Thousands of classified documents offer a view more bleak than official portrayal.
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
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.
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 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 is stronger than at any time since 2001.
As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David 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 reports - usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives - shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
• The Taliban has used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
• 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. 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.
• 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. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone's weaponry.
• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct raids. From 2001 to 2008, the CIA paid the budget of Afghanistan's spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
Overall, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements - attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.
White House officials vigorously denied that the Obama administration had presented a misleading portrait of the war in Afghanistan.
"On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al-Qaida and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," said Gen. James L. Jones, the White House national security adviser, in a statement released Sunday.
He also condemned the decision by WikiLeaks to make the documents public, saying that "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."
The Taliban's use of heat-seeking missiles has not been publicly disclosed - indeed, the military has issued statements that these internal records contradict. In the form known as a Stinger, such weapons were provided to a previous generation of Afghan insurgents by the United States, and helped drive out the Soviets. The reports suggest that the Taliban's use of these missiles has been neither common nor especially effective; usually the missiles missed.
May 30, 2007 - Helmand Province
Incident Report: Downed Helicopter
An American CH-47 transport helicopter was struck by what witnesses described as a portable heat-seeking surface-to-air missile after taking off from a landing zone. The crash killed seven soldiers: five Americans, a Briton and a Canadian.
Multiple witnesses saw a smoke trail behind the missile as it rushed toward the helicopter. The smoke trail was an important indicator: Rocket-propelled grenades do not leave them; heat-seeking missiles do. The crew of other helicopters reported the downing as a surface-to-air missile strike. But that was not what a NATO spokesman told Reuters. "Clearly, there were enemy fighters in the area," said the spokesman, Maj. John Thomas. "It's not impossible for small-arms fire to bring down a helicopter."
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The reports paint a disheartening picture of the Afghan police and soldiers at the center of the American exit strategy.
The Pentagon is spending billions to train the Afghan forces to secure the country. But the police have proved to be an especially risky investment and are often described as distrusted, even loathed, by Afghan civilians. The reports recount episodes of police brutality, corruption petty and large, extortion and kidnapping. Some police officers defect to the Taliban. Others are accused of collaborating with insurgents. Afghan police officers defect with trucks or weapons, items captured during successful ambushes or raids. One report documented the detention of a military base worker trying to leave with GPS units hidden under his clothes.
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Incident by incident, the reports resemble a police blotter of the myriad ways Afghan civilians were killed - not just in airstrikes but in ones and twos - in misunderstandings or in a cross-fire, or in chaotic moments when Afghan drivers ventured too close to convoys and checkpoints.
The dead, the reports repeatedly indicate, were not suicide bombers or insurgents, and many of the cases were not reported to the public at the time. The toll of the war - reflected in mounting civilian casualties - left the Americans seeking cooperation and support from an Afghan population that grew steadily more exhausted, resentful, fearful and alienated.
The reports also show in previously unknown detail the omnipresence of drones in Afghanistan, the Air Force's missile-toting Predators and Reapers that hunt militants. The military's use of drones in Afghanistan has rapidly expanded in the past few years; the U.S. Air Force now flies about 20 Predator and Reaper aircraft a day - nearly twice as many as a year ago - over vast stretches of hostile Afghan territory. Allies like Britain and Germany fly their own fleets.
As the Afghanistan war took priority under the Obama administration, more Special Operations forces were shifted from Iraq to conduct secret missions. The CIA's own paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan grew in tandem - as did the agency's close collaboration with the Afghan spy agency.
Usually, such teams conducted night operations aimed at top Taliban commanders and militants on the "capture/kill" list.
June 17, 2007 - Paktika Province
Incident Report: Botched Night Raid
Shortly after five American rockets destroyed a compound in Paktika province, helicopter-borne commandos from Task Force 373 - a classified Special Operations unit of Army Delta Force operatives and members of the Navy Seals - arrived to finish the job.
The mission was to capture or kill Abu Laith al-Libi, a top commander for al-Qaida, who was believed to be hiding at the scene.
But Libi was not there. Instead, the Special Operations troops found a group of men suspected of being militants and their children. Seven children had been killed by the rocket attack.
Some of the men tried to flee, and six were quickly killed. After the rest were taken as detainees, the commandos found one child still alive in the rubble, and performed CPR for 20 minutes.
Word of the attack spread a wave of anger across the region. American military officials drew up a list of "talking points" for the governor, pointing out that the target had been a senior al-Qaida commander, that there had been no indications that women and children would be present and that a nearby mosque had not been damaged.
Libi was killed the following year by a CIA drone strike.
