WikiLeaks Revelations

ajtr

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Frustrating, to be sure, but borne out of a lot of experience over two administrations (to speak just about the current context). Pakistan isn't a monolith, either: there are competing centers of authority, with competing interests, competing resources, and, often, miscalculations. The Pakistanis have also shown great fortitude in combatting the TTP over the past 18 months. There's no alternative to dealing with them, even if there's no emotional satisfaction in doing so.
http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/07/26/a-fair-point-on-pakistan/
 

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A Sanctuary for Terror

The militants wage war in Afghanistan while using Pakistan as a place for rest, recuperation and recruitment.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the so-called Afghanistan war logs released by WikiLeaks Sunday is our continued capacity to be shocked.That the war isn't going as well as advertised is already painfully evident—last week alone, the Taliban kidnapped two American sailors and killed five soldiers. Allegations of Pakistani double-dealing—of accepting a torrent of American dollars with one hand while arming and sheltering the Taliban with the other—are hardly new. Nor are revelations that the country's Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has apparently perfected its own version of don't ask, don't tell. Don't ask your clandestine operatives too many questions about their ties with Islamist militants, and don't tell the Americans more than the minimum required to keep the aid faucet open.

But the detail gives the leaked documents their punch. Even if some of their gaudier revelations—say a plot to sell American troops poisoned alcohol, or to assassinate Afghan officials with a bomb disguised as a gold Quran—need to be taken with a grain of salt, they nonetheless create a bleak picture of life on the ground for American troops.Most of all, they show how the gaggle of Islamist groups fighting NATO in Afghanistan—primarily the Taliban and its allies, militants loyal to Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—have an advantage that more than makes up for their inferior equipment and training. The militants wage war in Afghanistan while using Pakistan as a sanctuary for rest, recuperation and recruitment.

Ironically, one of the best explanations of Islamabad's perfidy comes from Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador in Washington, D.C., and the man charged with the unenviable task of explaining to outraged Americans why their tax dollars—$18 billion since 2001—must continue to flow to a country with so much American blood on its hands. In a seminal book, "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military," written five years ago when Mr. Haqqani was a critic of his country's government rather than its representative, he examined the symbiotic relationship between Pakistan's generals and its Islamic fundamentalists. In a nutshell, Mr. Haqqani argues that in Pakistan—unlike, say, in secular Turkey or Indonesia—the mosque and the military have always been allies rather than adversaries.This alliance has roots in both ideology and realpolitik. On the one hand, the army (of which the ISI is the intelligence wing) sees itself as the guarantor of the world's first nation created purely on the basis of Islam. Its motto: "Faith, Piety and Jihad in the Path of Allah." Historically, even those generals who have had no interest in turning Pakistan into an Islamist state by formally applying Shariah law—among them the dictators Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf—have championed aggression toward Pakistan's neighbors, primarily India and Afghanistan.

For Islamist-leaning generals, the army's rank and file and most of the fervently anti-American Pakistani masses, bloodying America in Afghanistan represents a triumph over the infidel akin to what they experienced in 1989 when the last Soviet troops limped home. For the more secular minded, it gives Pakistan the so-called strategic depth it has long sought against its much larger neighbor India.

Even though it helped spawn the monster of international jihadism, in some ways paying Pakistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s made perfect sense. Islamabad's financial interest in aid, emotional attachment to pan-Islamism, and strategic quest for depth in Afghanistan all aligned neatly with the Western goal of checking Soviet power. Since 9/11 that equation has been much more complicated. The carrot of aid alone has not been enough to make Pakistan betray its core belief in pan-Islamism or its quest for strategic depth, a cornerstone of its military thinking for more than three decades.What, then, is the solution? In the short term, America can continue to nudge Pakistan to give up its support of the likes of the Taliban, Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani through a combination of the carrot of aid and the sticks of stepped-up drone strikes and regular public admonishment. But in the long term, the problem the country poses to the region and the world will not change until Pakistan ceases to be what the Singaporean scholar Tan Tai Yong has termed a garrison state.

As long as the army remains the most powerful institution in Pakistani life—a fact underlined last week when Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani "gave" a three-year extension to Army Chief Ashfaq Kayani, who headed the ISI for much of the period covered in the war logs—Islamabad is unlikely to stop using militant Islamists to further its ideological and strategic goals. Or, to put it another way, if there's one lesson from the past 60-odd years of history it's this: Pakistan needs to become less an army with a country and more a country with an army.

Mr. Dhume, a columnist for WSJ.com, is writing a book about the new Indian middle class.
 

ajtr

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Facing up to an unwinnable war


Full Comment's Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. When Daniel Ellsberg unleashed the Pentagon Papers via The New York Times way back in 1971, the documents added up to a mere 7,000 pages and earned Ellsberg the title of the most dangerous man in America.

Julian Assange, the public face of the WikiLeaks site, is unlikely to garner such opprobrium for publishing more than 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan.

Few, if any, of the WikiLeaks provide new insights — we've known for some time Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, is at best inefficient, at worst corrupt; that Pakistan's secretive spy agency is in cahoots with the Taliban; and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are an effective, low-tech method of killing NATO soldiers.

Where WikiLeaks scores is in the massive accumulation of detail. (And in an era where the dead-tree media are supposed to have gone the way of the dodo, it's pleasing to note the news was spread the old-fashioned way as well as electronically.) It may also play a huge part in convincing Americans that, as in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan is now and always was unwinnable.

As Al-Jazeera's Gregg Carlstrom writes:

The Wikileaks documents offer a detailed record of the mismanagement of the West's nearly nine-year-old war in Afghanistan.

In terms of shifting the public debate, though, it is hard to imagine them rising to the level of the Pentagon Papers, the Vietnam-era documents that detailed the bombing of Laos and Cambodia and other illegal U.S. activities in Southeast Asia."
Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, Declan Walsh concludes:
But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity. Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred.

