Yes, you can now download the Afghan War Diary from WikiLeaks covering the invation of Afghanistan by the emperial United States of America.

Various file formats are covered, including a full HTML dump, CSV and KML.

Don't forget to visit the dedicate web page for the Afghanistan War Diary at http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/

A glossary of military acronyms is also available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/2010/jul/25/wikileaks-afghanistan-war-logs-glossary

You might want to have a quick look at those otherwise your travel through the war diaries will be rather uninteresting.

Visit the download page at http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010 or just click below to download your very own copy.

1. Complete dump of the web site in HTML format. 75 MB
http://leakmirror.wikileaks.org/file/straw-glass-and-bottle/afg-war-diary.html.7z
•(SHA1: 80adb634a0d218bd0f9a0f22734e3d2e7e67acfc)
•This is a complete dump of the website at http://wardiary.wikileaks.org. Extract this to your local hard disk and open it with your web browser. Please check the project website http://wardiary.wikileaks.org for the most recent version.

2. •All entries, CSV format. 15 MB
http://leakmirror.wikileaks.org/file/straw-glass-and-bottle/afg-war-diary.csv.7z
•(SHA1: d6b82f955a7beb9589f92e9487c74669d1912a34)
•Raw data in comma-separated value format for further processing.

3. All entries, SQL format. 16 MB
http://leakmirror.wikileaks.org/file/straw-glass-and-bottle/afg-war-diary.sql.7z
•(SHA1: 9463f73ebbcd3f95899a138d6ba9817e1b6b800d)
•Raw data in SQL format for further processing.

For more download options, visit http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010

To decompress the files you will need the program 7zip. A free client for Windows can be downloaded...

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Originally published on July 26, 2010 "ICH"
The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home.

On Sunday, the Web site Wikileaks posted 75,000 reports written mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a six-year period from January 2004 to December 2009. The authenticity of the material - published under the title "Afghan War Diaries" - is not in doubt.

The New York Times, which received an embargoed version of the documents from Wikileaks, devoted six pages of its Monday editions to several articles on the disclosures, which reveal how the Afghan War slid into its current morass while the Bush administration concentrated U.S. military efforts on Iraq.

Wikileaks also gave advanced copies to the British newspaper, The Guardian, and the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, thus guaranteeing that the U.S. Fawning Corporate Media could not ignore these classified cables the way it did five years ago with the "Downing Street Memo," a leaked British document which described how intelligence was "fixed" around President George W....

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Eight months after the Obama administration announced a “surge” of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to crush the Taliban-led insurgency, the rate of US and allied casualties has soared to the highest level of the nearly nine-year war and is beginning to match the bloodiest stages of the occupation of Iraq.

Five more American soldiers were killed on Saturday, four in a single roadside bomb blast in an unspecified area of southern Afghanistan. The fatalities were announced amidst a desperate aerial and ground search by American forces to locate two missing Navy personnel.

The pair, whose identity and unit have not been made public, allegedly drove out of a base in the Afghan capital Kabul on Friday evening and, according to Afghan government sources, were stopped at a checkpoint on the edge of the Charkh district in the neighbouring province of Logar. Like numerous areas of southern Afghanistan, Charkh is largely under the control of the Taliban.

On Sunday, Taliban representatives claimed that the pair had been ambushed in Charkh and one captured and one killed. No explanation has been provided for the actions of the sailors apart from that given by a Logar provincial government representative, who told the Washington Post that...

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Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message that we’re losing Afghanistan

Originally published September 19, 2009
"The Independent"
-- Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president's critics - indeed, for many critics of the West's military occupation of Afghanistan - are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama's (and their) greatest enemy.

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates - once more the Secretary of Defense - and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military "surges" appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address "the American people" this week. "You are waging a hopeless and losing war," he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. "The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby." There was no more talk of Obama as a "house Negro" although it was his "weakness", bin Laden contended, that prevented him from closing down the wars in Iraq and...

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'I took some flesh home and called it my son.
The Guardian interviews 11 villagers

Originally published on September 14, 2009
"The Guardian"
-- At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike. They picked their way through a heap of almost a hundred charred bodies and mangled limbs which were mixed with ash, mud and the melted plastic of jerry cans, looking for their brothers, sons and cousins. They called out their names but received no answers. By this time, everyone was dead.

What followed is one of the more macabre scenes of this or any war. The grief-stricken relatives began to argue and fight over the remains of the men and boys who a few hours earlier had greedily sought the tanker's fuel. Poor people in one of the world's poorest countries, they had been trying to hoard as much as they could for the coming winter.

