AFGHANISTAN ACCOUNTABILITY

The massive release of documents which number reportedly over 92,000 documents will take some time to digest. It is doubtful whether they will have any effect on the phony election that has been inflicted on Australia.

Paul McGeough gives his assessment at The Sydney Morning Herald:

However, the logs’ greater service to disclosure and transparency is the extent to which they reveal how the governments with troops in Afghanistan sanitise their public account of how badly the war has been going.

These are the raw accounts, soaked in the blood and sweat of combat, before they have been prettied up by the triage teams in the Washington and allied PR clinics. We knew there were civilian casualties, but not this many; we had heard of the secret CIA ground missions to assassinate Taliban leaders, now it is confirmed; we have had guarded reports on the use of unmanned drone aircraft in attacks on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, now the picture is fleshed out.

And with the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, last week dropping another $US500 million ($558 million) on Washington’s ally Pakistan, there is enough new dirt in the logs on Islamabad’s two-timing with the Taliban to make Americans wonder who is getting the bang for their buck.

Washington and its forces on the ground are still recovering from the shock sacking in June of their Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal – and now this.

It makes no difference to the public understanding of the progress of the war that the most recent of the logs is dated December 2009. Their sheer weight on being dumped in the public arena will cement the sense of a war being lost and give rise to further demands that the troops be brought home.

The contradiction, inherent in the barbarity that is modern warfare conducted among civilians, is that this war supposedly designed to defeat terrorism, is conducted with the methods of terrorism. The questions  that arise include: Why have journalists and news organizations been so unable to report on the war? Why have not those responsible for murdering civilians, and thus engaging in war crimes, been brought to account?

ELSEWHERE:

Dan Gilmor at Salon makes several points that to me are salient, including the observation that the rich and the powerful are not going to accept the democratic ( or is it anarchic) spirit of the internet lying down. We can expect a reaction. Do the intertubes have any friends in high places? Does representative democracy? We are about to find out.

One immediate effect of the release of the war log documents by Wikileaks is now there is more attention being given to civilian casualties, but not to date the implication of war crimes, which presumably would include criminal negligence.