Wikileaks Divulges Things Already Known

The whistleblower website, Wikileaks.org, has offered the world a pretty big data dump in the last few hours. It has leaked some 90,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan starting in 2004. Much of the Pentagon brass, the Afghan government and the Pakistani intelligence service is in mid-conniption over the release of the information, which was also shared with New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel. They needn't be upset. Having taken the temperature of more than a handful of experts in the counter-insurgency and Afghan fields, one can reasonably state that these documents merely offer footnote citations for things already known.

Andrew Exum, who has gone through a huge chunk of these documents for the Center for a New American Security, blogged that three facts came out his studies that cannot be denied: "1. Elements within Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) support the Taliban. 2. The United States integrates direct action special operations into its counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, targeting insurgent leaders through capture/kill missions. 3. Civilians have died in Afghanistan, often as the result of coalition combat operations." Well, obviously. He also adds that if he continues reading he might discover that LeBron James will be playing for Miami this season.

Over at the Economist, the magazine reports, "In military terms, the one copper-bottomed, never-known-before revelation is that insurgents have managed to get their hands on surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and even used one to down a helicopter." Another great revelation? Afghans shoot copters down with SAMs -- someone call the Soviets.

David Loyn, reporting from Kabul for the BBC, stated, "The picture they [the documents] paint is of American naivety at the beginning, a distracting obsession with Osama bin Laden, aid programmes that did not work, failure to understand the nature of the Taliban, and the continuing poor quality of Afghan police and soldiers. It is easy to see why the leak of all of this information would infuriate a White House desperate to make 2010 the year they change the way they do business in Afghanistan. The extent of American penetration and control of Afghan intelligence revealed in the documents will also raise questions about Afghan independence." Hardly news, is it?

A few have suggested that the leak here is comparable to the publication of The Pentagon Papers, the US government's papers on the Vietnam War, that Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media decades ago. The only real comparison is the size of the files. America was still rather evenly divided about the war when the Papers came out in 1971, and the US had committed itself to expanding the war into Cambodia and Laos. Moreover, they covered US-Vietnamese relations from 1945 to 1967; in other words, it was about how America got into the mess as much as about the war itself. Now, most Americans see no point in the Afghan War, and official US policy is to get out in the next year or so. Moreover, these papers only start in 2004, a few years after the start of the Afghan War, and they certainly cannot represent a study of how the US got into this current mess -- that would be a leak worth reading end to end.

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