The Glade 4.0

WASHINGTON—Thousands of secret military documents were released Sunday by a web-based organization, a gigantic leak of classified information that appeared to present a bleak view of Afghanistan war and could have a profound impact on the public perception of the conflict.

WSJ Afghanistan correspondent Matthew Rosenberg speaks with Amol Sharma about the significance of the leak of thousands of documents related to the Afghanistan war and the possible effects on the perception of the war among American and Afghani citizens.

The release of the documents, which were obtained and made public by the website WikiLeaks, evoked the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War, which when published contradicted the public narrative of that war and played a role in turning public opinion against it.

There appears to be evidence of war crimes in the leaked documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a news conference in London on Monday according to the Associated Press. "It is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime. That said ... there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material," he said.
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Coming at a time when President Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy has come under increasing criticism, the release will likely stoke criticism of the war effort, as well as spark a debate about the manner in which the information was made available.

WikiLeaks allowed three publications, the Guardian newspaper in London, the magazine Der Spiegel in Germany and the New York Times, to have access to the documents for several weeks. Those news outlets released stories in a coordinated manner Sunday.

The documents are mostly raw field reports, some spare, some mundane and others rich with narrative details. Many of the low-level reports are the kind that some intelligence experts consider the equivalent of second-hand rumors, said one U.S. official.
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* Former Spy Chief Responds to Allegations
* Who Is Hamid Gul?
* Afghanistan Files Blog
* WSJ.com Topics: Afghanistan

The White House condemned the release of the documents, as it has in the past when WikiLeaks has made classified material public. Even as it condemned the leak, the White House also noted that the bulk of the material released was from the Bush administration.

"On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on Al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," Gen. James Jones, White House national security adviser, said in a written statement.

WikiLeaks said it was releasing some 91,000 documents, reports that cover a time period from January 2004 through the end of 2009.

On its website, WikiLeaks also said it would delay the release of 15,000 reports at the request of its source. As it reviewed and redacted those documents, they too would be released, the statement said.

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 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. The U.S. has increased the number of special operations teams and their operational tempo in recent months. Officials say rules put in place by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander, have minimized the collateral damage produced by the elite forces' raids.

The reports note that a number of U.S. unmanned aircraft have crashed and collided, undermining the overall success rate. That finding also has been previously reported by news organizations.

The swiftness of the White House's response when the first stories about the WikiLeaks documents appeared suggests the Obama administration views the release of the reports as potentially damaging to the war effort.

The administration has boosted the U.S. presence in Afghanistan by some 50,000 troops, but put in place a tight timeline, insisting it plans to begin a drawdown in about a year.

At the beginning, the war in Afghanistan enjoyed widespread support, even from Bush administration critics who opposed the Iraq war. As it has dragged on, becoming the longest armed conflict in U.S. history, doubts about whether the U.S. can be successful there have grown.

Antiwar members of Congress such as Rep. Denis Kucinich (D., Ohio) have seized on new revelations about the war in Afghanistan to renew their arguments that the U.S. should begin to withdraw. A minority of lawmakers has so far supported withdrawal resolutions.
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The House of Representatives is due to debate a resolution on U.S. involvement in Pakistan this week. The WikiLeaks reports will likely be used as ammunition in that arguments.

"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," said Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a written statement. "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."

The release is sure to put attention on WikiLeaks, a web-based group devoted to publishing state secrets. In April, the organization unveiled classified footage of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters employees. In addition to video shot from a helicopter gunship, the group released a package of documents related to the attack; it sent correspondents to Baghdad to track down survivors of the incident and conduct follow-up interviews. At a news conference in releasing the video, Mr. Assange called the pairing of investigative reporting with leaked footage a "powerful combination."

This month, the U.S. military said it would press criminal charges against an Army soldier, Pfc. Bradley Manning, for allegedly transferring classified military information to an unauthorized source. The charges appeared to be connected to the materials Wikileaks released in April.

The arrest of Pfc. Manning intensified the criticism of Wikileaks and discussion about whether Mr. Assange was inducing people to leak classified data that could potentially put intelligence sources in danger.

Launched in 2007, WikiLeaks has posted a wide range of leaked documents from the internal correspondence of climate researchers to information on secret sorority rituals. The organization has designs on being seen as a serious newsgathering enterprise. The unusual agreement to team up with the three major news organizations appears to be an attempt to build on those aspirations.

In coming days, as officials and experts review the documents, new revelations are likely to come to light. The most important documents may be those dealing with the activities of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and its relationship with the Taliban.

Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, condemned the leak as irresponsible and not reflective of the current situation on the ground in the region, adding that the U.S. and Pakistan are "strategic partners" working to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban. "These reports reflect nothing more than single source comments and rumors, which abound on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and are often proved wrong after deeper examination," he said Sunday. The Pakistani government, he said, "is following a clearly laid out strategy of fighting and marginalizing terrorists and our military and intelligence services are effectively executing that policy."

Several of the reports provide details behind the long-running U.S. contention that Pakistani intelligence officers—and veterans of the ISI—have been supporting the Afghan Taliban.

One January 2009 intelligence report describes an Afghan Taliban meeting that included former ISI chief Hamid Gul. It focused on plans to launch a truck bomb to avenge the recent killing of Osama al-Kini, an al Qaeda leader killed by a Central Intelligence Agency drone. The participants at the meeting included several older Arab men with large security details, which may have indicated they were members of al Qaeda. Mr. Gul advised the group to focus their operation on Afghanistan "in exchange for the government of Pakistan's security forces turning a blind eye," the report said. Mr. Gul has denied links to terrorism. Pakistani officials strongly dispute the notion that the government still provides support to the Afghan Taliban, saying they have severed all ties to the group.



A report from December 2006 describes a member of the ISI running a suicide-bombing network in Afghanistan that trained bombers, conducted reconnaissance, and performed other operational planning and support for attacks such as transporting bombers from Pakistan to Afghanistan. The aspiring bombers receive training at militant camps, including one run by a notorious militant group that has links to al Qaeda, the Haqqani network.

According to WikiLeaks reports, the Taliban was in expert in its use of heat-seeking missiles. Still, U.S. officials have never acknowledged the Taliban had access to such weaponry.

One document released by WikiLeaks was a May 30, 2007, report that discussed a CH-47 transport helicopter destroyed by a heat seeking missile, killing five Americans, a Briton and a Canadian.

At the time, a NATO spokesman dismissed eyewitness reports that suggested the helicopter was struck with a missile. The WikiLeaks report shows the military knew that the Taliban had used a heat-seeking device.

Actually I tried to clean it up, but was in a rush. The WSJ had lots of pictures and charts that really messed up with cut/paste.

Commentary, well normally I just like to start the discussion. In this case I want to see more about these things revealed. If the Pentagon has been concealing information for the president or other offices related to the persecution of the war I am very much against this. Massacres actually do not bother me as much, I am a realist and things like that happen during a war.