A retired senior American officer said ground-level reports were considered to be a mixture of 'rumours, bullshit and second-hand information' and were weeded out as they passed up the chain of command. 'As someone who had to sift through thousands of these reports, I can say that the chances of finding any real information are pretty slim,' said the officer, who has years of experience in the region.
The Atlantic magazine's Andrew Sullivan parses the gloomy choices that face Americans:

What do we really learn from the Wikileaks monster-doc-dump? I think the actual answer is: not much that we didn't already know. But it's extremely depressing — and rivetingly explicit — confirmation of what anyone with eyes and ears could have told you for years "¦

Now we all know why retreat is politically treacherous. The terror threat from that region is real — and made worse by the last few years. Allowing the Taliban to come back and launch attacks with al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and Pakistan is real. A president who withdraws and then presides over a terror attack will be vulnerable to cheap political attacks of the Palinite variety.

But a mature polity will understand that just because we cannot prevent any terror attack from that region does not mean we should be occupying it with 100,000 troops in a quixotic attempt at nation-building. We have to return to the Biden option of the least worst counter-terrorism strategy. In order to defeat this terror threat, the American people are going to have to accept that they will endure, for an indefinite period of time, a level of terror that is more than zero. They are also going to have to accept that the occupation itself has become a source of terror, globally.
At Politico, Ross Baker is having none of this. His view is simple:

The Wikileaks release is The Pentagon papers on steroids. This information is giving aid and comfort to the enemy and begins to look like WikiTreason.
Nonetheless, Andrew J. Bacevich at The New Republic believes:

The leaks are unlikely to affect the course of events on the ground. However, they may well affect the debate over the war here at home. In that regard, the effect is likely to be pernicious, intensifying the already existing inclination to focus on peripheral matters while ignoring vastly more important ones "¦

The real significance of the Wikileaks action is of a different character altogether: it shows how rapidly and drastically the notion of 'information warfare' is changing. Rather than being defined as actions undertaken by a government to influence the perception of reality, information warfare now includes actions taken by disaffected functionaries within government to discredit the officially approved view of reality. This action is the handiwork of subversives, perhaps soldiers, perhaps civilians. Within our own national security apparatus, a second insurgent campaign may well have begun. Its purpose: bring America's longest war to an end. Given the realities of the digital age, this second insurgency may well prove at least as difficult to suppress as the one that preoccupies General [David] Petraeus in Kabul.
compiled by Araminta Wordsworth
[email protected]



Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/26/facing-up-to-an-unwinnable-war/#ixzz0uqhs06hU
 

ajtr

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EDITORIAL
Pakistan's Double Game

Published: July 26, 2010

There is a lot to be disturbed by in the battlefield reports from Afghanistan released Sunday by WikiLeaks. The close-up details of war are always unsettling, even more so with this war, which was so badly neglected and bungled by President George W. Bush.But the most alarming of the reports were the ones that described the cynical collusion between Pakistan's military intelligence service and the Taliban. Despite the billions of dollars the United States has sent in aid to Pakistan since Sept. 11, they offer powerful new evidence that crucial elements of Islamabad's power structure have been actively helping to direct and support the forces attacking the American-led military coalition.

The time line of the documents from WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing secrets, stops before President Obama put his own military and political strategy into effect last December. Administration officials say they have made progress with Pakistan since, but it is hard to see much evidence of that so far.

Most of the WikiLeaks documents, which were the subject of in-depth coverage in The Times on Monday, cannot be verified. However, they confirm a picture of Pakistani double-dealing that has been building for years.

On a trip to Pakistan last October, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested that officials in the Pakistani government knew where Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. Gen. David Petraeus, the new top military commander in Afghanistan, recently acknowledged longstanding ties between Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, known as the ISI, and the "bad guys."

The Times's report of the new documents suggests the collusion goes even deeper, that representatives of the ISI have worked with the Taliban to organize networks of militants to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan and hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

The article painted a chilling picture of the activities of Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul of Pakistan, who ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, when the agency and the C.I.A. were together arming the Afghan militias fighting Soviet troops. General Gul kept working with those forces, which eventually formed the Taliban.

Pakistan's ambassador to the United States said the reports were unsubstantiated and "do not reflect the current on-ground realities." But at this point, denials about links with the militants are simply not credible.

Why would Pakistan play this dangerous game? The ISI has long seen the Afghan Taliban as a proxy force, a way to ensure its influence on the other side of the border and keep India's influence at bay.

Pakistani officials also privately insist that they have little choice but to hedge their bets given their suspicions that Washington will once again lose interest as it did after the Soviets were ousted from Afghanistan in 1989. And until last year, when the Pakistani Taliban came within 60 miles of Islamabad, the country's military and intelligence establishment continued to believe it could control the extremists when it needed to.

In recent months, the Obama administration has said and done many of the right things toward building a long-term relationship with Pakistan. It has committed to long-term economic aid. It is encouraging better relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is constantly reminding Pakistani leaders that the extremists, on both sides of the border, pose a mortal threat to Pakistan's fragile democracy — and their own survival. We don't know if they're getting through. We know they have to.

It has been only seven months since Mr. Obama announced his new strategy for Afghanistan, and a few weeks since General Petraeus took command. But Americans are increasingly weary of this costly war. If Mr. Obama cannot persuade Islamabad to cut its ties to, and then aggressively fight, the extremists in Pakistan, there is no hope of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan.
 

ajtr

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Wikileaks row is the last thing Nato needs


In what has been called Nato's crucial year in Afghanistan, the sudden, unauthorised publication of thousands of revealing military and intelligence documents is just about the last thing the alliance needs.

To those of us in the media who have been following the twists and turns of the Afghan conflict, there are few great surprises contained in the 91,000 documents.

Even some of the material classified as "Secret" (the second highest classification after "Top Secret") is not, in reality, particularly sensitive, and of course all of it is at least seven months old.Some of the documents, while authentic as official intelligence reports, can be dismissed as clearly wrong or unfounded.

But that is not the point. Taken together, the Wikileaks documents give the general public a remarkable insight into a war that - at least up until December 2009 - now appears to have been going worse than we were told.

The issue of civilian casualties has been one of the biggest bones of contention between Nato and the Afghan government.

When US General Stanley McChrystal took over command of coalition forces in Afghanistan last year he put "protecting the civilian population" right at the top of his priorities.This was in recognition of the fact that killing civilians is not only morally unacceptable but is also a sure-fire way to boost Taliban propaganda and recruiting.

