Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan.
Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry. The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed.These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment. Secret commando units like Task Force 373 - a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives - work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders.Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat. The documents - some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 - illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.Īs the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday. The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.