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Jul 28, 2010

Wikilieaks wonderings

destroyed house in Bala Baluk district
Some thoughts

“Supposedly the biggest leak of military information ever”, appropriately summarizes the response by the likes of CNN, Al Jazeera and Euronews to the leak of military logs from Afghanistan on Wikileaks and in three international newspapers. Over 92000 incidents have been ‘made available’ for public scrutiny and paint a clearer picture of the daily intensity, insecurity and pain involved in this conflict.

My response: are people really surprised? Surprised about the high numbers of civilian casualties; the hunt for 2000 AQ leaders; or the mechanical descriptions of loss of human life and goods? I do wonder, because I’m not surprised and find it hard to understand that there is astonishment…but I also do understand that not everyone is here in the field on a daily basis and that indeed people do not have to be thinking about it over breakfast (because, please don’t).

I immediately spent some hours going over the log entries for my province and recognised a number of the incidents described. About an incident described as having happened at a bridge at this or that latitude in which LN 7 KIA and LN 5 WIA, I know that those 7 killed (KIA: killed in action) were in fact children and I have pictures of the wounded (WIA: wounded) on my laptop, as well as of the burned out auto-bus and the surviving relatives.

Obviously I recognise the reaction from a number of journalists and maybe the general public that the logs are extremely mechanical in dealing with human lives, but that is the way it is and there is no other way. Logs are not meant to convey an opinion or a feeling. Next to that it’s not always possible for an army to go and visit the village they air-struck the night before to assess the damage, so numbers and acronyms are what we are left with.

What can be done is making sure that information is forwarded whenever an army suspects civilians have been caught in conflict, this happens, but not in all cases; not by a long shot. I (very) regularly receive army-made short descriptions of incidents with a date, maybe a place, numbers of KIA and WIA and an explanation of the action. With these short descriptions I can send my team to the field to further investigate. My team coming back and their information being typed-up is often the moment that names, ages and families are added to the numbers and acronyms you see in the logs, if they weren’t known yet.

The information we receive from the troops is often incomplete (understandably so) and from the responses I get from these troops I know that they appreciate the human story that we assemble from our investigations. Not just for information, but also because they know this means that an organisation that can provide assistance is working on it. No human lives can be brought back or blown-off legs replaced, but for the troops and international politics it means: “we hit civilians, we won’t make any statements concerning that, but we know that either compensation or assistance (my work) is in the pipeline, which might stabilise this community again.”

The information isn’t always correct either. I’ve had a man that supposedly died at an army hospital, but was still very much breathing and talking. Nevertheless the information I get from troops, however incomplete or flawed, is often more reliable than the information we can get from afghan civilian sources. Village-councils happily keep people off victims-lists if they have no ‘interest’ in specific victims’ tribes or families; one family will accuse another of Taliban relations on absolutely no grounds whatsoever; an elder declares with his hand on his heart that a certain person has never existed; and another one damages his own house, that escaped a bombing, so he can get compensation. Even during meetings at my office victims will argue about who has suffered most, or should have suffered more. Human behaviour? yes, in all it’s indescribable, unrelentless and shadowy glory.

The fog of war, that’s what we’re collectively in and anyone you meet will tell you to go and search either left or right, but never under his roof. In this fog shocking mistakes are made and horrifying numbers of lives are lost. But who is guilty when you can hardly make out friend or enemy, or more appurtenant, who is innocent and innocent on what account? When an American rocket hit’s a family-car, if a soldier never returns to his family due to a Taliban IED, if a donkey is turned into a mobile explosive device which blows up a marketplace, if a NATO missile can’t distinguish between the children’s’ bedroom or the explosives workshop under the same roof…

The fog of war is never an excuse though...