On the ground it has translated into a policy known as "courageous restraint", meaning holding off ordering airstrikes on buildings or locations where Taliban gunfire is coming from unless commanders on the ground - who can be as junior as a corporal - can be absolutely certain no civilians would be harmed.

Inevitably this has given rise to grumbles among soldiers that they are taking more casualties of their own.

But the Wikileaks documents give disturbing and authentic details of previously unpublished events where Nato actions have inadvertently resulted in Afghan civilian casualties.

These include an RAF Harrier airstrike, separate incidents involving French and US troops, and a mortar attack by Polish forces that hit a wedding party.

According to human rights groups the number of civilians killed by Nato is vastly outnumbered by the number killed by the Taliban but as one senior Nato general put it to me this year "even one civilian casualty is unacceptable, it can never be justified".

The details regarding Pakistan's alleged support for the Taliban are harder to substantiate.Again, the reports are authentic but their content is shaky to say the least. Afghanistan and Pakistan's respective intelligence agencies have a deep mutual distrust.

So those reports that paint the ISI, the Pakistani agency, in a damning light and which are based on information provided by the NDS, their Afghan counterparts, need to be treated with a degree of scepticism.

Still, they do provide further fodder for those convinced the ISI never really cut its links with the Afghan Taliban, an organisation it openly nurtured from 1994-2001.

Among the Pakistani military and intelligence community, the perceived long-term strategic threat comes not from the jihadists but from India.

There are therefore many who are keen to keep open links to a proxy militia in Afghanistan for the day when Nato eventually leaves that country.

'Unglossed' war

The revelations about Taskforce 373 are more embarrassing.

This covert operations unit is something both its operatives and senior commanders would far rather not see publicised.

Their mission, put simply, is to "remove" key insurgent commanders from the battlefield. This means acting on human intelligence, or tip-offs, and intercepted communications to locate them and try to capture them alive.

In practice many are not prepared to surrender so a gun battle ensues in which the insurgents often come off worse, their commander is killed but sometimes so too are a number of civilians sheltering nearby.

So what difference will the release of these documents make, if any, to Nato operations in Afghanistan?

"None", said William Hague, the UK Foreign Secretary, on Monday when asked about the possible effect on British troops.

But that may prove optimistic.

The public - if it cares to read the documents - is now offered a far more revealing and unglossed version of the ugly nature of war in Afghanistan and it is unlikely to welcome what it sees.

The patience of electorates on both sides of the Atlantic with this increasingly unpopular conflict has just been shortened by another notch.
 

ajtr

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But the extension of Kayani's service exposed the weakness of the civilian government, which did not wish to grant him three more years. Analysts believe the government could not force Pakistan's military, which has ruled the country for most of its existence, to change its policy towards Afghanistan or investigate Afghan actions.
"We have a political establishment that does not have the authority to engage the military," said Ayesha Siddiqa, author of Military Inc. "We don't have the mean to know how deeply the agency (ISI) was involved. All intelligence agencies have contacts."The leaks put pressure on Kayani, tell him what the Americans want him to do. But he also faces pressure from the rest of the [Pakistani] military high command. He is being embarrassed in front of his generals. He's caught in the middle."Pakistan's critics have consistently questioned whether the country is ally or foe in the battle in Afghanistan. The truth appears, to many, that it has played both sides. Pakistan's military nurtured the Taliban in the mid-90s as a force to bring stability to Afghanistan and keep out the influence of its arch-enemy, India.
With uncertainly about the strength of the West's commitment to Afghanistan, the ISI has hedged its bets. "No amount of money, threats, incentives ... nothing can make the Pakistan army do something it doesn't see in its national interest," said Mosharraf Zaidi, a newspaper columnist based in Islamabad. "The Taliban are genetically an extension of the Pakistani security establishment. Those links have never been severed."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/pakistan-spy-isi-taliban-afghanistan
 

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Proof of war crimes in leaked papers?

LONDON: Thousands of leaked US military papers from Afghanistan contain evidence of possible war crimes that must be urgently investigated, the founder of the whistle-blowing website that published the papers said. WikiLeaks justified the expose saying its goal in disclosing secret documents is to reveal "unethical behavior" by governments and corporations.

Julian Assange, who set up WikiLeaks to expose perceived unethical behaviour by government and business, accused US forces of covering up civilian deaths and said sections of the collection of papers supported such accusations.
His website has published 76,000 military reports covering the Afghan conflict between 2004 and 2010, and has promised to release thousands more in the coming weeks. The US has criticized the publication of the material.

"It is up to a court to decide, clearly, whether something is in the end is a crime", Assange told a news conference in London. "That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material."

His website has held back a further 15,000 documents while it decides whether their publication had security implications.

Assange said the power of the material lay in its accumulation of small, previously unknown details from the war in Afghanistan, rather than any disclosure of one large event. "The real story of this material is that it is war, it is one damn thing after another. It is the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children," he said.

"It shows not only the severe incidents but the general squalor of war, from the death of individual children to major operations that kill hundreds," Assange added.

Since it was founded in 2006, WikiLeaks has exposed internal memos about the dumping of toxic material off the African coast, the membership rolls of a racist British party, and the US military's manual for operating its prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies," the organization's website says. "All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information."

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...imes-in-leaked-papers/articleshow/6220953.cms
 

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Pakistan rejects US intelligence reports of ISI links to Taliban

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Monday dismissed as "baseless" and "skewed" the leaked US intelligence reports that accused its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of supporting Taliban fighters.

Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit told the media that leaked reports were "far-fetched and skewed" and inconsistent with ground realities.

The leaked documents also betrayed a "lack of understanding of the complexities involved" in Pakistan's role in the war against terror, he said.

Pakistan's "constructive and positive role in Afghanistan" cannot be affected by such "baseless and self-serving reports", Basit said.

Pakistan's ambassador to Afghanistan Muhammad Sadiq said regardless of how the classified documents emerged, they cast the US administration in a poor light.

The whistleblowers' website Wikileaks yesterday made public 92,000 classified reports and cables from the US military, intelligence and civilian administration in Afghanistan.

Three publications were given access to the documents and have published a series of reports on the data.


