Afghan police casualties soar
The Post’s Josh Partlow on the disproportionate death rate among Afghan police forces:
Over the past year, 1,555 Afghan policemen were killed, more than twice the number of Afghan soldiers who died in the same period, even though there are 35,000 fewer police than soldiers in the country, according to statistics provided by the U.S.-led coalition. In the same period, 474 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan. The police death toll in June, 246 police — a rate of eight a day — was 50 percent higher than any other month in the past year.
PHOTOS OF THE DAY: For the past decade, hundreds of Afghan war widows have convened on a slope known as Tapaye Zanabad, building mud hovels by hand and living as a community of sisters. Read about “The hill that women built.”
Source: Washington Post
Pretty amazing New York Times video based on footage taken by Spc. Michael Gannon as his unit worked through a mine field in Afghanistan. As Gannon’s helmet camera films, one of his men is injured in a blast. Hat tip to Garance Franke-Ruta, who tweets: “Was there ever anything like this for other wars?”
Source: washingtonpostinnovations
Jon Krakauer Publishes Greg Mortenson Expose - GalleyCat
It’s the Krakauer-Mortenson smackdown.
RCT 8 Public Affairs concerns lie in the fact that anytime too much information is aggregated in one place in a fashion tying unit disposition and manpower together we have facilitated the enemy.
Source: niemanlab.org
The War Logs
It’s been interesting to see the Afghanistan war logs story play out across The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel (and to think all three organizations essentially co-published a series of reports based on the Wikileaks embargo).
The NYT report does the best job showcasing the actual documents, explaining their methodology for redactions, providing hover definitions of military acronyms and organizing key findings as annotations within the document viewer. A really impressive presentation — much preferred to the Guardian’s take on an interactive map (although they offer all the data behind it for download) and Der Spiegel’s photo gallery.
The Times is rounding up reaction on its At War blog, including this response from the White House:
The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.
What a story.
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