WikiLeaks Revelations
- Thread starter bhramos
- Start date
DaRk WaVe
Regular Member
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 809
- Likes
- 97
The ISI: America's favourite scapegoat
First, a freelance reporter brings down America's top general in Afghanistan with a damning article in the iconic pop-culture Rolling Stone magazine. Now, thousands of classified military documents are published on to the Internet through a website called WikiLeaks allegedly through a US soldier who had a change in conscience.
Both stories have the makings of a future Hollywood film. But most importantly, both stories reveal an Afghan War that is going very wrong. Sadly, coverage in the US, of arguably the two biggest scoops of the year, can only be described as constrained. Most media moguls chose to shy away from the real story.
Michael Hastings article, "the Runaway General" did not turn in to a larger discussion of a failing war like he intended, but became a mission to prove no general is above the civilian leadership in the US.
And now in the WikiLeaks story, instead of focusing on the many war crimes, cover-ups and evidence of an occupation mentality in Afghanistan, most American news networks and publications have seized the opportunity to either berate WikiLeaks for divulging secret information or to point fingers at Pakistan by pulling headlines like, "Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan," and editorials like "Pakistan's double game."
And those were just the christening headings given by the New York Times, one of the three news organizations and the only US publication that was given a two-week jump-start to analyse the 92,000 leaked US intelligence reports from the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009.
The Guardian, one of the two European papers that was also given early access to the classified documents decided to headline, "Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation".
In a press conference in London, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks said, "I am often asked this question: what is the most single damning revelation, what is the thing that is easily capturable, the single event, the single personality, the single mass killing? But that is not the real story of this material, the real story of the material is that it is war. It is one damn thing, after the other."
The WikiLeaks founder himself focused on the number of civilian casualties cited in the documents and said there is evidence of "war crimes" throughout the reports.
Click for an excerpt of the press conference.
Much in line with Assange's tragic narrative, the leaked documents depict a disturbing fudging of facts and unreported killing of hundreds of civilians. Two incidents in particular have been highlighted by the Guardian.
One involves a group of US marines, who went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad in 2007. They recorded false information about the incident, in which they actually killed 19 unarmed civilians and wounded another 50.
In another case the same year, documents 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.
But the NYT chose not to run with these stories as their lead, instead they pulled out the ISI card, in their Editorial "Pakistan's Double Game".
""¦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"¦..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."
Here's a bit of the Guardian coverage that takes some of the weight off the ISI:
"At least 180 files contain allegations of dirty tricks by the powerful agency with accounts of undercover agents training suicide bombers, bundles of money slipping across the border and covert support for a range of sensational plots including the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, attacks on Nato warplanes and even poisoning western troops' beer supply. 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."
I can understand why the US is trying to deflect off the greater tragedy that the leaked reports reveal – a failing war that has had its fair share of civilian causalities – especially at a time when the American public is increasingly growing wary of the distant war as they tighten their belts in a weak jobless economy. But I wish they chose a scapegoat other than the Pakistani ISI.
The truth is the ISI is doing what spy agencies do. Their actions are no different from the CIA. The only difference is that the ISI acts in what it perceives to be Pakistan's interest, while the CIA acts in what it perceives to be America's interest.
Now what is American interest? Wiping out the Taliban.
What is Pakistan's interest? Surviving.
Here's the bitter impending truth that Pakistan and the ISI have to deal with. When the US and Nato forces eventually leave Afghanistan, it will not be because all of the Taliban have been wiped out. It will simply be because they just aren't worth the fight anymore. Most analysts agree that the Taliban are much stronger than they were in 2001. Fighting the allied forces the last nine years has left the tribal warriors better equipped, trained, united and organised. If anything, before bidding farewell to Afghanistan, the US will have captured some big guns among the ranks. The Taliban and their many foot soldiers and commanders will still be around. Karzai's government, his bureaucracy, police force and Afghan army are not ready (and from the looks of it will never be ready) to deal with the Taliban. The ISI fears the dust from departing US boots would have barely settled before Afghanistan is back in Taliban hands.
