More Ancap Good News: Wikileaks releases 92,000 hidden Afghan war docs
Author
Message
RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
Subject: More Ancap Good News: Wikileaks releases 92,000 hidden Afghan war docs Mon Jul 26, 2010 3:46 am
The White House has denounced a massive leak of secret military files that allegedly describe how Pakistan's spy service aids the Afghan insurgency, but said the information was no surprise.
In all, about 92,000 documents were released by the web whistleblower Wikileaks, containing previously untold details of the Afghan war through Pentagon files and field reports from 2004 to 2010.
The New York Times, one of the first three media outlets to review and report on the leaks, said they "suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban".
Britain's Guardian newspaper said the files, many of which detail growing numbers of civilians dying at the hands of international forces as well as the Taliban, painted "a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan".
The White House issued its condemnation shortly before the leaks were posted online, saying the information could endanger US lives but also pointing to the administration's long-held doubts about links between Pakistan intelligence agents and Afghan insurgents.
"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security," White House National Security Adviser James Jones said.
"These irresponsible leaks will not impact [on] our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people."
The White House also released a series of remarks made in the past by top officials expressing their concern about links between Pakistan spy services and militants in Afghanistan.
Among them was one from Defence Secretary Robert Gates dated March 31, 2009: "The ISI's contacts with [extremist groups] are a real concern to us, and we have made these concerns known directly to the Pakistanis," referring to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
The New York Times said it, The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, had received the leaked material several weeks ago from Wikileaks, a secretive web organisation that often publishes classified material.
The source of the leaks was unknown.
The last person suspected of providing classified material to the outlet is an American soldier who has been charged with two counts of misconduct for allegedly providing video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in which about a dozen people were gunned down in broad daylight.
Describing "secret strategy sessions", the Times said Pakistan spy services "organise networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders".
In one of the documents, Pakistan's former ISI spy chief Hamid Gul is described at a January 2009 meeting with a group of insurgents following the death by CIA drone attack of a leader of al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan named Zamarai, also known as Osama al-Kini.
"The meeting attendees were saddened by the news of Zamarai's death and discussed plans to complete Zamarai's last mission by facilitating the movement of a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device from Pakistan to Afghanistan through the Khan Pass," it said.
The Times noted that it was unclear whether the attack ever took place, and said that, despite the official end of Gul's tenure at the ISI in 1989, "General Gul is mentioned so many times in the reports, if they are to be believed, that it seems unlikely that Pakistan's current military and intelligence officials could not know of at least some of his wide-ranging activities".
Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, denounced the leaks, saying they consisted of "unprocessed" reports from the field that "do not reflect the current onground realities".
However, US Senator John Kerry, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the leaks "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent."
With nearly 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama has set a deadline of July 2011 as the start of a gradual drawdown of US troops, after a nearly nine-year mission that began in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001.
Mr Jones, who did not address the veracity of the information contained in the leaks, said that the documents mainly covered the time period of January 2004 to December 2009, when former president George Bush was in office.
He pointed out that Mr Obama on December 1, 2009, announced a new strategy that boosted resources for Afghanistan, and put increased focus on al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan.
"This shift in strategy addressed challenges in Afghanistan that were the subject of an exhaustive policy review last fall," Mr Jones said.
A US official who asked not to be named added: "I don't think anyone who follows this issue will find it surprising that there are concerns about ISI and safe havens in Pakistan.
"Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the President ordered a three-month policy review and a change in strategy," the official said, adding: "Wikileaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organisation that opposes US policy in Afghanistan."
Location : Wasted Space Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
Subject: Weight of pages, but the best is yet to come Tue Jul 27, 2010 3:44 am
Weight of pages, but the best is yet to come
How big is big? Attempting to give the Afghan War Logs their place in history requires that this explosion of top secret documentation in the public domain be measured against the yardstick of the sensational 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, which changed the course of the Vietnam War.
That effort, which prompted Henry Kissinger to dub Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the papers, as the most dangerous man in America, was a paltry 7000 pages. But apart from revealing how badly the war in Vietnam was going, it also revealed one of Washington's dirtiest secrets: the US was carpet-bombing neighbouring Cambodia and Laos.
By comparison, the logs are enormous - a mind-boggling 92,201 military, intelligence and diplomatic documents - but a first skim by teams from The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel has revealed more of the grinding detail of Barack Obama's unwinnable war than it has uncovered unknown dimensions of the conflict.
That said, Washington is sweating, because WikiLeaks is preparing another tranche of 15,000 documents for release that reportedly include up to 10,000 cable messages from US embassies around the world on fraught issues such as arms deals, trade talks, covert meetings and unvarnished assessments of governments.
But already it can be said that the logs will be to Afghanistan what the Pentagon Papers were to Vietnam.
To date, the logs' single new revelation on the conduct of the war is that the Taliban appears to have heat-seeking, surface-to-air missiles - one of which brought down a US helicopter.
However, the logs' greater service to disclosure and transparency is the extent to which they reveal how the governments with troops in Afghanistan sanitise their public account of how badly the war has been going.
These are the raw accounts, soaked in the blood and sweat of combat, before they have been prettied up by the triage teams in the Washington and allied PR clinics. We knew there were civilian casualties, but not this many; we had heard of the secret CIA ground missions to assassinate Taliban leaders, now it is confirmed; we have had guarded reports on the use of unmanned drone aircraft in attacks on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, now the picture is fleshed out.
With US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week dropping another $US500 million ($A558 million) on Washington's ally Pakistan, there is enough new dirt in the logs on Islamabad's two-timing with the Taliban to make Americans wonder who is getting the bang for their buck.
Washington and its forces on the ground are still recovering from the shock sacking in June of their Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal - and now this.
It makes no difference to the public understanding of the progress of the war that the most recent of the logs is dated December 2009. Their sheer weight on being dumped in the public arena will cement the sense of a war being lost and give rise to further demands that the troops be brought home.
President Obama has been trying to wriggle out of the words he uttered last year, which were read as a promise to start bringing troops home from Afghanistan in July next year.
With the release of the logs, he has just lost a lot of wriggle room.
Ellsberg, a strategic analyst with the Rand Corp, famously concluded in his decision to leak the classified history of the Vietnam War: ''We weren't on the wrong side, we were the wrong side.''
At a February screening in Washington of the film The Most Dangerous Man in America, the now grandfatherly whistle-blower appealed for his contemporary equivalent in the US security establishment to take courage and hit the send button.
Subject: More Ancap Good News: Wikileaks releases 92,000 hidden Afghan war docs 
Mon Jul 26, 2010 3:46 am
