The screening of Afghan Army girls ended with a roaring sound of applause at the Frontline Club yesterday evening. Lalage Snow, also a photojournalist, made her directing debut with a film beautifully weaved in stills and moving images to showcase the lives of women preparing for a life in the Afghan national army.

Focussing on the lives of three girls training in the army, Samiya, Homa and Zeinab, the film captured their individual personalities, following them on a ten week training course to an isolated military base in Kabul and into some of their homes.

Anyone who is remotely familiar with Afghan news and culture would know that staying away from home is taboo for women, and that this is a big step forward.

One member of the audience questioned if and whether this has had any impact.

Snow said,

“Lets not forget before the occupation of the Taliban, the Afghans used to employ at least 4,000 women in the army. Of course all this has been superimposed by ISAF and NATO lately in an effort to empower the women and the country.

All the training and classes take place in a compound. About the impact – I really don’t have much of an idea now. Of course there are higher generals who are women but they still need to develop a better sense of authority without being trampled over by their male peers.”

Many were curious to know about the reactions from fellow Afghan countrymen and women. Snow said:

“In Afghanistan, not many women are aware that women are being recruited for the armed forces. There is not much publicity about it. Not sure if this is a move by ISAF and NATO to superimpose women’s rights on top of the agenda. Female soldiers are being recruited for the army and the police force to conduct searches.”

She added

“Can’t speak for all but many of the men-folk are progressive and want a future that is sustainable. They want peace and stability.”

While the film tackled many aspects of being a woman in the armed forces, many were still looking for answers as to what would happen when the international troops pull out.

Snow said:

“Well it is a mixed response; I have argued this over and over with my friends. Many think they would like the foreign forces to leave. Others think there is just going to be a civil war if that happens.”

One audience member had the room in hysterics asking, “So can the women shoot?” To which Snow replied, jokingly “No.”

As seen in the film, after graduation, no-one made it to the Afghan Air Force. “All of them were extremely proud and happy to have undergone this training except for one, Samiya,” said Snow.

Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith has been given a prestigious Bayeux-Calvados award for Blood and Dust, a film shot during 10 days spent with a US Medevac helicopter team in Afghanistan.

The awards, which were launched in 1994, recognise the work of journalists covering conflicts around the world.

Smith’s film, which was shown on Al Jazeera in February this year,  won the grand format television category with his coverage of the work of the paramedics of the US Army’s 214th Aviation Regiment.

This year the awards were dominated by Libya, with Sky News’ Alex Crawford’s team announced winners of two awards at an event in north-west France for their reports from Libya’s besieged town of Zawiyah, between 4 to 6 March.

Smith, who has filmed in Afghanistan several times in the past, said he decided to go back because he was concerned that his previous work had shown the machinery of war but not the suffering:

"This being a grevous omission I went back last winter to film US army air ambulances, ‘Dustoff’ helicopters, flying over Marjah in Southern Afghanistan, " he said: "The pictures are strong and show both US marines and Afghan civilians being lifted off the battlefield in equal numbers."

Of his decision to work with Al Jazeera, he said: "I couldn’t find another news broadcaster in Britain that would show the film without cutting out the stronger images. I have huge respect for the way Al Jazeera as a broadcaster engages the world while so many others appear to retreat from it."

Read more about Vaughan Smith in Afghanistan.

The Sal Giunta Story from Sebastian Junger on Vimeo.

Meanwhile according to Militaryblogging.com, somebody was running a Twitter account pretending to be Sal Giunta. It appears to have been subsequently changed to "the first and best tribute page" to the soldier.

Of course, long gone are the days when blogs were an unknown quantity, and these days blogs by U.S. soldiers will usually be signed off by a superior meaning they are to some degree ‘official’ but I wasn’t after these individual soldier blogs.

By ‘official’ I meant blogs that were started as deliberate public affairs exercises on behalf of a branch of the services, or individual units as the corporate, the professional, the governmental, the NGO and the military began colonising the blogosphere.

Nobody seemed sure but people like @LindyKyzer, @fieldsteven, @salottimc and @milblogging (who also wrote a blog post about it) pointed me in the direction of various pieces of information or other people I might ask.

