If the problem were just undisciplined local units, then a solution that McChrystal advocated-more money and more training-might have a chance. Is a police chief who might chase insurgents one day but creates more of them by alienating the civilian population the next our enemy or our friend? When our soldiers go to the chief’s village and are met with hostility, whose fight are they walking into? But the designation, of this and many of the other reports, raises a larger question: Do we know who in Afghanistan is our enemy and who is our friend? Al Qaeda is our enemy, of course, but after that the lines get blurry. But knowing specifically what happened to a sixteen-year-old girl and to the man who stood up to her alleged rapist-and knowing that her attacker may have been in a position to do what he did because he was backed by our troops and our money-is different.Īnd what do we still not know? The documents are labelled in various ways, among them whether an incident involved an “enemy” or a “friend.” The Balkh report is marked “enemy,” and it does mention insurgents killing a motorist. And we knew that the Afghan security forces were a disaster, even after we had spent twenty-seven billion dollars to train them. There had been reports, including some in this magazine, of targeted killings. We did know, in a general sense, much of what they document: that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is corrupt and unpopular, that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency has ties to the Taliban, that too many civilians are dying.
Almost immediately, a consensus emerged that little in the files was actually secret or new.
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