"We didn't recognise any of the dead when we arrived," said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. "It was like a chemical bomb had gone off, everything was burned....

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Originally published on September 11, 2009
URL = http://www.huffingtonpost.com/virginia-moncrieff/losing-ground-taliban-cov_b_283140.html

" -- New research indicates that 80% of Afghanistan now has a permanent Taliban presence and that 97% of the country has "substantial Taliban activity."

The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) has followed the movement of the Taliban throughout Afghanistan since 2007, by tracking third party public daily reports of incidents that indicate Taliban presence. Presence is defined by: "(An) average of one (or more) insurgent attacks (lethal and non-lethal) per week."

Even with this new data outlining a 97% presence, ICOS President Ms. Norine McDonald QC told the Huffington Post that she believes that figure is "conservative".

"It's bad numbers and bad news," says MacDoanld. "They (the Taliban) have the momentum, their strategies and tactics are working, and ours are not. ... it's not a question of where they are operating, it's more a question of where they are not."

Combined with instability and uncertainty after the August 20 elections, allegations of wide scale electoral fraud and an alarming increase in violence and deaths, the new research further emphasizes the deterioration in Afghanistan.

Historically the north of Afghanistan has enjoyed a relative stability and little insurgent activity. The new ICOS data shows that the northern...

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Originally published on September 11,2009 "

URL = http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/470629/afghanistan_election_fraud_and_the_high_price_of_empire

It is amusing, if remarkable, that there are still some players in Washington who try to maintain the fantasy that Afghan President Hamid Karzai governs with anything akin to legitimacy.

Karzai, an alleged oil-industry fixer awarded control of his country by occupying powers, has always served with strings attached.

And the Afghan people have been quite aware of that fact.

It is true that, at different points over the past eight years, Karzai has enjoyed measures of popular support, thanks to alliances with warlords and drug dealers, the inflaming of ethnic rivalries and an awareness that he was the one distributing all those billions of dollars from the United States.

But, aside from a slick sense of dress, Karzai has never had much going for him in the political department.

So he has, out of instinct and by necessity, relied on fraud to "win" the elections that have kept the Afghan president and his minions in power.

That was not much of a problem during the Bush-Cheney years. The men who assumed control of the United States after losing the 2000 popular vote by more than 500,000 and then shutting down the recount of votes in the contested state...

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Source URL = http://www.huffingtonpost.com/virginia-moncrieff/losing-ground-taliban-cov_b_283140.html
Originally published on September 11, 2009

"Huffington Post"
-- New research indicates that 80% of Afghanistan now has a permanent Taliban presence and that 97% of the country has "substantial Taliban activity."

The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) has followed the movement of the Taliban throughout Afghanistan since 2007, by tracking third party public daily reports of incidents that indicate Taliban presence. Presence is defined by: "(An) average of one (or more) insurgent attacks (lethal and non-lethal) per week."

Even with this new data outlining a 97% presence, ICOS President Ms. Norine McDonald QC told the Huffington Post that she believes that figure is "conservative".

"It's bad numbers and bad news," says MacDoanld. "They (the Taliban) have the momentum, their strategies and tactics are working, and ours are not. ... it's not a question of where they are operating, it's more a question of where they are not."

Combined with instability and uncertainty after the August 20 elections, allegations of wide scale electoral fraud and an alarming increase in violence and deaths, the new research further emphasizes the deterioration in Afghanistan.

Historically the north of Afghanistan has enjoyed a relative stability and little insurgent activity. The new ICOS data shows that the...

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"If you can't outbreed the enemy, cull `em."

Source URL = http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22653.htm

May 19, 2009 "ICH" -- -Reuters reports "Ninety-three children and 25 adult women are among a list of 140 names of Afghans who villagers say were killed in a battle and U.S. air strikes last week, causing a crisis between Washington and its Afghan allies."

American Colonel Greg Julian disputed the numbers, saying, ""Well I could give you 140 names too. The problem is there is no evidence of that number of graves ... Are those real people? Did they ever actually exist? I can give you a list of 53 girls names with their ages."

The politicians argue: "The air strikes are not acceptable," Karzai said. "Terrorism is not in Afghan villages, not in Afghan homes. And you cannot defeat terrorists by air strikes."

"But White House National Security Advisor James Jones said on Sunday that U.S. forces need air power to protect themselves: 'We can't fight with one hand tied behind our back.'"

