Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization’s latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to “opening the Stasi archives” in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also compared the leak to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers.
Both claims are a bit difficult to swallow. The Stasi were famous for creating a total surveillance state and gathering comprehensive evidence of political “crimes” against their own citizenry; the Pentagon Papers revealed Kennedy’s involvement in the overthrow of Diem, and Nixon’s decision to illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos. The WikiLeaks archive is… daily incident reports. Incident reports can be revealing, if they say something new. But these don’t.
The leak is certainly news—though not surprised by their content, even Afghan president Hamid Karzai was shocked by their sheer scope. The White House is worried about how this might harm national security. And if nothing else, these documents confirm our worst fears about the war—namely, that it is slowly being lost.
Yet when you look at the Small Wars Journal’s archive of stories about “The Afghan War Logs,” as WikiLeaks has taken to calling them, what is remarkable is what’s new: not very much. Did we know the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, was supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan? We seemed comfortable enough with that relationship in 2002, when the U.S. allowed Pakistan to fly thousands of Pakistani operatives, Taliban militants, and even al Qaeda agents out of the northern city of Kunduz over a three month period at the end of 2001—a movement of people so massive, and so inexplicably brazen, it’s been called “The Airlift of Evil.” Lest we be tempted to assume that Pakistan stopped supporting the Taliban at some point, as recently as 2008 U.S. officials were complaining of the ISI’s direct support to terrorist groups inside Afghanistan, like when Afghan insurgents detonated a massive car bomb at the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing fifty.
Assange has argued that these files “prove” the Pakistani government’s direct complicity in attacks in Afghanistan. The Guardian retorts:
But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred.
It’s too easy to blanketly condemn Pakistan for its relationship to the Taliban, which goes back to 1994 and has spanned four presidents. Pakistan has also lost nearly 2,000 soldiers trying to remove the Taliban from its restive Northwest (an area where rumor is fact more often than not). And for several years, the U.S. hasn’t been shy about flinging missiles and SEAL hit squads into Pakistan to root out these same insurgents—to muted protest when the Pakistani government even bothers to protest publicly.
There are other examples, too, but rather than debunking the hype over these leaks, it’s probably more important to look at how context-free most of the coverage of the leaks really is. The New York Times makes a conscious effort to note that President Obama is not, as is being reported almost everywhere else, blithely in denial about Pakistan’s support to the insurgency, but they’re in rare company in that sense.
Der Spiegel reports that the drones used to so much effect in Pakistan aren’t as effective as the official spokesmen would have us believe. Are we to be surprised that the U.S. government reaches for panaceas and spins how awesome it is? Marc Ambinder reported that U.S. and Afghan officials are covering up civilian deaths, but that’s been a public problem for years.
You seem to come to much the same conclusion I gained with both the Washington Post's summary and those from both the Guardian and NY Times--some of which I read last night since California is early morning for London and Germany. Was the fuel truck hit that was mentioned in the Times the same one that was hit and written about last winter?? The one I'm thinking of was led by the British and the officer first apologized for the actions and the deaths they caused and then was removed from his position by Brown. The way it was written today, the hit of fuel truck was caused by US drones/missiles but they were both in the north eastern area and the trucks were both crossing a river when each got stopped. The people killed were those trying to gain free gasoline. The exact same actions seem too similar to be separate but that doesn't mean they weren't. Do you happen to know??
#1 Posted by Patricia Wilson, CJR on Mon 26 Jul 2010 at 08:22 PM
Joshua:
You're spot on. What this massive leak reveals is... that anyone who bothered to read through the existing open source material already had a pretty good grasp on the war. There are no great revelations, or shocking scandals. Indeed, within the confines of OPSEC, the normal political spin, and the fog of war, the Western public turns out to have already been pretty well informed--if it wanted to be (quite the opposite of Assange's take on all this).
On the impact of this, the people put at risk by the leak is only part of the cost, albeit the most tragic.
The raw intel also gives the Taliban and AQ unprecedented insight into what is known, not known, how it is reported, how it is collected, what intel gaps there are, operational tempos, counter-IED procedures, and a host of other things. Having worked as an analyst myself, there is a great deal that can be worked out from this working-level Secret material.
It also will likely have a chilling effect on the sharing of classified of material within and across agencies and countries--thus exacerbating the sort of stove-piping that Western intelligence communities have sought to reduce in the years since 9/11.
An interesting question is to how the media will react to this, beyond the role of the NYT, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel. Had the recently-arrested Russian spies stolen 90,000+ US intelligence reports, there would be outrage--even though it would have done far, far less damage for the Russians to have had these than Wikileaks. Will there be similar outrage at this more serious harm to coalition and Afghan efforts?
#2 Posted by Rex Brynen, CJR on Mon 26 Jul 2010 at 09:27 PM
So, to recap:
1) your worst fears about the war are that it's being slowly lost (as opposed to say, concern for the killing of innocents)
2) the leaks are unimportant because they don't say something new, and yet, in not saying anything new somehow they pose grave dangers
3) protecting journalistic sources is wrong
4) the comparison to Stasi records is invalid because this country doesn't have a surveillance state and does not commit crimes against its own citizens (cf:http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/; http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIi.htm)
#3 Posted by Diogenes, CJR on Tue 27 Jul 2010 at 02:50 PM
Wikileaks seems to leak only western-language sources. It would be great if they were more ecumenical in their approach.
They also seem to have acquired a kind of moral immunity. Leaking the Climategate emails was a complete disaster for global climate legislation and Copenhagen, which made Wikileaks into dupes of a criminal conspiracy. They were totally played. Yet it had zero effect on them.
#4 Posted by Michael Turton, CJR on Wed 28 Jul 2010 at 03:55 AM
Wikileaks is equal opportunity, they are a conduit of Chinese, Swedish w/e. You are wrong they only leak Western documents. You seem to feel that they should have an agenda "to promote climate legislation" for example. The facts are facts, can't help the idiots that don't weigh the importance and context. So what the rightwing made hay from nothing? It was REALITY, even if not the big picture. No propaganda. Period.People need to learn to look for evidence, jeez.
#5 Posted by SPhoenix, CJR on Thu 29 Jul 2010 at 12:23 AM
if you are so deeply concerned about the lives put at risk by the wikileaks cables, why do you repeat their names above with links to their mentions on wikileaks?
#6 Posted by melanie, CJR on Thu 29 Sep 2011 at 12:50 PM