And Pakistan will be left with yet another hostile neighbor. So is it really in Pakistan's interest to alienate and declare an all-out war with the Taliban? By keeping its ties with the saner elements of the Taliban, the ISI is simply trying to prevent a painful déjà vu from the '80s coupled with the possibility of very bitter enemy, on its eastern border.
The sad thing is the US understands these realities; in fact many elements within the US establishment are for talks with the "good" Taliban. And that is a course the Obama administration has been toying with since it put its new Afghan policy into motion in 2009. The leaked documents only cover incidents up until January 2009, which is before the new Obama policy was put in place. In fact, in an interview with ABC news last year, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State emphasized the need to sort out the real enemy. She said,"not every Taliban is Al Qaeda."
So why put pressure on ISI, when they might just be doing what the US wants them to do in the first place–divide and conquer the Taliban?
Because when push comes to shove, and things start looking bleak in Afghanistan, especially to the American public, the US immediately points its finger at its "ostensible" ally.
Pakistan has become America's favorite scapegoat.
First, a freelance reporter brings down America's top general in Afghanistan with a damning article in the iconic pop-culture Rolling Stone magazine. Now, thousands of classified military documents are published on to the Internet through a website called WikiLeaks allegedly through a US soldier who had a change in conscience.
Both stories have the makings of a future Hollywood film. But most importantly, both stories reveal an Afghan War that is going very wrong. Sadly, coverage in the US, of arguably the two biggest scoops of the year, can only be described as constrained. Most media moguls chose to shy away from the real story.
Michael Hastings article, "the Runaway General" did not turn in to a larger discussion of a failing war like he intended, but became a mission to prove no general is above the civilian leadership in the US.
And now in the WikiLeaks story, instead of focusing on the many war crimes, cover-ups and evidence of an occupation mentality in Afghanistan, most American news networks and publications have seized the opportunity to either berate WikiLeaks for divulging secret information or to point fingers at Pakistan by pulling headlines like, "Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan," and editorials like "Pakistan's double game."
And those were just the christening headings given by the New York Times, one of the three news organizations and the only US publication that was given a two-week jump-start to analyse the 92,000 leaked US intelligence reports from the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009.
The Guardian, one of the two European papers that was also given early access to the classified documents decided to headline, "Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation".
In a press conference in London, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks said, "I am often asked this question: what is the most single damning revelation, what is the thing that is easily capturable, the single event, the single personality, the single mass killing? But that is not the real story of this material, the real story of the material is that it is war. It is one damn thing, after the other."
The WikiLeaks founder himself focused on the number of civilian casualties cited in the documents and said there is evidence of "war crimes" throughout the reports.
Click for an excerpt of the press conference.
Much in line with Assange's tragic narrative, the leaked documents depict a disturbing fudging of facts and unreported killing of hundreds of civilians. Two incidents in particular have been highlighted by the Guardian.
One involves a group of US marines, who went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad in 2007. They recorded false information about the incident, in which they actually killed 19 unarmed civilians and wounded another 50.
In another case the same year, documents 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.
But the NYT chose not to run with these stories as their lead, instead they pulled out the ISI card, in their Editorial "Pakistan's Double Game".
""¦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"¦..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."
Here's a bit of the Guardian coverage that takes some of the weight off the ISI:
"At least 180 files contain allegations of dirty tricks by the powerful agency with accounts of undercover agents training suicide bombers, bundles of money slipping across the border and covert support for a range of sensational plots including the assassination of President Hamid Karzai, attacks on Nato warplanes and even poisoning western troops' beer supply. 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."
I can understand why the US is trying to deflect off the greater tragedy that the leaked reports reveal – a failing war that has had its fair share of civilian causalities – especially at a time when the American public is increasingly growing wary of the distant war as they tighten their belts in a weak jobless economy. But I wish they chose a scapegoat other than the Pakistani ISI.