The documents, dating from 2004 to 2009, contain allegations that the ISI was linked to a plot to assassinate Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the 2008 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

One report said the ISI had allegedly offered USD 15,000 to USD 30,000 for the killing of Indian construction workers in Afghanistan.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...-ISI-links-to-Taliban/articleshow/6220751.cms
 

ajtr

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Leaks hint at level of damage from Pakistan's double role

July 27, 2010
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LONG BEFORE the leak of 92,000 field reports from the war in Afghanistan, American officials understood the dual role of Pakistan, an ostensible US ally that provides sanctuary to the Taliban insurgents and has long been suspected of giving them other aid as well. But the reports offer more concrete evidence that Pakistan is playing a double game, and that contact between Taliban leaders and some Pakistani intelligence officials, far from being a mere hindrance, is a fundamental obstacle to the war effort. The Obama administration must demand more than just promises from Pakistan that it will cut ties with the insurgents.


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The documents come via Wikileaks, an organization that seeks to unearth and publish secret material. Some of the information in certain reports appears incomplete or inaccurate, but so far no one has disputed the authenticity of the material, which documents the grinding frustrations of those fighting to support a weak Afghan government that is being undermined by a supposed US ally. A telling indictment of Islamabad's two-faced role was the response to the leaks by its ambassador to the United States: The documents, Husain Haqqani said, "do not reflect the current on-ground realities.''

That might be true — the most recent reports are from last December. But in the past nine months Pakistan has not mounted a major offense against Afghan insurgents hiding out in Pakistani border areas, nor have US officials reacted to this week's damning leaks with any evidence that Pakistan has recently cut all ties with the Taliban.

The United States is loath to endanger its relationship with Islamabad, both because many supplies to US forces in Afghanistan go through Pakistan and because Pakistan has turned a blind eye to US drone attacks on Al Qaeda operatives living in Pakistan. But the United States cannot hope to prevail in its goal of making the Kabul government capable of holding its own against the Taliban if the insurgents have undercover allies in Islamabad.

The Obama administration should turn the leaks' release to its advantage. The reports should bolster US demands that Pakistan, recipient of $1 billion in annual US aid, stop working with the Taliban and start helping to stabilize Afghanistan.
 

dineshchaturvedi

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Actually both USA and Pakistan are in Samp Chachondar situation, Pakistan with Taliban and USA with Pakistan. "Na Nigla jaye na ugla jayee"
 

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the only superpower and the only superfool countrty in the world.....uncle USA/sam.....!!:emot15:
 

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Afghanistan war logs: Iran's covert operations in Afghanistan

Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan, according to classified US military intelligence reports contained in the war logs.

The secret "threat reports", mostly comprising raw data provided by Afghan spies and paid informants, cannot be corroborated individually. Even if the claims are accurate, it is unclear whether the activities they describe took place with the full knowledge of Tehran or are the work of hardline elements of the semi-autonomous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ideological sympathisers of the Taliban, arms smugglers or criminal gangs.

The Iranian government has repeatedly denied accusations that it is aiding militants fighting to oust President Hamid Karzai's pro-western government. It blames the presence of western forces for Afghanistan's instability.

Summaries of classified diplomatic cables produced by the US embassy in Kabul, contained in the war logs, reveal high-level concern about Tehran's growing political influence in Afghanistan. Senior US and Afghan officials appear at a loss over how to counter Iran's alleged bribery and manipulation of opposition parties and MPs whom Afghan government officials dismiss as Tehran's "puppets".

If the war logs are to be believed, Iranian involvement in Afghanistan has steadily widened from 2004 to today, amid record levels of military and civilian casualties and spreading violence.

A threat report originated by Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) headquarters in February 2005, covering Regional Command South, classified secret, says for example that Taliban leaders and former officials of the Taliban government toppled by the US in 2001 are planning a series of attacks in Helmand and Uruzgan provinces.

"This joint group currently resides in Iran. The group consists of eight main leaders, all of whom travel with seven bodyguards," the report says. "The leaders travel into Afghanistan to recruit soldiers "¦ Initially, the joint group will attack NGOs and GOA [government of Afghanistan] officials "¦ If these attacks are successful, they will start to attack US forces. The group will use hit-and-run tactics using AK-47 assault rifles and IEDs."

In addition, the report claims: "The Iranian government has offered each member of the group 100,000 rupees ($1,740) for any Afghan soldier killed and 200,000 rupees ($3,481) for any government official."

In January 2005 it is reported that Iranian intelligence has delivered 10 million Afghanis ($212,000) to a location on Iran's border. In the language of the war logs, "Iranian intelligence" usually appears to be a reference to Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Islami – the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

"The money was transferred to a 1990s model white Toyota Corolla station wagon "¦ hidden with various foodstuffs. The Corolla was occupied by four members of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin [HIG] terrorist organisation [the al-Qaida-allied militia led by the former mujahideen leader and notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar]. The money was transported to an unknown location," it is claimed.

The war logs refer to other covert Iranian or Iranian-backed activities. Whether they carry official blessing is unclear. In June 2006 it is reported that two Iranian "secret service" officers have arrived in Syahgerd village in Parwan province with false Afghan identities. The two have been previously spotted in Kabul. Their cover names are provided. Abdul Jalil is about 37 and has a "short black beard"; Ahmaddin is about 25, "tall, white complexion, long hair and brown eyes".

The report, sourced to "humint" (human intelligence), continues: "These two Iranians are tasked to instigate local Afghan people into making propaganda against the Afghan government authorities and CF [coalition forces] members. Also they are helping HIG and Taliban members in carrying out terrorist attacks against the Afghan governmental authorities and CF members, especially against the American forces." No evidence is offered to corroborate this statement.

This report also claims: "In Birjand, Iran, there is an important base where Iranian officials train Taliban and HIG members. From that location they use [sic] to send to Afghanistan explosive devices and vehicles ready to be used as SVBIEDs [suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices]."

This is not the first time Iranian links to IEDs and suicide bombings have been alleged. In May 2006, a report from "Source NY-9013" claims Hekmatyar's men are equipping 200 vehicles to deliver IEDs after having bought the cars in Pakistan and Iran. "HIG members in Pakistan provide the remote control devices for these cars." In April, 2008, the Taliban are said to have received Iranian-made parts for 20 remote-controlled IEDs to be used against the British in Sangin.

