Alex Thomson on Channel 4 News blog:
The point is that this is according to WikiLeaks from the horse’s mouth and if it is verified it is NATO validating the above conclusions from reporters like me who take (small but significant) advantage of the embed system of allowing reporters some limited access to the war.
Had we the Vietnam era of wide and free-ranging access across Afghanistan then much more of this picture of confusion and off-hand civilian killing would have come to more strongly than it now has.
What comes across most striking is the catastrophic lack of human intelligence which is the single biggest factor as to why this war can never, ever, be won. I know that I go on banging this point home but it really cannot be said forcefully enough.
The endless picture in these dispatches is of an occupying army that does not know the land, the people, the language and thus understand either the motives of movements of those it seeks to subdue. So it is ever terrified, trigger-twitchy, unsure who is who.
The tragic shooting and wounding of a man running away in a village high in the Afghan mountains typifies this. It is almost poetic.
Special forces pile into a village and shout at a man who is running away. He ignores the shout. They fire a warning shot. He fails to stop. They shoot him. The man is deaf and mute.
They didn’t know, of course, they didn’t know. They didn’t know almost everything about his village, his people, their lives and their motivations and disposition.
They merely followed their procedure. The wounded man was given some provisions by way of “compensation. And the mission moved on. Moved onto another level of futility.
And it is the exposure of this, the lack of transparency from NATO about what its soldiers have been doing, day in, day out, which has now been laid bare.
Let’s get past the Guardian’s righteous indignation over this. The facts they have used to whip themselves and their readers into a frenzy is their business. The WikiLeaks are not the smoking gun they like to think it is. We know that there are thousands of unaccountable civilian casualties, that Pakistan’s intelligence agency the ISI is aiding the Taliban, that the Afghans by and large deeply resent westerners invading and occupying their land, that the Taliban have got their hands on deadly surface-to-air missiles, and so on.
What the WikiLeaks tells has exposed is that this war is being played by ear and fought on a wing and a prayer. This is not a winnable war and therefore NATO should now pull out ASAP.