There are two main stories in the
New York Times today which are important enough to spend time reading, and considering: The first is
Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert; and the second,
Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan.
Both
NYT reports are the result of approximately 90,000 items of classified material (roughly, two hundred thousand pages) about America's war in Afghanistan -- documentation made available through
Wikileaks, the accountability organization based in Sweden. As the
NYT reported, it was given access, along with the UK Guardian and the German magazine
Der Spiegel, to the records several weeks ago on condition that they not publish any articles about them before today.
The
Guardian referred to the release as "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 neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency."
Man; tell us something we
didn't know, already.
But, before you start yawning and click away to eBay or Amazon -- this event is extremely important. What the meaning of 'National Security' truly is; how our country has remained willfully ignorant and apathetic about what has been happening in West Asia since 2001; and how governments manipulate public opinion and hide the effects of policy and strategy are only a few of the reasons.
Wikileak's release, which covers the period 2004 - 2009, is easily comparable to that of the
Pentagon Papers in 1971, which revealed parts of the secret history of the Vietnam war.
Glenn Greenwald at
Salon notes that
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... 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...
Note how obviously lame is the White House's prime tactic thus far for dismissing the importance of the leak: that the documents only go through December, 2009, the month when Obama ordered his "surge," as though that timeline leaves these documents without any current relevance. The Pentagon Papers only went up through 1968 and were not released until 3 years later (in 1971), yet having the public behold the dishonesty about the war had a significant effect on public opinion, as well as their willingness to trust future government pronouncements. At the very least, it's difficult to imagine this leak not having the same effect. Then again... it's possible that the public will remain largely apathetic ...
The first story details something anyone with half a brain who had been paying attention to events in West Asia since 1998 or so would know -- that Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, operated by the Pakistani military, had been secretly supporting the Taliban by providing active intelligence against American forces for almost a decade.
The ISI has also been implicated in assisting
Pakistan's Dr. Strangelove, A.Q. Khan, to disseminate nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, Libya, and god knows where else.
The second story covers a five-year period of the Afghan war, from 2004 until December, 2009. The image is of a war that was essentially ignored by the Bush administration, run on a shoestring, and all but 'set up to fail'; promising the Kharzai government support in Afghanistan (which we never delivered), and ignoring the Islamic radical elements of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan. Lil' Boots believed the war in Iraq would end and the nation stabilized shortly after the March, 2003 invasion, and then the United States would mop up the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
What happened instead was an utter and complete
EPIC FAIL, like something out of Tolkein or Tolstoy. Iraq turned into a quagmire. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, through the labyrinthine nature of West Asian cultures (more about tribal and clan relationships than Western-style politics), the U.S. was subjected to manipulation and deceit by multiple levels of both country's military and political power structures.
It involved not only those countries, but the larger Arabic world, and Iran, and became the 'Death Of A Thousand Cuts' for the United States that's still going on.
The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend, in the Muslim world; think of the scenes of the Arab Council, tribes arguing over how Damascus will be governed, at the end of
Lawrence Of Arabia.
On one level, we could say that George W. Bush and his pals just... made a bad call when they decided (not even a whole day after Lil' Boots was given his play-inauguration for his make-believe presidency) to invade Iraq. That even after September 11th, and the invasion of Afghanistan, when common sense dictated ignoring Iraq, and destroying Al-Qaeda in the mountains of Tora Bora and the Taliban elsewhere ... they decided not to do that.
On another level, as I've mentioned before, this was a strategic mistake on the order of diverting the 6th Army to take Stalingrad. If an American city is ever lost to an Al-Qaeda-created dirty bomb or worse, it will be on the head of Lil' Boots and his Bright Stars:
Oh, well; hey; My Bad! YAAA-HOO! Let's be lovin' some freedom, huh? YAAA-HOO! What does all this mean for Wikileaks? The organization's directors and membership is essentially anonymous, though it does have public spokespersons -- the most well-known being
Julian Assinge, Wikileak's Editor-In-Chief. Hosted through servers in Sweden which allow Wikileaks anonymity and a high level of security, it has been severely criticized by the Obama administration, and in all probability subject to scrutiny by intelligence agencies (and, probably, corporate intelligence groups).
"In August 2009
Kaupthing, a large bank [in Iceland, notes
Wikipedia], succeeded in obtaining a court order gagging Iceland’s national broadcaster, RUV, from broadcasting a risk analysis report showing the bank's substantial exposure to debt default risk. This information had been leaked by a whistleblower to Wikileaks... Citizens of Iceland felt outraged that RUV was prevented from broadcasting news of relevance.
"Therefore, Wikileaks has been credited with inspiring the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a bill meant to reclaim Iceland's 2007
Reporters Sans Frontieres ranking as first in the world for free speech. It aims to enact a range of protections for sources, journalists, and publishers."
It may not be a good idea to reveal intelligence or proprietary information on public forums. However, governments or corporations appear to make decisions regularly which affect the life of citizens or consumers, and keep information pertaining to those decisions secret. When The Powers That Be eliminate transparency and public review, public debate, about things which affect us, it's just another way of saying
Government is too important to be left to the Peasants citizens which it is supposed to serve.
If Wikileaks were just a bunch of twentysomething anarchist hackers, it could be presented by our government and others as something that could be ignored; a fringe anomaly. But it isn't.
And yes, all this will be on the final.