If the war logs intelligence is to be believed, Iran is also ready to host Taliban leaders and their men, to offer treatment if they are injured in the fighting and act as a conduit for foreign insurgents anxious to join the fray. A report marked secret, and dated September 2005 , lists a number of Taliban commanders who have gathered in Mashhad, Iran, supposedly to plan future attacks. Another in October 2006 claims Iranians have "provided support on the ground by organising transports for injured people [meaning Taliban fighters] to Tehran". No corroboration is offered.

In March 2009 military intelligence reports that a party of more than 100 Afghan and foreign-born Taliban, including 15 Chechen fighters, have moved from Iran into Afghanistan with the intention of launching suicide attacks. In May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, the then US and Nato commander, appears to refer specifically to this intelligence finding. "The training [of insurgents] that we have seen occurs inside Iran with fighters moving inside Iran," he said.

If some of the more creative reports are to be believed, Iranian subversion also extends to alleged plans to slip poison into the tea of Afghan government officials, supposedly a tidier method of assassination than suicide bombs; and the fomenting of political unrest in the relatively stable northern provinces.

Summaries of US embassy diplomatic cables and situation assessments contained and distributed through the war logs offer firmer ground than some of the raw intelligence data, given that they are evidently written by American officials and represent an official record, or official evaluation, of high-level meetings.

The cables reveal deep concerns among the western allies and Karzai's government about Tehran's parallel attempt to extend its political leverage in Afghanistan, in part by allegedly proffering lavish bribes.

The cables include accounts of consultations between British Foreign Office officials and senior US counterparts such as Eliot Cohen, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's then special regional representative, the Pentagon's Eric Edelman, and former US ambassador to Kabul Ronald Neumann. They discuss, among other things, how best to handle Karzai and promote national reconciliation without talking to the Taliban.

"Over the past several months Iran has taken a series of steps to expand and deepen its influence," says a secret cable sourced to the US embassy in Kabul and written in May 2007 by CSTC-A DCG for Pol-Mil Affairs [combined security transition command deputy commanding general for political and military affairs]. The cable cites the creation of the opposition National Front and National Unity Council, which it claims are under Iranian influence.

These worries notwithstanding, the cables also reflect the Afghan government's continuing perception that it must maintain friendly relations with Iran, in order to "marginalise" pro-Iranian groups in the country but also because of its own chronic weakness.

A "non-combat event" intelligence report dated April 2007 says that "the [Afghan] ministry of foreign affairs [MFA] wants to keep the issue of the Iranian-made weapons recently found in Kandahar under the radar screen in the lead-up to the visit of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Afghanistan. According to MFA, President Karzai supports the plan to avoid additional friction with Afghanistan's neighbours". Anxious to avoid more problems with Karzai, the US apparently agrees to play along.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/iran-backing-taliban-alqaida-afghanistan
 

sandeepdg

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As if the involvement of Pakistan was not enough in the mess that is "Afghanistan", now the reports clearly show that Iran is another party to the same dirty game !!
 

sandeepdg

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Afghanistan war logs: US covered up fatal Taliban missile strike on Chinook

The US military covered up a reported surface-to-air missile strike by the Taliban that shot down a Chinook helicopter over Helmand in 2007 and killed seven soldiers, including a British military photographer, the war logs show.

The strike on the twin-rotor helicopter shows the Taliban enjoyed sophisticated anti-aircraft capabilities earlier than previously thought, casting new light on the battle for the skies over Afghanistan.

Hundreds of files detail the efforts of insurgents, who have no aircraft, to shoot down western warplanes. The war logs detail at least 10 near-misses by missiles in four years against coalition aircraft, one while refuelling at 11,000ft and another involving a suspected Stinger missile of the kind supplied by the CIA to Afghan rebels in the 1980s.

But if American and British commanders were worried about the missile threat, they downplayed it in public – to the extent of ignoring their own pilots' testimony. The CH-47 Chinook was shot down on 30 May 2007 after dropping troops at the strategic Kajaki dam in Helmand where the British were leading an anti-Taliban drive. Witnesses reported that a missile struck the left rear engine of the aircraft, causing it to burst into flames and nosedive into the ground. All on board died, including 28-year-old Corporal Mike Gilyeat of the Royal Military Police.

Later that day Nato and US officials suggested the helicopter, codenamed Flipper, had been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade – effectively, a lucky hit. "It's not impossible for small-arms fire to bring down a helicopter," Nato spokesman Major John Thomas told Reuters in Kabul. A US official said it had "probably been brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade [RPG]".

But US pilot logs show they were certain the missile was not an RPG and was most likely a Manpad – the military term for a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. "Witness statements from Chalk 3 [another aircraft] suggest Flipper was struck by Manpad," it reads.

Those fears were confirmed by two Apache attack helicopters hovering over the crash site that came under fire from more missiles, twice in 30 minutes. Both missiles missed, and the pilots subsequently reported that they were "not an RPG" but a "probable first-generation MANPAD".

"Clearly the Taliban were attempting to down an Apache after downing the CH-47," it read.

The crash and its handling highlight steadily escalating US worries amid a stream of intelligence reports, also captured in the files, that suggest the Taliban were being supplied with missiles from Iran and Pakistan.

One internal report in September 2005 warned that Taliban commanders in Zabul and Kandahar provinces had acquired missiles they called "number two Stinger", for about $1,000 (£650) each. Nine months later came the first of at least 10 near-miss reports.

In June 2006 a Black Hawk medevac helicopter came under fire 25 miles from Kandahar. The missile changed course after the American crew launched six diversionary flares. "The crew chief saw only the smoke trail due to evasive maneuvering but determined that the missile was a type of MANPAD," the subsequent report read – the second Manpad attack that month.

In June 2007, shortly after the American Chinook was shot down in Kajaki, a British Chinook had a close shave when its missile warning system activated 6,000ft over Helmand. "The crew looked out their window and observed a projectile with a white-grey tight spiral smoke trail rising from their 7 o'clock, climbing through their level and exploding 2000ft 3000ft above and 0.5-1nm [nautical miles] ahead of the aircraft," it read.

"The airburst was described as a dark grey cloud. All crew members heard a loud bang and the projectile passed within 50ft of the aircraft."

