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### MTG - DEVELOPMENT

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
--- | --- | --- | ---
AFG20061220n457 | RC EAST | 33.62928391 | 69.39308167

Date | Type | Category | Affiliation | Detained
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
2006-12-20 00:12 | Non-Combat Event | Meeting - Development | NEUTRAL | 0

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

`

    Meeting with Individual&amp;amp;apos;s Name:Rahmapulla Rahmat   Individual&amp;amp;apos;s Title:Paktya Governor

    Discussion Items:

    - Discussed how the weather will likely affect our helicopter flight to Jaji and Chamkani scheduled for tomorrow morning.  We anticipate at least a delay, if not cancellation.  We will keep him advised.  If it does not happen we discussed the possibility of a two day ground trip so he can stop at villages along the way and talk with people.  We also discussed taking one day trips to other districts and he is very interested in this.

    - The PRT CDR informed him that his concerns about not being informed, nor coordinated with concerning the operation in Jaji have been sent up the chain of command.  He stated he is now willing to go to Jaji and talk to the people and ask them to cooperate with the searches for enemy personnel.  He would like MGen Khaliq to be there as well.

    - In addition, some leaders from Jaji met with him today here in Gardez.  They stated that there were tractors that have started leveling some land in the district and the villagers did not know why.  The governor asked us if this was one of our projects.  We told him it was not a PRT project, but we would
    check to see if other CF units may be doing something.  Apparently the land is disputed and construction should stop until ownership is resolved.

    - We showed him the list of large projects we are considering focusing on developing proposals for and/or lobbying for funds for over the next few months and asked his opinion.  The projects were:
      -- Armored vehicle(s) for the governor
      -- Hydro-Electric Plant in Ahmad Abad
      -- Chormate mine in Zormat
      -- Security wall for the Gardez University
      -- Paving the Gardez-Chamkani-Patan-Pakistan road
      -- Road clearing/maintenance equipment
      -- Radio station in Zormat
      -- Robat school near Gardez
      -- Government motorpool

      -- He stated that he would also like us to look into finding a way to get the radio station in Chamkani to reach into Jaji
      -- He agreed with all the projects on the list, but felt that the mine would be very difficult and complicated and would take a lot to develop the infrastructure and processes to make it projective.  He would prefer we concentrate on something which will benefit the people sooner.  We told him our main goal of the mine project was to create long-term jobs.  He said he would discuss the issue with the people of Zormat and other districts to see if they had some ideas for projects that could create a lot of this type of jobs.
      --  Discussed how it may be easier to get funding if we did the Gardez  Pakistan road in phases, with the first phase being from Gardez to Sayed Karam.  He said this was a critical road because the majority of the provinces population lived along it so most would benefit from the project.  He also felt that its construction would give hope to the people because they would see the government and CF working for their benefit.
      -- When prompted, he said his priorities from the list would be first the university security wall, then the hydro-electric plant, then the paving of the at least the first phase of the road.  He did not rank the others, but did mention that we should consider adding a clinic in Laji Mongal.  He also stated that he would prefer we spend the money on helping the people instead of protecting him (note:  he is being humble and showing his concern for his people over himself; however it is this attitude that makes us want to do whatever we can to help keep him alive).

    - Gov Rahmat stated that he has requested BGen Rahofi be replaced due to corruption and ineffectiveness.  While we were there he received a list of potential replacements, but only their names were provided.  He knows nothing about the men, so he wasnt sure how useful the list was going to be in regards to him recommending a replacement.  He gave several examples of ineffectiveness:
      -- The suicide bomber who struck the ANA/ETT convoy on 15 Dec sat on the bridge for some time waiting for a target of opportunity.  There is a police checkpoint on the Gardez side of the bridge, but they never checked out the vehicle
      -- The police search all the vehicles that come up to the checkpoint on the north side of town, but do not search vehicles at the other main entrances to the city even through there are supposed to be checkpoints there.  At the one where they do search, they also charge a fee/bribe
      -- The governor told BGen Rahofi to activate the checkpoints on all main roads leading into the city due to intel indicating that suicide bombers were heading for Gardez.  This order was given on 14 Dec.  The checkpoints were not manned and the attack happened the following day.  Still, most of them are not active.

    - He stated he would get a letter from the MoPW pledging support for fuel and operator salaries regarding the road clearing/maintenance equipment.

    - He is currently working with TLO to initiate a project in Ahamd Abad involving agriculture.  They hope this project will provide a lot of long-term jobs.

    - We presented the HA pre-positioning plan for Paktya and explained where we were in stocking the supply points.  He was pleased with this effort and suggested that once the ANA base was built in Jaji, this would be another good place to pre-position supplies.

    - We told him that some people had come to our gate claiming to be returnees living in tents over by the prison and that they were in need of HA.  He stated he had no knowledge of a returnee camp there and suspects that they were just looking for handouts.  He stated there were only two returnee camps, Bonozai and Robat.  We told him that we had a lot of clothing nd other items that have been donated by friends and family of service members back in the states.  We would like to take these items and other DoD provided HA supplies out to a returnee camp after the Christmas Holiday.  He said he would like to join us when we go and he would like to take the time to sit down and talk to them while we were there.  We agreed this would be best.

    - We expressed our concern that when we conducted a follow-up check of the orphanage that we opened a couple weeks ago, we found very few orphans living there and could not find most of the HA we had given them.  He stated he was also concerned about what was going on over there and has no idea what they did with the money that he gave during the ribbon cutting which was supposed to be divided among the orphans.  He does not believe they got any benefit from the funds.  He also stated that he had only seen about 30 orphans, not the 102 that the orphanage director said lived there.  He said he would have the Director of Social Affairs follow-up.

    - Gov Rahmat asked us if we had anything we could bring with us tomorrow to give to the people we meet with.  We decided to bring some prayer rugs and Korans that we have on hand.  He then   ... Remarks are continued in the comments section ...

` `

    Report key: 5872B755-ABF0-4FE6-9A88-C7CDCC75414E
    Tracking number: 2007-033-010249-0075
    Attack on: NEUTRAL
    Complex atack: FALSE
    Reporting unit: -
    Unit name: -
    Type of unit: None Selected
    Originator group: UNKNOWN
    Updated by group: UNKNOWN
    MGRS: 42SWC3645721122
    CCIR:
    Sigact:
    DColor: GREEN

`