Afghan War Diary

The most surprising thing contained in the 92,000 classified document WikiLeaks disclosed on the Afghan War is that nothing there is surprising. There is really nothing there that we didn't already know or could have easily surmised.

• American helicopters are being shot down by portable surface-to-air missiles, just like Russian choppers a couple of decades back. Only Americans would assume the Afghans didn't stockpile their unused Stinger missiles. For Americans most of the fun in a war is you get to buy all new weapons.
• Certainly the niftiest new war toy are the drones. The Air Force even has a recruitment ad where they play up the video game thrill of being a Reaper remote pilot.
  
• Killing civilians creates more insurgents. There is a direct cause and effect here. Foreigners kill a man's family or neighbors and he's going to want revenge. And we are killing a lot of civilians.
  
• Pakistan is not our friend. They have provided safe haven for the Taliban and al Qaeda since 2002. We give money to Pakistan to buy weapons which they, in turn, give to the Taliban.
  
• Afghan opium warlords are the most powerful men in the country.
• The US military covers up war crimes. We did that in Iraq, we did that in Vietnam, why not now?
  

There is nothing we didn't already know. The only things this War Diary does is leave no room for doubts.

This doesn't mean that the Afghan War is a failure. The Afghan War, as it is being run, fits perfectly into the Pentagon's Long War Doctrine that envisions an 80-year long series of colonial and brush fire wars for the United States raging from Beirut to the Pacific Ocean. The goal is war for its own sake - the consumption of weapons so that expensive new weapons must be built.