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### MTG

To understand what you are seeing here, please see the Afghan War Diary Reading Guide and the Field Structure Description
Afghan War Diary - Reading guide

The Afghan War Diary (AWD for short) consists of messages from several important US military communications systems. The messaging systems have changed over time; as such reporting standards and message format have changed as well. This reading guide tries to provide some helpful hints on interpretation and understanding of the messages contained in the AWD.

Most of the messages follow a pre-set structure that is designed to make automated processing of the contents easier. It is best to think of the messages in the terms of an overall collective logbook of the Afghan war. The AWD contains the relevant events, occurrences and intelligence experiences of the military, shared among many recipients. The basic idea is that all the messages taken together should provide a full picture of a days important events, intelligence, warnings, and other statistics. Each unit, outpost, convoy, or other military action generates report about relevant daily events. The range of topics is rather wide: Improvised Explosives Devices encountered, offensive operations, taking enemy fire, engagement with possible hostile forces, talking with village elders, numbers of wounded, dead, and detained, kidnappings, broader intelligence information and explicit threat warnings from intercepted radio communications, local informers or the afghan police. It also includes day to day complaints about lack of equipment and supplies.

The description of events in the messages is often rather short and terse. To grasp the reporting style, it is helpful to understand the conditions under which the messages are composed and sent. Often they come from field units who have been under fire or under other stressful conditions all day and see the report-writing as nasty paperwork, that needs to be completed with little apparent benefit to expect. So the reporting is kept to the necessary minimum, with as little type-work as possible. The field units also need to expect questions from higher up or disciplinary measures for events recorded in the messages, so they will tend to gloss over violations of rules of engagement and other problematic behavior; the reports are often detailed when discussing actions or interactions by enemy forces. Once it is in the AWD messages, it is officially part of the record - it is subject to analysis and scrutiny. The truthfulness and completeness especially of descriptions of events must always be carefully considered. Circumstances that completely change the meaning of an reported event may have been omitted.

The reports need to answer the critical questions: Who, When, Where, What, With whom, by what Means and Why. The AWD messages are not addressed to individuals but to groups of recipients that are fulfilling certain functions, such as duty officers in a certain region. The systems where the messages originate perform distribution based on criteria like region, classification level and other information. The goal of distribution is to provide those with access and the need to know, all of the information that relevant to their duties. In practice, this seems to be working imperfectly. The messages contain geo-location information in the forms of latitude-longitude, military grid coordinates and region.

The messages contain a large number of abbreviations that are essential to understanding its contents. When browsing through the messages, underlined abbreviations pop up an little explanation, when the mouse is hovering over it. The meanings and use of some shorthands have changed over time, others are sometimes ambiguous or have several meanings that are used depending on context, region or reporting unit. If you discover the meaning of a so far unresolved acronym or abbreviations, or if you have corrections, please submit them to wl-editors@sunshinepress.org.

An especially helpful reference to names of military units and task-forces and their respective responsibilities can be found at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/enduring-freedom.htm

The site also contains a list of bases, airfields http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/afghanistan.htm Location names are also often shortened to three-character acronyms.

Messages may contain date and time information. Dates are mostly presented in either US numeric form (Year-Month-Day, e.g. 2009-09-04) or various Euro-style shorthands (Day-Month-Year, e.g. 2 Jan 04 or 02-Jan-04 or 2jan04 etc.).

Times are frequently noted with a time-zone identifier behind the time, e.g. "09:32Z". Most common are Z (Zulu Time, aka. UTC time zone), D (Delta Time, aka. UTC + 4 hours) and B (Bravo Time, aka UTC + 2 hours). A full list off time zones can be found here: http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/military/

Other times are noted without any time zone identifier at all. The Afghanistan time zone is AFT (UTC + 4:30), which may complicate things further if you are looking up messages based on local time.

Finding messages relating to known events may be complicated by date and time zone shifting; if the event is in the night or early morning, it may cause a report to appear to be be misfiled. It is advisable to always look through messages before and on the proceeding day for any event.

David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, explains the online tools they have created to help you understand the secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/video/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-video-tutorial

Understanding the structure of the report

- The message starts with a unique ReportKey; it may be used to find messages and also to reference them.
- The next field is DateOccurred; this provides the date and time of the event or message. See Time and Date formats for details on the used formats.
- Type contains typically a broad classification of the type of event, like Friendly Action, Enemy Action, Non-Combat Event. It can be used to filter for messages of a certain type.
- Category further describes what kind of event the message is about. There are a lot of categories, from propaganda, weapons cache finds to various types of combat activities.
- TrackingNumber Is an internal tracking number.
- Title contains the title of the message.
- Summary is the actual description of the event. Usually it contains the bulk of the message content.
- Region contains the broader region of the event.
- AttackOn contains the information who was attacked during an event.
- ComplexAttack is a flag that signifies that an attack was a larger operation that required more planning, coordination and preparation. This is used as a quick filter criterion to detect events that were out of the ordinary in terms of enemy capabilities.
- ReportingUnit, UnitName, TypeOfUnit contains the information on the military unit that authored the report.
- Wounded and death are listed as numeric values, sorted by affiliation. WIA is the abbreviation for Wounded In Action. KIA is the abbreviation for Killed In Action. The numbers are recorded in the fields FriendlyWIA, FriendlyKIA, HostNationWIA, HostNationKIA, CivilianWIA, CivilianKIA, EnemyWIA, EnemyKIA
- Captured enemies are numbered in the field EnemyDetained.
- The location of events are recorded in the fields MGRS (Military Grid Reference System), Latitude, Longitude.
- The next group of fields contains information on the overall military unit, like ISAF Headquarter, that a message originated from or was updated by. Updates frequently occur when an analysis group, like one that investigated an incident or looked into the makeup of an Improvised Explosive Device added its results to a message.
- OriginatorGroup, UpdatedByGroup
- CCIR Commander's Critical Information Requirements
- If an activity that is reported is deemed "significant", this is noted in the field Sigact. Significant activities are analyzed and evaluated by a special group in the command structure.
- Affiliation describes if the event was of friendly or enemy nature.
- DColor controls the display color of the message in the messaging system and map views. Messages relating to enemy activity have the color Red, those relating to friendly activity are colored Blue.
- Classification contains the classification level of the message, e.g. Secret