Using their information and some link-hopping, what appears below is a list by start of date of official U.S. military blogs.

I have no doubt that it is a far from comprehensive list so if you have any to add or reckon I’ve got the date wrong let me know. I’m aware that some blogs might have been disbanded or restarted.

I’m not sure I can yet conclusively answer the question I posed but I’m further forward.

It has been an interesting exercise. For some reason (and I’m not sure why) I was under the impression that the U.S. military had been officially blogging for longer than it actually has. 

Initially the strategy of the Department of Defense’s New Media Directorate, set up in October 2006, was to work with and engage bloggers rather than start their own blogs.  

(Although @Wodins suggested that official military blogging might have been taking place on ARPANET way before the Internet.)

Official U.S. Military Blogs by Start Date

2004-5 

DoD news article suggests a blog written by Capt Steve Alvarez for Orlando Sentinel as part of his official duties in Iraq was "first official U.S. military blog". (Here is a taster…it appears to be no different from any online article).

2006

October – Department of Defense New Media Directorate established; For the Record (Pseudo-blog: see this written by Steven Field for discussion of whether this is a blog)*

2007

October – Bloggers’ Roundtable

2008

Updates: This post has been updated on several occasions to include several other blogs missing from the original post in response to comments and emails.

Various people (including U.S. senators) and organisations (like the European Commission) have already pointed out that this has serious implications.

Here is another.

On Monday 17 May, a twenty year old US soldier was killed in Afghanistan. Billy Anderson had been serving with 82nd Airborne in Baghdis province when his unit hit some improvised explosive devices. He died of the wounds he received in the incident leaving behind his wife and nine month old daughter.

On Wednesday, I thought I’d have a play with Kurrently, a new search engine for Twitter and Facebook. Naturally, I stuck in ‘Afghanistan’ to see what would come up. I was less interested in the Twitter results because we already have Twitter search and was more ‘impressed’ with the range of material that it was digging up from Facebook profiles.

Various status updates discussed members of family who were deploying soon. There was one update apparently posted by a soldier at a U.S. base in Afghanistan. And it also became clear that a number of people were posting updates about Billy Anderson offering their condolences and support to the family.

A quick Web search and some scouring of the Department of Defense website revealed that Billy Anderson’s death had not yet been released and it wasn’t until Friday 21 May that an official statement was published.

The U.S. Department of Defense takes care to inform family members of the death of their relatives before any official announcement. Sometimes there are delays because family members are on holiday or otherwise unavailable. The aim is to ensure they do not first find out about the death of a loved one in a media report.

In this case a local radio station, WJLE radio, had reported the death on their website (on a page that is no longer available) by Thursday. It is possible that by that stage most family members knew what had happened but they might not have done.

It seems to me that Facebook’s fluctuating privacy policy combined with the power of a search engine like Kurrently has some profound consequences.

In an instant information age militaries need to work as quickly as possible to provide reliable information and might even have to ask families and friends of military casualties not to post updates on Facebook until everyone who needs to be has been informed.

Journalists are going to have to think about how they use information they access and whether it is ethically responsible to re-distribute what they find.

I, for example, could have flagged this up before the official statement but for obvious reasons – at least to me – decided not to. But that call might be more difficult in other circumstances when it could be argued that a piece of information is already in the public domain.

Perhaps most evidently it appears that Facebook is in serious danger of making its users learn how the website’s privacy settings work in some very hard ways.

P.S. And on a related note, The Toronto Star is reporting that earlier today the Helmand blog, run by UK Forces Media Operations, had to pull a blog post which allegedly revealed incorrect information about ISAF casualties at Kandahar airfield.

Public Affairs Specialist, Lindy Kyzer, concurs with a number of concerns raised by military bloggers admitting that there are "still areas, and leaders, where blogging in the ranks is not met with open arms", and acknowledging that "most of the issues milbloggers have are with their local command".

Nevertheless, Kyzer highlights that bloggers need to remain within the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Operations Security and are responsible for "maintaining military standards" and "decorum" online.

