Asia (West & South)

Most people are interested in something that no one knows or can know: what is going to happen in Egypt? It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future (that's from Keynes). There are lessons from past revolutions that might help us understand what is happening, but from where I'm sitting, marveling at Egyptian people's courage and looking at these utterly unanticipated and amazing events, I haven't said much because I don't have much to offer the people whose courage made this happen and whose decisions will determine how this all goes.

My daily routine these days includes going to the Wikileaks twitter feed (twitter.com/wikileaks), which took me to this story in the UK Guardian about how Saudi Arabia proposed an Arab force to invade Lebanon. The Guardian is definitely the best site on the Wikileaks, and for data in general - they have understood something about what media organizations should be doing and they are going about it, in ways that a lot of other outlets haven't.

An initial look at the first 76,000 records in the "Afghan War Diary" leaked by Wikileaks yields some important information, much of which has been known or suspected by analysts for years. Given the sheer size of the database, there is a great deal more to be learned, but here are some initial findings.

Casualty data

The first impression is one of an extremely lopsided war, like all wars of occupation, where occupied casualties are vastly higher than those by the occupier.

Just reading some of the 800+ hits on the drug war in Afghanistan, and these are real - the US is fighting a drug war in Afghanistan. There are DEA agents running around arresting people, there are troops eradicating poppy in farmers fields, and they are finding and burning piles of opium, heroin, hashish, and marijuana.

One thing I keep coming across is mentions of DynCorp, a private military contractor, in lines like this: "DYNCORP reps have confirmed that they are being told by senior provincial police officials that the CoP is taking bribes, involved in drug trafficing, etc."

[Analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]. I pulled out the 170-or-so incidents that mention Pakistan and are actually in Pakistan. A lot of them involve coordination with the Pakistani military, getting it, failing to get it, etc. An observation post comes under indirect fire, they track the point of origin, discover it's in Pakistan, try to get permission to attack the point, and either do or don't.

For example, this one dated October 16, 2009:

Event Title:D10 0523Z
Zone:null
Placename:IJC#10-1454
Outcome:Effective

TF EAST PAKTIKA
C/3-509TH IN (ABN)

[Analysis of Wikileaks's Afghan War Diary]. I thought it might be useful to show a map of the (approx. 170) incidents in the Afghan War Diary that mention Pakistan and also take place within Pakistan's borders. I will be reading the summaries to see what happened here, but take a look at it - there are incidents in Balochistan, FATA, and NWFP.

A search on "Iran" in the Afghan War Diary gives about 150 hits - more, actually, but I cleared a bunch that were place names that have the string "iran" in them, like Faqiran, and any entries about how the US raids a weapons cache and uncovers Iranian-manufactured weapons (there are a lot of those cache raids in the record).

In the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, hotel, india...), the letter "i" is represented by "india". This makes searching for "India" in the Afghan War Diary a bit of extra work, as grid systems and nomenclatures that use alphabetical numbering and reach the letter "I" end up having US military units or areas around bases that have nothing to do with India, called "India". When you go through that and cut those out, I got about 82 entries.

[More analysis of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary]. I tried searching the database for any of these keywords: narc, opium, heroin, drug, poppy. It came up with 800 hits, which look like this:

Note the concentration in the south (Hilmand) and the east.

Now let's zoom in on one of the areas, one the clusters of points you see in the south:

[More analysis of Wikileaks's Afghan War Diary]