Official comment on the Afghanistan battlefield reports released by Wikileaks would have us believe that they contain nothing new. But, many important facts never made it into the official reports, writes Noah Shachtman, who witnessed one of the battles. The reports, often providing little more than place, date and the number of enemies killed, leave out details that, Schactman acknowledges, include the most disturbing and important. He surmises, generously, that the lack of detail was unintentional.
In fact, from the early days of the Iraq war to the present battles in Afghanistan, war reports have whitewashed and manipulated the truth in order to better serve official US propaganda. Looking farther back, to the Vietnam war, we see reports, similar to these, that emphasized casualty figures--an emphasis that was intentional, high-level, and led to mass murder in Vietnam.
From the Wall Street Journal article by Noah Schactman:
Echo company got into a gunfight last Aug. 25 in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. You'll learn that by reading the report found in WikiLeaks's database of Afghan war documents released on Sunday night. You'll learn that, after a chase, the Marines killed one insurgent. You'll learn that the insurgents supposedly fled and that the troops decided to stay the night in the area in case the militants returned.
What you won't learn is that a Marine sniper team sparked the shoot-out with a surprise assault on the insurgents; that every member of that team was nearly killed in the battle; or that the incident would kick off a three-day siege in which the Taliban nearly surrounded the Echo company squad. - Noah Schactman
Schactman is sharp enough to realize that what the reports leave out is critical for anyone assessing the war to know.
In a counterinsurgency, such metrics often matter least. A counterinsurgency is a contest for the loyalties of the people. Munitions expenditures and body counts are, at most, tangentially relevant. More important is insurgent motivation, the mood of the local shopkeeper, and the local farmer's ability to bring his crops to market.
Surprisingly, Schactman fails to note the established importance of numbers to wartime administrations. Examples include the following.
Like units throughout Vietnam, Charlie Company was encouraged to achieve a high "body count," the Pentagon-sanctioned measure of progress in the war. Officers up to the high echelons of the American Division were more interested in sending on favorable reports about their operations than in asking awkward questions about civilian deaths. - from The Vietnam War in American Memory by Patrick Hagopian (2009)
[C]over-up of the My Lai massacre began almost as soon as the killing ended. Official army reports of the operation proclaimed a great victory: 128 enemy dead, only one American casualty (one soldier intentionally shot himself in the foot). The army knew better. Hugh Thompson had filed a complaint, alleging numerous war crimes involving murders of civilians. - Doug Linder
Not until 2008 would many details finally emerge in "A My Lai a Month (November 13, 2008), by journalist Nick Turse.
The investigation paints a disturbing picture of civilian slaughter on a scale that indeed dwarfs My Lai, and of a cover-up at the Army's highest levels. The killings were no accident or aberration. They were instead the result of command policies that turned wide swaths of the Mekong Delta into "free-fire zones" in a relentless effort to achieve a high body count. While the carnage in the Delta did not begin or end with Speedy Express, the operation provides a harsh new snapshot of the abject slaughter that typified US actions during the Vietnam War.
Newsweek latched onto the story In 1971, through the efforts of its Saigon bureau chief, Kevin Buckley, and its stringer, Alex Shrimkin.
In the end, Buckley and Shimkin's nearly 5,000-word investigation, including a compelling sidebar of eyewitness testimony from Vietnamese survivors, was nixed by Newsweek's top editors, who expressed concern that such a piece would constitute a "gratuitous" attack on the Nixon administration...A truncated, 1,800-word piece finally ran in June 1972, but many key facts, eyewitness interviews, even mention of Julian Ewell's name, were left on the cutting-room floor. In its eviscerated form, the article resulted in only a ripple of interest
A fuller picture would not emerge until decades later, thanks to a whistleblower's letter and the tenacious research of Nick Turse. By then, the US was involved in a new war with startling similarities to the old war.
So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."
You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...
-Seymour Hersh
Will Amreicans again have to wait decades for the real facts to emerge? Or will Congress heed the red flags and order an immediate investigation before authorizing continuation of this war?
Well, we didn't have to wait long for an answer.
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