CF in Afghanistan – a map

[ERROR – THIS MAP SHOWS CF OR COALITION FORCES. A MAP OF CANADIAN FORCES ENGAGEMENTS WILL FOLLOW… APOLOGIES FOR THE FAILURE TO CHECK THE ACRONYMS]

I’ve started to analyze the incredible Afghan War Diary that was published by Wikileaks.

What follows is a bit of nerdiness, in case you want to try this at home.

[ERROR – THIS MAP SHOWS CF OR COALITION FORCES. A MAP OF CANADIAN FORCES ENGAGEMENTS WILL FOLLOW… APOLOGIES FOR THE FAILURE TO CHECK THE ACRONYMS]

I’ve started to analyze the incredible Afghan War Diary that was published by Wikileaks.

What follows is a bit of nerdiness, in case you want to try this at home.

I downloaded the SQL, CSV, and KML versions. Then I went to Afghanistan Information Management Services to get some basic maps of Afghanistan – districts, roads, etc.

I run Ubuntu (10.04), so I obtained the following free software: GRASS GIS, QGIS, MySQL Administrator, and MySQL Query Browser. With a little help from someone with SQL experience, I got the SQL version of the Afghan War Diary accessible through the MySQL Query Browser. There was one “trick” in there, which was to create a table called “war_diary” which MySQL immediately dumped – it was some code that the Wikileaks people left in the SQL version of the database.

I then ran a few queries to try to pull out the Canadian angle on the war – partly because that’s what I wanted to check out first, partly because the entire database is so huge that taking off a manageable chunk seemed reasonable. I basically selected out for “CF”, which is the acronym for Canadian Forces, and got about 3800 hits (out of 90,000, or I think it’s actually 76,000). I exported this as a CSV file.

Next, after trying to import this CSV file into QGIS and getting repeated errors, I got rid of the “Summary” field (just for mapmaking purposes) just by importing the CSV into GNUmeric spreadsheet and cutting out that column. For those familiar with the data, the “summary” field is the most rich field in the whole database, but it causes no end of trouble when trying to import it into a GIS.

Once I got the table into QGIS, I then added district and road layers (cultivated areas is also interesting) from the AIMS database. The result is a map of all the incidents and where they occurred. More detailed analyses will follow. But one thing that struck me immediately is how CF is all over the south, not just in Kandahar. Not surprisingly to those familiar with the news coverage, a large number of these incidents are IED incidents, and they occur, also unsurprisingly, near roads. Here’s a quick map of the incidents (red), and roads in green.

Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction. View all posts by Justin Podur