Hats off to Julian Assange, Alan Rusbridger and the rest of the folks at WikiLeaks, the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. Their joint publication of what the Guardian describes as a “huge cache of secret US military files” does indeed provide, as the reporters Nick Davies and David Leigh argue, “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 White House has criticised the “irresponsible” leak of 90,000 documents. Surprise, surprise!
Richard Kemp, the retired colonel, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and pundit often invited on to the airwaves to defend our “mission” in Helmand, told Radio 4’s Today programme that the unprecedented document dump was “damaging” to operational security. First, how does he know? Second, so were the Pentagon Papers. As the US blogger Glenn Greenwald tweeted earlier this morning: “Can’t wait to hear from those who believe Dan Ellsberg is heroic but who viciously condemn WikiLeaks”. On his blog, Greenwald goes on to point out:
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.
At least John Kerry, the former Democratic presidential candidate and chair of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, seems to be taking the matter seriously:
[H]owever illegally these documents came to light, they 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.
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(Hat-tip: George Eaton.)
Talking of Daniel Ellsberg, by the way, here’s what the most famous leaker in living memory wrote in September 2004, in the New York Times:
Surely there are officials in the present administration who recognise that the United States has been misled into a war in Iraq, but who have so far kept their silence — as I long did about the war in Vietnam. To them I have a personal message: don’t repeat my mistakes. Don’t wait until more troops are sent, and thousands more have died, before telling truths that could end a war and save lives. Do what I wish I had done in 1964: go to the press, to Congress, and document your claims.
Technology may make it easier to tell your story, but the decision to do so will be no less difficult. The personal risks of making disclosures embarrassing to your superiors are real. If you are identified as the source, your career will be over; friendships will be lost; you may even be prosecuted. But some 140,000 Americans are risking their lives every day in Iraq. Our nation is in urgent need of comparable moral courage from its public officials.
Ellsberg was writing back then about the war in Iraq, but perhaps someone in the US government currently involved in the Afghan war effort read his piece more recently and was inspired to get in touch with Assange and co. (I suspect we’ll never know . . . )
Either way, as the well-connected US blogger and commentator on foreign affairs Steve Clemons writes:
This is the “Pentagon Papers moment” in this contemporary war, and it will force President Obama and his team to go back and review first principles about the objectives of this war.
LBJ escalated the Vietnam war that he felt politically unable to escape.
The question is whether President Obama has the backbone and temerity to reframe this engagement and stop the haemorrhaging of American lives and those of allies as well as the gross expenditure of funds for a war that shows a diminished America that is killing hundreds of innocent people and lying about it, of an enemy that is animated and funded in part by our supposed allies in Pakistan, and US tolerance for a staggering level of abuse, incompetence and corruption in our Afghan allies in the Karzai government.
Does Obama have the “backbone and temerity” to stop this madness? It’s question I’ve been asking for a while.
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