Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, time to break out ye olde Official Secrets Act to once again squealch anything that contradicts the 'official' version of history?
And so it goes...
Richard
Mike Martin,
An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict, 1978-2012 (Oxford University Press, 2014)
“Fury Over MOD’s bid to ban Book”, “Captain resigns over Afghanistan book.”
These are just some of British newspaper headlines that preceded the publication of An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict last month. If you don’t know the story, here it is in brief: a former Territorial Army Captain, Dr Mike Martin, was actually commissioned by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) to read for his PhD at King’s College, London. In his final thesis he was to provide them with an independent view of the Afghanistan campaign; that thesis has since become this book.
Whilst the MOD’s official objections concern the alleged use of classified information in the book, one can’t help but presume that this is a mask for the real source of anger, which is just how far Martin goes in criticizing the Ministry’s involvement in Afghanistan. ‘Killing the wrong people’, ‘complicity in corruption’, ‘indirectly funding their enemies’ and ‘sponsoring some of the most despicable people in Helmandi society to rise to the top’ are just a few of the charges being levelled at their door. Perhaps most cutting of all, however, is the underlying suggestion that this was all the result of a conceptual void which did not allow British military leaders to understand the type of conflict they were engaged in.
(Cont'd)
http://warontherocks.com/2014/05/an-...in-in-helmand/