As Dan Spielberg points out in "Lew Rockwell":

Barack Obama sold himself to the country as someone who would bring massive 'change' to the policies of the U.S. government, but of course when it comes to the favourite activity of that cancerous organism, warring against wholly innocent civilian populations in foreign countries, there will be no change.

Ron Paul makes the point: "We are inciting the very terrorism and extremism we are trying to stop." By bombing Afghans and Pakistanis, adds Paul, "We are helping the Taliban and other enemies to actually gain numbers and strength"

Meanwhile the US Congress has introduced bills to increase the aid to Pakistan from $500 million to $1.5 billion at a time when the USA is nearly bankrupt and doesn't have enough money to support Americans at home.

None of this can possibly help the USA. As Paul observes, "we are adding to the numbers of our enemies and increasing the threats to our security here at home." When will America learn that its actions are creating tomorrow's terrorists?

According to Muriel Kane, "Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal will be taking over command of US forces in Afghanistan, pending Senate approval." McChrystal headed the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that previously reported to Dick Cheney, with no congressional oversight.

Kane notes, "Famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh recently described the JSOC as an "executive assassination wing" controlled for many years by the office of former Vice President Dick Cheney."

Jeremy Scahill says, "Pentagon officials are spinning another cover-up," following the bombing that killed up to 130 people in Afghanistan. He also reports, "...as many as 2,000 (Afghans) poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting ‘Death to America’.”

Disgustingly, the Pentagon attempted to blame the Taliban for the murders, saying that they had done the killing with grenades.

Neoconservative commentator Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, "If you can't outbreed the enemy, cull `em." That's an attitude Americans have learned well. The US military in the Middle East practices it regularly.

Chris Hedges drew a shocking word picture of American involvement in Afghanistan:

The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war.

Hedges conveys the lesson of his picture:

We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

It's time to stop making excuses for American military barbarism abroad. It's time to stop creating terrorists by US terrorism in the Middle East.

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Source URL = http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughley12242008.html

In September an Afghan journalist, Jawed Ahmad, was released from a US military prison in Afghanistan where his jailers " broke two of my ribs during the beatings." He worked for Canadian TV and the BBC, among other media outlets, and he had done nothing wrong. That is obvious, because he was freed without charge after a year of hellish treatment at the hands of uniformed filth whose claim to being human is at best feeble. If there had been the slightest genuine suspicion that he had committed a crime he should have been put on trial, but that is not the way the US system works, in these horrible days. Bush policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is never to admit that anyone can be innocent because everyone arrested is automatically guilty. But will it get any better under Obama? Can he alter what has become normal behavior on the part of the robotic minions of the commander-in-chief?

In February Jawed Ahmad was declared an "enemy combatant," which is a glib catch-all description used by Washington's foulest to describe any foreigner who, in shades of the horrible McCarthy years, they suspect of possibly being involved in what they term anti-American activities. These victim of hysteria, of whom there are countless thousands around the world, are locked up in prisons where their treatment varies from casual brutality to hideous torture. From the British-owned, US-leased island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to the US colonial enclave at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, by way of Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan and equally horrible prisons in Iraq, the misery of innocent – or even guilty – detainees casts a dreadful blot on what the world used to think was a fair and free democracy.

Two Afghans were beaten to death by American soldiers in Bagram in 2002 (and these are the ones we know about). As recorded by McClatchy Newspapers "Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the detainees." He didn't go into detail. "I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway." The maximum punishment awarded to the killers was three months in confinement. Imagine the penalty that would have been meted out if an American had been beaten to death by an Afghan. Imagine the sentence if an American in America had been murdered in this fashion : the death penalty, automatically. But Afghans don't matter. Nor do Iraqis.

Anyone unfortunate enough to be taken captive by US forces or intelligence people can expect nothing but the direst conditions, indefinite confinement without charge and without legal representation, and – oh joy – methods of interrogation that "have been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm."

That quotation is from one of the worst Secretaries of State the US has suffered, the Bush protégé Condoleezza Rice, who wrote to Congress on 12 September that the "simulated torture techniques" administered to would-be members of US special forces during their training, would not harm them.

Right. Of course it wouldn't harm them : because these volunteers knew that the 'torture' would end immediately if they just once shouted Stop, Please Stop It. And they knew, also, that it would certainly end, sometime. Maybe in an hour or two; maybe longer. But they knew it would not go on indefinitely. And when it ended they would be free to boast that they got through it without any problem.