A month later a C-130 aircraft was refueling 11,000ft over Nimroz province when a crew member spotted a "bright flash" followed by a second flash 2 nautical miles away. "A corkscrew smoke trale [sic] was observed and the aircraft dispensed flares" just before projectiles streaked past the plane, read the assessment.

The anti-aircraft missile threat has a strong historical resonance in Afghanistan. CIA-supplied Stingers punched dozens of Soviet Hind helicopters from the skies in the 1980s, and were considered to have played a key role in forcing the Soviets to abandon the country in 1989.

Western worries that the phenomenon could be repeated in this war have made surface-to-air missiles a favourite topic among intelligence informers, whose unconfirmed accounts of meddling foreign powers stuff the files.

As fighting intensified in April 2007 one unidentified source told an American officer that seven Manpads purchased by Iran from Algeria had been "clandestinely transported from Mashhad in Iran across the border into Afghanistan". Other reports, also unconfirmed, accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence of supplying weapons or missile-trainers to the Taliban.

More concretely, the files contain first-hand accounts of Afghan tribesmen slipping into US bases offering to sell their private stock of missiles. In one instance four elders from Balkh, near Mazar-i-Sharif, arrived with a clutch of blurry photographs of missiles. "Their motivation is monetary gain," the report notes.

The Americans were particularly interested in retrieving unused Stingers from the stockpile of up to 2,000 distributed in the 1980s. One report from Jowzjan in 2005 said an Afghan intelligence chief was authorised to pay $5,000 for older SA-7 missiles and $15,000 for a Stinger. "The NDS [National Directorate of Security] had been ordered to buy all they can acquire, to stop them falling into OMF [opposing military force] hands," it says.

Military experts say many Stingers may no longer be operational – due to drained batteries, for instance – but on at least one occasion US troops feared they were under fire from their own weapons. A Black Hawk helicopter leaving an airbase in Paktika province in July 2007 came under fire from two missiles that crew members believed were Stingers. It was a "probable Stinger due to flight characteristics, the smoke trail going straight up, then turn towards aircraft and lack of cork screws".

The assessment was provided by a crew member who said he had previously operated the Stinger system. It is not recorded whether his assessment was later confirmed.

Another eye-catching intelligence report from January 2009 says an Iranian agent, Hussein Razza, had arrived in Marjah in Helmand carrying four Stingers. There have been no reports since of aircraft being shot down in Marjah, where British and American troops launched a major offensive last February.

But for all the worries about Manpads and Stingers, the Taliban's most potent weapon against US aircraft was a carefully aimed RPG. In June 2005 a Taliban rocket shot down a Chinook in Kunar, killing all 16 special forces troops on board. Another RPG strike in 2007 forced a Black Hawk in Wardak province to crash-land.

As fighting surged in the runup to the last election in August 2009, one report noted 32 RPG attacks against aircraft across Afghanistan in the previous month. "RPGs remain the most lethal weapon system used in theatre, accounting for the majority of A/C [aircraft] losses," it said.

But some missile attacks remained a mystery. In August 2007 two Harrier jets flying at 270mph were circling a target when "an unidentified rocket" passed between them, leaving a thick smoke trail that soared above 21,000ft and took three minutes to dissipate. Task Force Pegasus, the US army aviation command, was puzzled. "The signature reported by the crew does not match any known weapon in Afghanistan. Every MANPAD and known rockets burn out at half the height reported by the crew."
 

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Excerpt from the White House press briefing of July 26th dealing with the malign role of the Pakistan in fomenting Islamic Terrorism in Afghanistan disclosed by the release of classified US Intelligence documents by WikiLeaks:

Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, 7/26/2010
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
1:07 P.M. EDT "¦"¦"¦"¦"¦"¦..

Q Does the White House believe that the documents raise doubts about whether Pakistan is a reliable partner in fighting terrorism?

MR. GIBBS: Well, let's understand a few things about the documents. Based on what we've seen, I don't think that what is being reported hasn't in many ways been publicly discussed either by you all or by representatives of the U.S. government for quite some time. We have certainly known about safe havens in Pakistan; we have been concerned about civilian casualties for quite some time -- and on both of those aspects we've taken steps to make improvements.

I think just the last time General Petreaus testified in front of the Senate there was a fairly robust discussion about the historical relationships that have been had between the Taliban and Pakistan's intelligence services.

Q So no doubts about Pakistan's trustworthiness or reliability?

MR. GIBBS: No, no, look, I think the President was clear back in March of 2009 that there was no blank check for Pakistan, that Pakistan had to change the way it dealt with us, it had to make progress on safe havens. Look, it's in the interest of the Pakistanis because we certainly saw last year those extremists that enjoy the safe haven there turning their eye on innocent Pakistanis. That's why you've seen Pakistan make progress in moving against extremists in Swat and in South Waziristan.

But at the same time, even as they make progress, we understand that the status quo is not acceptable and that we have to continue moving this relationship in the right direction.
Q On the WikiLeaks, one of the questions that this raises is whether it makes sense for the United States to continue to give billions of dollars of aid to Pakistan if they are helping the Taliban. And I'm wondering if that's a concern and what you think.

MR. GIBBS: Well, again, as I said a minute ago, on March 27, 2009, the President said, "After years of mixed results we will not and cannot provide a blank check. Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders."

Again, I am not going to stand here on July the 26th and tell you that all is well. I will tell you that we have made progress in moving this relationship forward; in having the Pakistanis, as I said earlier, address the issue of safe havens, the issue of extremists operating in the country by undertaking operations, again, in Swat and in South Waziristan -- because over the course of the past more than year and a half, what the Pakistanis have found is that the extremists that once enjoyed complete save haven in parts of their country now threaten their country. So they've taken steps. We want to continue to work with them to take more steps.

We understand that we are in this region of the world because of what happened on 9/11; that ensuring that there is not a safe haven in Afghanistan by which attacks against this country and countries around the world can be planned. That's why we're there and that's why we're going to continue to make progress on this relationship.

Q A blank check is one thing, but is there enough progress there to justify the aid that is being given to them?

MR. GIBBS: Again, look, we -- I think it was -- even if you look at some of the comments the Secretary of State made just last week in Pakistan, our criticism has been relayed both publicly and privately and we will continue to do so in order to move this relationship forward.

