As I have said many times before, speaking from first hand experience with four combat assignments, the first reports for a unit engaged in combat are generally incomplete or wrong.
The Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2010, had a great report called: “What I Saw At Moba Khan: The military reports highlighted by WikiLeaks don’t provide a full picture of the war,” by Noah Shachtman.
“It’s that… reports from a harried commander at the farthest edge of the war zone are by nature clipped, compressed, clunky and incomplete. But they also made their way up the chain of command. At the Marines’ provincial headquarters at Camp Leatherneck, this was one of the primary methods by which officers were kept apprised of Echo Company’s actions: number of rockets fired, number of enemies killed, and number of bombs dropped. Next report
“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.”
As reported earlier, the real issue of the more than 76,000 reports published by WikiLeaks, many of them brief and routine, are the details about Pakistani intelligence agency ISI assistance to Afghan insurgents.
The War in Afghanistan is between the Taliban and their allies in the Pakistani ISI and the Afghans with their NATO allies.
