What Wikileaks does not tell us about the Afghan war

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A week or so ago, Wikileaks rocked the world by disclosing classified documents from the Afghan war at its website.Much of the documentation contains incident reports filed post-action. These entries seem to be designed to fit a database record. But what about the lead-up to the incident?

As far as I can tell, the Wikileaks disclosures don't include any pre-action reports. Items such as negative newspaper articles on local politicians, out-of-the ordinary sermons at local mosques, large gatherings of locals etc. Were such pre-action reports to be maintained, along with the post-action reports they would likely have predictive power. There is probably some causation between pre-action "tension builders" and the action itself. A regression analysis between the pre-action parameters and the action (or recorded parameters of the action) could tells us the strength of this causation. If such a pre-action system were in place, some percentage of actions could be avoided or reduced in severity due to early intervention.

Given that the techniques above are generally understood by direct marketers - both off-line and online -  I would be surprised if the US armed forces haven't already implemented them in some fashion. Even though the Wikileaks documents don't seem to indicate that an "incident prediction" system is in place.

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