But real prisoners, held in filthy primitive conditions, beaten by vicious barbaric laughing guards and interrogated by demented sadists, have no idea when their torture is going to end. They can't hold up a hand and say "Stop." It is absurdly naive – or despicably pitiless – for Rice to claim that their treatment does not cause "significant physical or psychological harm;" but that's the way things are in psycholand.

Detention without charge, denial of access to a lawyer and refusal of trial have become normal in the US justice system as practiced by the US military. They arrested a Reuters' photographer, Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, in September, and the Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled on 30 November that there was no evidence against him and that he should be released from US military custody. In a staggering display of contempt for democracy, decency and the constitutions of Iraq and America the military refused to comply. He's still in jail; without justice, without hope. So much for democracy, US-style, in Iraq.

And contempt for democracy doesn't stop with sadism in prisons. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is supposed to have an independent government. This means that foreign activity in these countries should be subject to domestic laws and that there should be total cooperation between foreign armed forces and those of the country on which they are inflicted. When military operations are mounted, the authorities of the 'host' countries, appointed by democratically-elected governments, should be informed. Does this happen? Almost never. In a recent display of ignorance and criminal arrogance, US special forces attacked a police station in the town of Qalat in south eastern Afghanistan on December 10, imagining it to be a "militant hideout." The policemen thought the special forces were militants and opened fire.

The police were in their own country ; they were in a police post whose location should be known to foreign troops operating in their country ; they were not told that there would be any foreign operations in their area. So of course they opened fire. And what did the gallant special forces do? Did they "close with and kill the enemy, in any terrain, in any weather, by day or by night"? (This used to be the way we were taught but it seems to have gone out of fashion a bit.) Don't be silly: they called in airstrikes that killed the police commander, five of his men, and, inevitably, a civilian whose house they destroyed. Oh; and wounded "at least 13 others."

119 Afghan civilians (including policemen) were killed by US airstrikes in January to July 2008, The figure for the whole year will be much higher. The effect on Afghans cannot be measured accurately, but it is unlikely that their regard for foreign troops will be high. In fact it is inevitable that there will be much hatred engendered by these cowboy catastrophes, concerning which the first option is to lie if it is considered the truth is unlikely to surface.

Take the case of the killing of 90 people by US airstrikes in August in the Afghan village of Azizabad. The immediate reaction by the US military was to flatly deny that any civilians had been killed. An inquiry by the UN which confirmed the scores of civilian deaths was scorned by the military. Unfortunately for them, a local doctor had taken photographs showing 40 bodies, mostly children and young women. Many of them had been his patients.

After the slaughter, the Afghan Women's Association recorded a 25 year-old woman as saying that when she regained consciousness "I was in hospital, and they told me that all of my family were dead and already buried. Was my two-year-old child a terrorist? Then am I not also a terrorist? Why did they let me live?" And "Ghulam Azrat, 50, director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he collected 60 bodies after the bombing. "We put the bodies in the main mosque. Most of these dead bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them" [he told Associated Press]."

But even then, even after they had been forced to hold an inquiry that eventually had to admit that civilians were killed, the US military stated "US and Afghan forces did not commit any violations of the law of war or rules of engagement." This was because there were supposedly "22 anti-coalition militants" killed. In fact, of the fifteen males killed, only seven were under 40; the others were ancients.

One survivor said he heard shooting and was just coming out of his house when he saw his neighbor's sons running across. "They were killed right here; they were 10 and 7 years old." In the compound next to his, he said, four whole families, including those of his two brothers, were killed. "They bombard us, they hate us, they kill us," he said. "God will punish them."

Well, God might punish them, eventually. But they seem safe enough from justice while on earth. The sadistic torturers; the incompetent arrogant oafs who killed the policemen ; the gung-ho gangsters who murdered the children in Azizabad; the liars who tried to cover up – all will go unpunished.

Will there be change under Obama? Will he order a case review of the 15,000 people held without charge or trial, without legal advice, in hellish conditions, without hope, by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan? Will he be able to release from captivity the unknown number of people kept in foreign jails by arrangement with US intelligence operatives? Will he make it his business to ensure that the demented out-of-control special forces be reined in? Will he order inquiries into torture? Will he, above all, insist on the truth being told? Watch this space.

Brian Cloughley's book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, has just been published by Pen & Sword Books (UK) and will be published in the US in May by Skyhorse (New York). No Trackbacks

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