The truth is the ISI is doing what spy agencies do. Their actions are no different from the CIA. The only difference is that the ISI acts in what it perceives to be Pakistan's interest, while the CIA acts in what it perceives to be America's interest.
Now what is American interest? Wiping out the Taliban.
What is Pakistan's interest? Surviving.
Here's the bitter impending truth that Pakistan and the ISI have to deal with. When the US and Nato forces eventually leave Afghanistan, it will not be because all of the Taliban have been wiped out. It will simply be because they just aren't worth the fight anymore. Most analysts agree that the Taliban are much stronger than they were in 2001. Fighting the allied forces the last nine years has left the tribal warriors better equipped, trained, united and organised. If anything, before bidding farewell to Afghanistan, the US will have captured some big guns among the ranks. The Taliban and their many foot soldiers and commanders will still be around. Karzai's government, his bureaucracy, police force and Afghan army are not ready (and from the looks of it will never be ready) to deal with the Taliban. The ISI fears the dust from departing US boots would have barely settled before Afghanistan is back in Taliban hands.
And Pakistan will be left with yet another hostile neighbor. So is it really in Pakistan's interest to alienate and declare an all-out war with the Taliban? By keeping its ties with the saner elements of the Taliban, the ISI is simply trying to prevent a painful déjà vu from the '80s coupled with the possibility of very bitter enemy, on its eastern border.
The sad thing is the US understands these realities; in fact many elements within the US establishment are for talks with the "good" Taliban. And that is a course the Obama administration has been toying with since it put its new Afghan policy into motion in 2009. The leaked documents only cover incidents up until January 2009, which is before the new Obama policy was put in place. In fact, in an interview with ABC news last year, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State emphasized the need to sort out the real enemy. She said,"not every Taliban is Al Qaeda."
So why put pressure on ISI, when they might just be doing what the US wants them to do in the first place–divide and conquer the Taliban?
Because when push comes to shove, and things start looking bleak in Afghanistan, especially to the American public, the US immediately points its finger at its "ostensible" ally.
Pakistan has become America's favorite scapegoat.
SHASH2K2
New Member
- Joined
- May 10, 2010
- Messages
- 5,711
- Likes
- 730
Top US military commander has said that any links, if they exists, between Pakistan's military intelligence and militant outfits were "completely unacceptable".
The chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said Washington remained concerned about Pakistan's intelligence service ISI amid disclosures by online whistle blower Wikileaks that the spy agency continues to maintain links with Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Mullen said he was appalled at the leaks of 92,000 documents of the Defence department's war in Afghanistan by the online whistle blower. According to the Pentagon, he told reporters on his way to Iraq that "any links which exists with terrorists organisations, whether it is Haqqani or LeT, it's just completely unacceptable", The US commander said that leaked documents on the war did not call into question the US strategy or relations with Pakistan.
He said information about Pakistan's activities and other details were discussed during the major war strategy review last year.
"The information I have so far seen in the documents. There is nothing in there that was not reviewed or considered in the strategic review," he said.
His comments came as voices grow louder against giving Pakistan a 'blank cheque' in the war on terror and media reports quoting Obama administration officials said now that the disclosures were in open "in some ways it makes it easier for us to tell Pakistan they have to help us", the New York Times reported.
"The documents seem to lay out rich new details of connection between the Taliban and other militant groups and Pakistan's main spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI," the paper said.
It quoted several administration officials privately expressing the view that they might be able to use leaks and their description of a sometimes duplicitous Pakistani ally to pressurise Islamabad to cooperate more fully with the US on counter-terrorism.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/106899/World/links-between-isi-and-militant-outfits-unacceptable-mullen.html
The chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said Washington remained concerned about Pakistan's intelligence service ISI amid disclosures by online whistle blower Wikileaks that the spy agency continues to maintain links with Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Mullen said he was appalled at the leaks of 92,000 documents of the Defence department's war in Afghanistan by the online whistle blower. According to the Pentagon, he told reporters on his way to Iraq that "any links which exists with terrorists organisations, whether it is Haqqani or LeT, it's just completely unacceptable", The US commander said that leaked documents on the war did not call into question the US strategy or relations with Pakistan.
