© Tim Hetherington

Last week I saw Restrepo, the Sebastian Junger/Tim Hetherington fly-on-the-wall documentary about a US infantry unit stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a.k.a. “the most dangerous place on Earth.” Junger and Hetherington follow the troops as they exchange fire with and call in airstrikes on the omnipresent Taliban, try to justify civilian deaths (a.k.a. collateral damage) to the locals, and suffer tragic deaths themselves.

Desperate for any claim to accomplishment, the unit’s commanding officer talks proudly about OP Restrepo, the new outpost his men built on high ground less than a kilometre away from their main base, as a strategic masterstroke that changed the whole dynamic of the war in the valley. I almost believed him, too — until the punch line subtitle at the very end: The US Army withdrew from the Korengal Valley in April 2010.

Meanwhile, a shadowy and fascinating organization called Wikileaks, about which little is known other than that it is headed by a shadowy and fascinating Australian hacker named Julian Assange, has ignited a political firestorm by releasing more than 90,000 secret military documents from Afghanistan which reveal that, according to the Guardian, “coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in reported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared, and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.” (more…)

Tags: Afghanistan, Julian Assange, restrepo, Taliban, US Military, war, wikileaks
Posted in World Fast Forward 7 Comments