War Diary Analysis

Wikileaks War diaries provide around 50000 diary entries for Afghanistan war and 250000 war diary entries for Iraq war. These reports are internal reports from the US Military, each covering an operation during the war days. In order to get some insight about the "rational" actions of the US Military in these two wars, these documents were added to SPARK SQL database. From the database, we were able to get some numbers about how these wars progress over time and the causalities caused by them. Also the diaries include the spending of the US Military Units in the war which helps estimate the amount of money spent on the Army by the US for these two wars.

 

We start with Afghanistan, where the total number of "enemy" personal killed reported is 10799. The number exceeds that of 2739 civilians killed but the percentage is not small.

For every 4 enemy soldiers, 1 civilian is being killed in a military operation which is supposed to target only hostile action. Both numbers grow in a similar manner over the period documented by the reports, as it start small to grow considerably after that. But looking at the average values(number of killed/number of documents per year) we notice that the average number of civilians starts at a very high value, to then decrease a little bit with time to take a constant value. As for the average number of Enemies, we notice that it stays around the same value. This means that either the US army took some time to realize who is a civilian and who is an enemy, or that the number civilians killed does not depend on the number of enemies killed. In both ways, the number of civilians killed did not decrease to a minimal at any point. This only show how much the US military did not care about civilians through out this war. The number of enemies wounded is not very large compared to those killed, but the average number of civilians wounded stays constant over the whole period. This supports the 2nd theory that the US Military didn't bother to care about civilians in their lethal operaions.

Over the recorded period, there are 1665 US soldiers killed in Afghanistan and 4594 wounded. These loses are incomparable to the Afghani civilians lost, but still it is a sign of how the American government sacrificed their soldiers for the control of Afghanistan.

5739 people were detained during the recorded war period. These are not clearly classified to be "terrorist" or civilians or whether they were released or kept detained.

 

To compare these with the Iraq war, the number of civilians killed is 45539, and is 10 times more than that in Afghanistan. The average number of civilians is twice that in Afghanistan.

Yet the number of enemies killed is 11962, which is not much more than those in Afghanistan, but with 5 times less on average. This would only show the recklessness in the US approach in Iraq, as it pushed to control the Iraqi oil while bombing civilian areas and attacking harmless people. The number of kills is huge, even though this number does not account to all people killed during the Iraqi war (as there are those killed by bombings), but it does show how US attack was ruthless.  The average of the civilians killed does increase after the first two years, and this is clearly a sign that excessive force was used in the first days of the war regardless of the affected sides. Compared to that we find 1823 US soldier killed during this war, as the average decreases with time. The number of those detained in Iraq reached more than 100000. This is a 20 times more than those detained in Afghanistan. A simple explanation to this number is that the US Military became over worried from the Iraqi community to increase the number of detained people. Also this explains how Abo Ghrieb prison became over crowded with innocents.

 

Looking at the amount spent on the US Military unit, there was around $1.2 Billion spent on the Afghanistan war units and a stunning $6.3 Billion spent on those in Iraq.

This numbers are huge especially as a spending on a single unit peaks to $70 Million. US has paid $160 Thousand for each civilian that died in the war.