He said information about Pakistan's activities and other details were discussed during the major war strategy review last year.
"The information I have so far seen in the documents. There is nothing in there that was not reviewed or considered in the strategic review," he said.
His comments came as voices grow louder against giving Pakistan a 'blank cheque' in the war on terror and media reports quoting Obama administration officials said now that the disclosures were in open "in some ways it makes it easier for us to tell Pakistan they have to help us", the New York Times reported.
"The documents seem to lay out rich new details of connection between the Taliban and other militant groups and Pakistan's main spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI," the paper said.
It quoted several administration officials privately expressing the view that they might be able to use leaks and their description of a sometimes duplicitous Pakistani ally to pressurise Islamabad to cooperate more fully with the US on counter-terrorism.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/106899/World/links-between-isi-and-militant-outfits-unacceptable-mullen.html
Afghanistan questions U.S. silence over Pakistan's role
KABUL (Reuters) – The United States has pursued a contradictory policy with regard to the Afghan war by ignoring Pakistan's role in the insurgency, the Afghan government said on Tuesday, following the leak of U.S. military documents.
The classified documents released by the organization, WikiLeaks, show current and former members of Pakistan's spy agency were actively collaborating with the Taliban in plotting attacks in Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, in its first reaction to the leak, Afghanistan's National Security Council said the United States had failed to attack the patrons and supporters of the Taliban hiding in Pakistan throughout the nine-year conflict.
"With regret ... our allies did not show necessary attention about the external support for the international terrorists ... for the regional stability and global security," the council said in a statement.
Afghanistan has long blamed Pakistan for meddling in its affairs, accusing the neighbor of plotting attacks to destabilize it. Islamabad, which has had longstanding ties to the Taliban, denies involvement in the insurgency and says it is a victim of militancy itself.
The National Security Council did not name Pakistan, but said use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy was a dangerous gamble and had to be stopped.
"Having a contradictory and vague policy against the forces who use terrorism as a tool for interference and sabotage against others, have had devastating results," it said.
At a news conference later on Tuesday, council head Rangeen Dadfar Spanta was more specific, questioning the billions of dollars in cash aid and military assistance Washington has given to Pakistan over the years.
"It is really not justifiable for the Afghan people that how come you give to one country $11 billion or more as help for reconstruction or strengthen its security or defensive forces, but from other side the very forces train terrorism," he said.
He warned that the war would not succeed unless there was a review of Afghan policy by Washington that focuses on Taliban sanctuaries and bases in Pakistan and their supporters.
Those supporting militants should be punished rather than be treated as an ally, said Spanta, who served for years as foreign minister in President Hamid Karzai's government until last year.
The White House has condemned the WikiLeaks disclosures, saying it could threaten national security. Pakistan said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible.
The documents numbering tens of thousands also said that coalition troops had killed hundreds of Afghan civilians in unreported incidents and often sought to cover up the mistakes that have shaken up confidence in the war effort among many in Afghanistan.
On Monday, the Afghan government said it had spoken in private and in public meetings with its Western allies about the need to stop civilian deaths.
"In the past nine years (since Taliban's fall) thousands of citizens of Afghanistan and from our ally countries have become victimised," it said.
Is it scapegoat or is it sacrificial lamb :happy_2:
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2009
- Messages
- 24,324
- Likes
- 11,757
The forum world and also the strategic community has been talking about Pakistans duplicity with the terrorists for the last 9 years. India has always known that Pakistan has been a state sponsor of terror. Just that the world refused to listen and still doesnt apart from the usual lip service it pays on Indian concerns. