The more than 91,000 classified documents -- most of which consist of low-level field reports -- represent one of the largest single disclosures of such information in U.S. history. Wikileaks gave the material to the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks ago on the condition that they not be published before Sunday night, when the group released them publicly.
Covering the period from January 2004 through December 2009, when the Obama administration began to deploy more than 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan and announced a new strategy, the documents provide new insights into a period in which the Taliban was gaining strength, Afghan civilians were growing increasingly disillusioned with their government, and U.S. troops in the field often expressed frustration at having to fight a war without sufficient resources. ..WaPo
Wikileaks has done it again. Only this time it goes straight to the guts of the Afghanistan war and our relationship with Pakistan. Pakistan's intelligence service -- ISI -- has been working with and for the Taliban and against the US, according to hair-raising reports in the New York Times, on NPR, and at the Washington Post.
The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders. ...NYT
There is nothing new here, not really. This blog has been watching the ISI/Pakistan relationship with the Taliban since '04, noting in the summer of '08 that it "turns out Pakistan's ISI -- its intelligence agency -- helped carry out the attack against the Indian embassy in Kabul, as suspected."
The ISI has been close to the Taliban for at least twenty years. The agency's actions are bound to embarrass the US government as well as Pakistan. The CIA has worked with the ISI for years. Their association lay behind theories, aka "conspiracy" theories, that the ISI and by extension the CIA were involved in planning 9/11. The New York Times reports on the damage..., a follow up to its report on Wednesday. The embarrassment to the US is deepened by news that "Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region." ...PW, 8/1/2008
What Wikileaks has put together now are the details -- the on-the-ground details -- of a relationship that the US has, obviously, had to factor into its decisions on how or whether to fight this war. As NPR points out, these anti-war Wikileaks revelations just make the administration's policy harder to defend. Coupled with the Shirley Sherrod firing, it sows yet more doubts about Obama's leadership among his most dependable supporters.
The administration had a pro forma, not to say Bushesque, early-morning response to the leaks "accusing the website of putting the lives of US, UK and coalition troops in danger and threatening America's national security of the US," according to the Guardian, begging the question as to whether both the Bush and Obama administrations didn't put troops' lives and America's security at far greater risk by entering into open warfare with the Taliban. As for the Obama administration's role, it's only fair to point out that the leaked documents don't cover the period after December 2009 when the war in Afghanistan became "Obama's war" -- effectively a clean-up operation.
The sources of many of Wikileaks' revelations come from the US and Afghan military. In other words, many American soldiers go into a confusing, life-threatening situation with the added awareness that America's allies are also America's enemies.
Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.
Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.
But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable. While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence. ...NYT
In other words, soldier, watch your back.
