Afghanistan war logs: the unvarnished picture

A leaked trove of US military logs reveals a very different landscape from the one with which we have become familiar

Editorial
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 July 2010

"The fog of war is unusually dense in Afghanistan. When it lifts, as it does today with the Guardian's publication of selections from a leaked trove of secret US military logs, a very different landscape is revealed from the one with which we have become familiar. These war logs – written in the heat of engagement – show a conflict that is brutally messy, confused and immediate. It is in some contrast with the tidied-up and sanitised "public" war, as glimpsed through official communiques as well as the necessarily limited snapshots of embedded reporting.

The war logs consist of more than 92,000 records of actions of the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009. The logs were sent to Wikileaks, the website which publishes untraceable material from whistleblowers. In a collaboration with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, the Guardian has spent weeks sifting through this ocean of data, which has gradually yielded the hidden texture and human horror stories inflicted day to day during an often clumsily prosecuted war.....

However you cut it, this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain is about to hand over gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national government in Kabul. Quite the contrary. After nine years of warfare, the chaos threatens to overwhelm......"