Q And I know you're unhappy about the leak, but could you talk about how that part of the issue was characterized in the memos and whether you think it's accurate?

MR. GIBBS: Which –

Q In terms of Pakistan's role.

MR. GIBBS: Look, again, I would point you to -- as I said a minute ago, I don't know that what is being said or what is being reported isn't something that hasn't been discussed fairly publicly, again, by named U.S. officials and in many news stories. I mean, The New York Times had a story on this topic in March of 2009 written by the same authors.
Q You say the President is very concerned with this release, this breach of federal law. But is he concerned with evidence in these documents about civilian casualties, about cooperation between the Taliban and the ISI?

MR. GIBBS: Chip, let's be clear. Again, the statements that the President made in March of 2009 very much understand the complicating aspects of our relationship with both of these two countries, the existence of, as I said, historical relationships between the Taliban and Pakistani intelligence. And, look, during the recent debate about General McChrystal, remember a decent part of the Rolling Stone article discusses frustration within our own military about rules of engagement around civilian casualties.

So we're not trying to either conventionally -- through conventional wisdom trying to deflect anything. What I'm merely saying is that what has been, I think what is known, about our relationship and our efforts in both Afghanistan and Pakistan are not markedly changed by what is in these documents. In fact, I think if, again, you go back to March of 2009, what the President says, we are clearly taking steps to make progress in dealing with Pakistan's safe havens; certainly dealing with civilian casualties. We all know that in efforts like this to win hearts and minds, you're certainly not going to do that with innocent civilians caught tragically in the crossfire.
LINK
 

DaRk WaVe

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Pakistan decries Wikileak release of U.S. military documents on Afghan war


By Joshua Partlow and Karin Brulliard
Washington Post staff writers
Tuesday, July 27, 2010

KABUL -- Pakistani officials reacted angrily Monday to the publication of a trove of U.S. military documents that suggested Pakistan's spy agency collaborated with the Taliban, saying the United States is using their country as a scapegoat for its failing war.

Diplomats and officials dismissed the reports as rehashed falsehoods, but ones that could have damaging consequences for Pakistan's relations with the United States. Some expressed doubts about whether the United States could be trusted with sensitive information and questioned pledges of increased trust in Pakistan.

In a statement, the Pakistani government called the allegations, contained in more than 91,000 military documents leaked by the group Wikileaks.org to unveil $500 million worth of development projects, the first disbursement of a $7.5 billion, five-year aid package approved by Congress last year.

In Islamabad, Pakistan, a senior ISI official, speaking on the condition of anonymity according to agency custom, said it was still sifting through the documents. But the official said that the allegations did not sound new and that they appeared to contain no concrete evidence of ISI backing for the Afghan insurgency.

The official acknowledged, however, that some of the allegations sound "very damning" and could erode support in America for the U.S. alliance with Pakistan. If the CIA does not denounce the suggestions, the official said the ISI might need to reexamine its cooperation.

Pakistani officials dismissed the disclosures that their country's spies meet and coordinate attacks with Taliban leaders. Several officials and analysts suggested that the Obama administration is trying to exert pressure on their government or smear Pakistan's reputation.

Retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, a former Pakistani spy chief who was repeatedly implicated in the documents, also lashed out at the allegations that he aided the Taliban attacks. Gul is accused, among other things, of directing Pakistan-based militants to craft plans for strikes inside Afghanistan, including one meant as payback for the death of an al-Qaeda operative killed by a U.S. drone attack.

In an interview Monday, he said the leaked documents should prompt Pakistan to drop its alliance with the United States. The Americans are "facing defeat in Afghanistan and to cover that, they are coming up with false allegations against Pakistan," he said. "This is a pack of lies to malign [the] Pakistan army and the ISI."

Gul worked closely with the CIA's anti-Soviet campaign during his tenure from 1987 to 1989. Today, he is one of Pakistan's most strident critics of the United States and an unabashed supporter of Afghan insurgents. U.S. officials have long suspected him of retaining links to former mujaheddin such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The senior ISI official said Gul has no remaining ties to the ISI.

washingtonpost.com
 

DaRk WaVe

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US lawmaker says leaks paint 'outdated' Pakistan picture

WASHINGTON: A top White House ally in the US Congress warned Monday against judging Pakistan's role in the Afghan war by "outdated reports" in a massive cache of leaked Pentagon documents on the conflict.

"Some of these documents implicate Pakistan in aiding the Taliban and fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan," House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a Democrat, said in a statement.

"It is critical that we not use outdated reports to paint a picture of the cooperation of Pakistan in our efforts in Afghanistan," he stressed, adding that Pakistan had "significantly stepped up its fight against the Taliban."

"While we still have concerns about Pakistan's efforts against the Afghan Taliban, there is no doubt that there have been significant improvements in its overall effort," said Skelton.


The lawmaker also slammed the whistleblowing website Wikileaks for "recklessness" in making public the roughly 92,000 Pentagon files and field reports, billed as perhaps the largest leak in US military history.

"Our nation's secrets are classified for a reason, and the release of classified documents could put our national security-and the lives of our men and women in combat-at serious risk," Skelton said in a statement.

At the same time, Skelton said the "troubling" documents seemed to support his criticisms of the war effort since it began in late 2001, but insisted US President Barack Obama's troop "surge," announced in December 2009, would right the faltering campaign.

"Under the new counterinsurgency strategy implemented earlier this year, we now have the pieces in place to turn things around. These leaked reports pre-date our new strategy in Afghanistan and should not be used as a measure of success or a determining factor in our continued mission there," said Skelton. -AFP
 
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SATISH

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I just hope the US dosent leave with its job half done...that would become a nightmare to Iran and the CAR...directly involving the Russians.
 

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Afghanistan war logs: tensions increase after revelation of more leaked files

Tensions between the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan were further strained today after the leak of thousands of military documents about the Afghan war.

As members of the US Congress raised questions about Pakistan's alleged support for the Taliban, officials in Islamabad and Kabul also traded angry accusations on the same issue.

Further disclosures reveal more evidence of attempts by coalition commanders to cover up civilian casualties in the conflict.