Help us extend and defend this work

Reference ID | Region | Latitude | Longitude
--- | --- | --- | ---
AFG20061018n439 | RC EAST | 34.31402206 | 68.22481537

Date | Type | Category | Affiliation | Detained
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
2006-10-18 00:12 | Non-Combat Event | Meeting | NEUTRAL | 0

| Enemy | Friend | Civilian | Host nation
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Killed in action | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0
Wounded in action | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0

`

    Wardak DIAG/Security Meeting led by Governor AJ Naeemi, Provincial Governor to Strengthen the security of the Province through actively supporting the DIAG program and the demilitarization of the militias.

    The Governor talked about the security over the last week and stated that there has been no attacks in the districts during Ramadan, and that the only attack in Maiden Shar was the mortars from the night of 15 October, which cause no damage to any property or personnel.  He also stated that no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.  The next topic was the Judge from Zabul, who was kidnapped by his cousin in Nerkh.  The case seems to be one of family animosity, even though a ransom of $30,000, since reduced to $20,000 has been asked for.  The Governor stated that it is government policy not to pay out any ransom and to discourage any NGOs from paying ransom.  Three individuals have been detained in relation to the Judges kidnapping and their cases have been turned over to the Nerkh prosecution office for further investigation.  The Governor talked about the need to activate the district councils, as they need to take a greater responsibility in improving the security and reconstruction efforts in the districts.  He would like the councils to handle any issues on the local level before they get elevated to the Provincial level.  He noted that DACAR, CARE, and Madera have all closed their offices in Wardak due to the perceived threat.  Their closing will slow reconstruction, raise unemployment, and consequently increase the security threat in the Province.  This makes the activation of the district councils even more important.  He also stated that the Government is increasing its efforts to gain the trust of the people and pointed to the recent arrest of a Judge in Nerkh for corruption.  As an official of the President, the Judge has immunity from the law, and therefore was fired from his job first, and then arrested so that he could face prosecution.  The next topic discussed was the status of the DIAG non-compliance list.  The list is still not finalized, and the Governor ordered the DIAG coordinator to either complete the list today or send a letter to the Central DIAG Commission stating why the list is not yet complete.  The DIAG coordinator also wanted to ensure that all weapons confiscated are either turned into the commission, or if they are kept with the police, they must be documented, tracked, and the list turned into the commission.  An update from the last DIAG meeting on the Jaghatu District Governors firing.  The source for the firing was a TV report, but no official decree came down from Kabul, so the District Governor is still in position and will continue operating with full authority and responsibility.  The Governor ended the meeting by offering his full support for any legal actions that occur at the district level, while promising that any actions thought to be illegal will be fully investigated.  Upon completion of the six months progress report, the Governor and his staff will be meeting with elders and mullahs in the districts to explain what the Government has accomplished, and
    their plans to offer further help to the villagers.  Due to the Eid holiday next week, there will be no DIAG meeting.  The next meeting will take place on 1 November.

    Problem Mitigation Before Next Meeting: The non-compliance list has been a topic of discussion for over four months, and hopefully the Governors order today will be followed and it will be concluded today.

    Additional Meeting Attendees: Governor Naeemi (GOV), Raz Mohammed (DIAG Coordinator), CPT Cooney, Bashir (Interpreter), General Amiri (Wardak Chief of Police ), Nazir Mohammed (DIAG Coordinator), Fazel Omar (Wardak Agriculture President), COL Shahpoor, Mayar  (Wardak Information and Culture President), Khashe  (Wardak Labor and Social Affairs President), General Zahiri (UN Security), Mr. Hank Abeci  (Turkish PRT), MAJ Anderson (102nd), SSG Finch (102nd)

    PRT Assessment: A short meeting that spent much of the time discussing the case of the kidnapped Judge.  The NDS President was not present, but it is clear that if they know who took him they need to start putting the pressure on this individual to discover his whereabouts.  This is the second high profile kidnapping in the last two months, and is contributing to the lack of confidence the NGOs have in their security, and must be resolved if they hope to increase NGO presence in the Province.

` `

    Report key: 1161DC3C-272C-4A8A-A0EA-08734C9DDFB5
    Tracking number: 2007-033-010605-0177
    Attack on: NEUTRAL
    Complex atack: FALSE
    Reporting unit: -
    Unit name: -
    Type of unit: None Selected
    Originator group: UNKNOWN
    Updated by group: UNKNOWN
    MGRS:
    CCIR:
    Sigact:
    DColor: GREEN

`