taliban could acquire quite a lot of them.
That's not a surprise either, sadly. Incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing of civilians have surfaced throughout the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, from the very first days of both conflicts. The military has played down most of them, or issued denials, unless confronted by overwhelming evidence that can't be easily denied such as video and photographs.
Which specific actions in this set of documents do you think were incidents of indiscriminate or careless killing?
There were definitely a bunch of cases of needless (in retrospect) killing, but those were generally mistakes, vs. conscious policy. Given that it is a war zone, and information is imperfect, but that inaction would have its own costs, I haven't seen a lot of cases of seriously bad activity. There is also a gray zone between illegal and unjustified; the few genuinely illegal actions have generally been prosecuted and punished by the military. There were other cases where "bad" things happened which were not illegal, but where the policy was changed as a result to prevent those things.
For instance, due to the incidents such as the madrasa night attack in J-Bad, special operations night raids were sharply limited in 2009 (per GEN McChrystal), and the rules for the use of airstrikes and artillery fires were substantially tightened.
Internal to the military, people don't really cover up this information -- it feels into the process of changing policies. Compared to most companies, lower ranking military people are fairly willing to report bad news up the chain of command (still not perfect, but more so). Almost all of this is "hidden" behind security classification, maybe too much so -- which makes people outside the military assume mistakes are intentional and not being corrected. There is a compelling argument for aggressively declassifying information as quickly as possible, positive or negative.
If the media covered Iraq/Afghanistan like they covered WWI/WW2/Korea, there could be burning cities (well, burning crappy towns in the case of Afghanistan), tens of thousands of dead civilians, etc. (I don't actually think that would happen, outside of Fallujah, Baqubah, Shahikot, Konar, etc.)
There are a lot more embedded reporters now than there were in Vietnam. The main difference with Vietnam was the draft. For almost all Americans, the wars now are something on TV which happens to other people, which they might feel intellectually one way or the other about, but which has very little direct impact.
There are more embedded but either they have more constraints on what they can/will say (I've heard this but can't find a citation so I wont stand on it) or they are siding with what's going on. You don't get the same feeling of senselessness from the reporting that you did from Vietnam.
The US killed more civilians in one afternoon on 16 MAR 1968 at My Lai (and, unlawfully) than have died in the ENTIRE AFGHAN WAR FOR TEN YEARS.
The reason there is no news reporting of numerous horrible atrocities committed by the US in Iraq or Afghanistan is that...there haven't been (m)any. There have been potentially needless but non-criminal incidents, and accidents, which are documented. There have not been many genuine crimes. (I believe there were more in Iraq than there have been in Afghanistan; in Iraq there was a military unit running a brothel, several cases of detainees potentially being abused, etc.)
The crime in Afghanistan and Iraq, if any, is that we're wasting huge amounts of "blood and treasure" for a mission which isn't in the US vital national interest. As far as how the actual war is being conducted, it's about as bloodless as an occupation can be. We're effectively trading combat effectiveness and huge amounts of money for casualties on both sides.
Very well, point retracted. But I think that the media should work harder to make people realize what hell on earth occupation is for the occupied in the same way they made people realize what a hell Vietnam was.
I don't disagree that the media has done a horrible job of reporting on Iraq/Afghanistan.
However, I think you really overestimate the downrange reporting coming from Vietnam (I don't know how old you are; the war was over before I was born, so I only read about it after the fact).
There was definitely a lot of focus on US casualties. We were losing about 300 per week, whereas now it is more like 300 per quarter or per year.
The main difference was in Vietnam, the journalists had free reign to go anywhere in the allied area they wished; in Iraq/Afghanistan, reporters are generally embedded with a specific unit. Maybe psychologically embedding with the unit makes reports identify with the soldiers more.
The only really stunning difference between Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan was down to Walter Cronkite giving his opinion that the war would end in stalemate. I don't think very many other Vietnam war reporters (from Vietnam; not US based) gave personal commentary like that. I think that is down to Walter Cronkite as a person, and that he had experience with a previous war (he flew on bombers and covered landings during WW2) before reporting on Vietnam. None of the embedded reporters in Afghanistan or Iraq covered a major war other than Gulf War I before (Anderson Cooper, Geraldo, Christiane Amanpour, etc.)