The details emerge from more than 90,000 secret US military files, covering six years of the war, which caused a worldwide uproar when they were leaked yesterday.

The war logs show how a group of US marines who went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad in 2007 recorded false information about the incident, in which they killed 19 unarmed civilians and wounded a further 50.

In another case that year, the logs detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000lb bombs on a compound where they believed a "high-value individual" was hiding, after "ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area". A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died.

Other files in the secret archive reveal:

"¢ Coalition commanders received numerous intelligence reports about the whereabouts and activity of Osama bin Laden between 2004 and 2009, even though the CIA chief has said there has been no precise information about the al-Qaida leader since 2003.

"¢ The hopelessly ineffective attempts of US troops to win the "hearts and minds" of Afghans.

"¢ How a notorious criminal was appointed chief of police in the south-western province of Farrah.

Speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London yesterday, Julian Assange, of Wikileaks, the website which initially published the war logs, said: "It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime. That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material."

Four days after it was first approached by the Guardian, the British Ministry of Defence said it was still unable to give an account of two questionable clusters of civilian shootings by British troops detailed in the American logs.

They were alleged to have taken place in Kabul in a month in 2007 when a detachment of the Coldstream Guards was patrolling, and in the southern province of Helmand during a six-month tour of duty by Royal Marine commandos at the end of 2008. The MoD said: "We are currently examining our records to establish the facts in the alleged civilian casualty incidents raised."

The UK foreign secretary, William Hague, told the BBC that the leaked documents could "poison the atmosphere in Afghanistan" but at the same time insisted they would not affect British troops:

Writing in the Guardian, Eric Joyce, a former soldier and parliamentary aide to the former Labour defence secretary Bob Ainsworth, described the leaked documents as a "game changer", adding that some of the questions raised were "stunning in their enormity".

The former Liberal Democrat leader and spokesman on defence and foreign affairs, Sir Menzies Campbell, said the documents showed how difficult it would be for UK troops to leave Afghanistan in 2015, the date set by David Cameron.

"The leaked documents show just how awesome the task will be to bring the Afghan police and army to a condition where they can be responsible for security," said Campbell.

Amnesty International called for reforms to the recording of civilian casualties after a row broke out over an incident in which the Afghan government says 45 villagers were killed in a rocket attack. The coalition disputes that it was responsible. Amnesty called on Nato "to provide a clear, unified system of accounting for civilian casualties in Afghanistan".

Daniel Ellsberg compared the publication of the war logs to the Pentagon Papers, which he leaked to the New York Times in 1971. "The Pentagon Papers did not stop or even affect the war but affected public opinion a great deal. Are we really going to do better with another $300bn [spent on the war in Afghanistan] on more bombs, more special forces, more drones? The Taliban are not going to quit."

The director of the military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute, Professor Michael Clarke, said in London: "There is no doubt that the leaks are politically pretty damaging. The papers give an impression of a lack of military discrimination in how operations were conducted."

The Pentagon said it was conducting an investigation into whether information in the logs placed coalition forces or their informants in danger.

Last night President Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, claimed the logs published by the Wikileaks website posed "a very real threat" to US forces: "It's not the content "¦ there are names, there are operations, there are sources, all of that information out in the public domain has the potential to do harm."

The Guardian was allowed to investigate the logs for several weeks ahead of publication, along with the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel. The three have published excerpts from the documents which do not pose a risk to informants or military operations.
 
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hit&run

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Washington: Pakistan's obsession with India is leading it to "dig its own grave" as the ISI's "destructive role" now stands exposed in the wake of the revelations by classified intelligence documents, a leading US lawmaker has said.
"The ISI's attempt to distinguish good from bad militants will spin out of control. With its obsession with India, Pakistan is digging its own grave," Congressman Ed Royce said in the wake of WikiLeaks revelations.
"I've been speaking about the destructive role of Pakistan's ISI for many, many years. I've read this headline before," Royce, Co-Chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, said when asked about the WikiLeaks leakage which revealed that ISI continues to help and assist al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Reacting to the WikiLeaks posting of more than 92,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan, several Congressmen condemned the release of such secret documents but expressed concern over the continued links between ISI and the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
"These leaked documents, while troubling, appear to support what I was asserting for years: the war in Afghanistan was not going well, and we needed a real strategy for success," Senator Ike Skelton, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said.
"These leaked reports pre-date our new strategy in Afghanistan and should not be used as a measure of success or a determining factor in our continued mission there," he said.
The publication of highly-classified documents was deeply troubling and a serious breach of national security, Senator John McCain said, adding the source of the leak within the US government should face the full penalties of the law.
"Some of these documents reinforce a longstanding concern of mine about the supporting role of some Pakistani officials in the Afghan insurgency," Senator Carl Levin said.
Levin said he and Senator Jack Reed, during their recent visit to Islamabad, had strongly urged officials to take forceful action against militant networks using Pakistan as a base to attack Afghanistan and American troops.
"The materials which cover the period from 2004 to 2009 reflect the reality, recognised by everyone, that the insurgency was gaining momentum during these years while our coalition was losing ground," Senator Joe Lieberman said in a statement.
"We should give General Petraeus and our troops on the ground the time and support they need to succeed. Although we know that the path ahead is difficult, we also know that the consequences for our national security will be catastrophic if we abandon this effort and allow the Taliban and their allies to regain a safe haven in Afghanistan. That is the path back to 9/11," Lieberman said.
In particular, the documents highlight a fundamental strategic problem, which is that elements of the Pakistani security services have been complicit in the insurgency, Senator Russ Feingold said.
"That, combined with competing agendas within the Afghan security forces, make it clear that there is no military solution in Afghanistan."
On February 2, during an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Feingold had asked the then Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair about Pakistan's "continued support to militant proxies and about the assistance provided by some of those groups to al-Qaeda".
Senator Kit Bond, Vice Chairman of the Senate Intellignce Committee, said it is shocking that any American, much less someone in the Pentagon, would betray his country and possibly put soldiers at risk by leaking information on the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
"The damage to our national security caused by leaks like this won't stop until we see more perpetrators in orange jump suits," he added.

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/pakistan-digging-its-own-grave-us-congressman/127570-2.html?from=tn
 

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