Perhaps most significantly she said "commanders remain free to set localized policy when it comes to social media use by their soldiers". That might disappoint some military bloggers who have been calling for stronger leadership from senior officers in favour of social media.

It’s also difficult to see how a number of military bloggers would take Kyzer’s advice to avoid politics and not "diss the boss" on their blogs.

Kyzer attempted to portray the ‘US military-military blogger’ relationship as fairly healthy. She dismissed claims of widespread closures of military blogs but said she was aware of one high profile case. (No doubt a reference to that of CJ Grisham which has had significant coverage both in the blogosphere and elsewhere.)

Although there was still progress to be made, she argued that "these days everyone from the Secretary of the Army to battalion and brigade commanders across the field aren’t just supportive of blogging – many of them are blogging themselves".

It will be interesting to see what the military bloggers make of it all.

"Blogging is no longer worth the trouble. Everything is fine as long as the stories are happy and positive. The military wants happy stories, not honest stories. Everything must be 100% in concert with the Army spin. If it’s not, you’re considered an "embarrassment" to the Army, the installation, and/or the NCO Corps. Integrity is no longer an accepted method of leadership. If I can’t be honest and open, I won’t write at all. I refuse to allow my private blog’s message to be dictated with threats and intimidation."

Bizarrely, it appears that one of the primary reasons why CJ Grisham pulled the plug was because of the fall out from a Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meeting at a school in Huntsville that his children attended.

In blog posts that are no longer available, Grisham had alleged that the Principal of the school was ignoring his concerns and those of other parents over a new uniform policy. He also posted a video in which he can be seen robustly challenging the conduct of the meeting. He believed it was not following relevant bylaws. 

The school was unhappy with Grisham’s behaviour and contacted his military superiors. In turn, they called the blogger in for "a dressing down by a senior NCO" and issued him with a formal counseling statement. Grisham’s chain of command also asked him to remove the videos he had posted. 

Over the course of a month, it seems everything was "blown way out of proportion".

The fact that Grisham continued to blog about the ongoing dispute probably didn’t do him many favours. Entitling posts ‘Piss poor leadership’ before expressing discontent with the conduct of a senior NCO might not have been too popular with his commanders even if Grisham is not currently deployed and the original issue does not directly concern the US Army. (Unless they’ve taken a sudden interest in school uniform policy…)

In the end, it seems Grisham decided it simply wasn’t worth the hassle. Once again, low level politics appears to have brought about the end of a military blog.

I came across a couple of links on media coverage of the London bombings in July 2005 that I hadn’t previously discovered. Maybe you missed them too.

Mike Thelwall did some research into bloggers and the bombings which ‘scratches the surface’ of the use of blogs to cover a major news event:

Interestingly there was:

"…a fall in the percentage share of the top linked-to sites at the time of the attacks, perhaps reflecting a widening of the search for information rather than a sudden reliance on a few authoritative sources."

And we learn that:

"…in comparison to major media representations of the London attacks, blog posts give insights into contemporary discussions and can highlight issues, such as the alleged Iraq connection which may be forgotten or deliberately ignored in hindsight."

I also picked up this article from Media Guardian earlier in the year in which Sky News’ John Ryley claims that Sky’s coverage of the attacks influenced BBC policy on breaking news:

"BBC bosses have admitted that they rewrote their policy after handling of the attacks…News does not usually break cleanly. Big stories emerge in dribs and drabs, bits of information from many sources. Often conflicting and confusing … when a big story breaks we report new information, clearly attributed to its source, even if things turn out differently…It was precisely that policy that the BBC decided to adopt after the London bombings." 

US Army and Milblogging

US military bloggers were meeting up at Blog World Expo last week and I see there was a panel entitled, ‘Milblogs: Not your standard news source’, which I’ll have to find out some more about. But in the meantime, Public Affairs Officer, Lindy Kyzer, explains how relations have changed between milbloggers and US Army.

Bonus Afghanistan ‘section‘ (OK. It’s one link. But that’s enough for a section on this blog)

Excuse the in-house appreciation club but Frontline blogger, Alex Strick van Linschoten, and colleague Felix Kuehn, have a great piece up on Foreign Policy drawn from their experience of living in Kandahar. Well worth a read.