| Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation
The Guardian
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and over 1,000 US troops.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US navy sailors captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
NYT
Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert
Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports to be made public Sunday.
The documents, to be made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.
Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.
Haaretz
More than 90,000 classified documents on U.S. war in Afghanistan leaked to media
The leaked records include detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive U.S. special operations unit called Task Force 373 against what U.S. officials considered high-value insurgent and terrorist targets. Some of the raids resulted in unintended killings of Afghan civilians, according to the documentation.
Among those listed as being killed by the secretive unit was Shah Agha, described by the Guardian as an intelligence officer for an IED cell, who was killed with four other men in June 2009. Another was a Libyan fighter, Abu Laith al-Libi, described in the documents as a senior al-Qaida military commander. Al-Libi was said to be based across the border in Mir Ali, Pakistan, and was running al-Qaida training camps in North Waziristan, a region along the Afghan border where U.S. officials have said numerous senior al-Qaida leaders were believed to be hiding.
The operation against al-Libi, in June 2007, resulted in a death tally that one U.S. military document said include six enemy fighters and seven noncombatants - all children.
Wall Street Journal
Website Releases Secrets on War
The most surprising finding in the reports may be that the Taliban have used sophisticated heat-seeking missiles against aircraft operated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Afghan resistance fighters used similar weapons, provided by the U.S., to great effect against the Soviet Army in the 1980s. The U.S. military has never publicly acknowledged that the Taliban possess such weapons.
According to the reports, the Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence agency provided the Taliban with safe haven in the Pakistan, even as Islamabad was aiding the U.S. war effort. That charge has often been made privately by U.S. officials. Even in public, Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Kabul, has said the ISI retains ties with the Taliban.
Other reports detail missions conducted by Special Operation Forces, charged with hunting down top insurgent commanders. The reports claim successes but also note that mistakes have led to the death of Afghan civilians and, as a result, eroded U.S. standing in Afghanistan.
Greenwald
The Wikileaks Afghanistan Leak
The White House has swiftly vowed to continue the war and predictably condemned WikiLeaks rather harshly. It will be most interesting to see how many Democrats -- who claim to find Daniel Ellsberg heroic and the Pentagon Papers leak to be unambiguously justified -- follow the White House's lead in that regard. Ellsberg's leak -- though primarily exposing the amoral duplicity of a Democratic administration -- occurred when there was a Republican in the White House. This latest leak, by contrast, indicts a war which a Democratic President has embraced as his own, and documents similar manipulation of public opinion and suppression of the truth well into 2009. It's not difficult to foresee, as Atrios predicted, that media "coverage of [the] latest [leak] will be about whether or not it should have been published," rather than about what these documents reveal about the war effort and the government and military leaders prosecuting it.
PressThink
The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization
I've been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven't found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here's what I said on Twitter Sunday: "We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs." My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect- not because the story isn't sensational or troubling enough, but because it's too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.
Last week, it was the Washington Post's big series, Top Secret America, two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowland that has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is no accountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a whole is doing, and too much "product" to make intelligent use of. We're wasting billions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does not work. It's an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven't followed, not because the series didn't do its job, but rather: the job of fixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.
The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works... and often fails to work?
The New Yorker
WikiLeaks and the War
What does it mean to tell the truth about a war? Is it a lie, technically speaking, for the Administration to say that it has faith in Hamid Karzai's government and regards him as a legitimate leader-or is it just absurd? Is it a lie to say that we have a plan for Afghanistan that makes any sense at all? If you put it that way, each of the WikiLeaks documents-from an account of an armed showdown between the Afghan police and the Afghan Army, to a few lines about a local interdiction official taking seventy-five-dollar bribes, to a sad exchange about an aid scam involving orphans-is a pixel in a picture that does, indeed, contradict official accounts of the war, and rather drastically so. |
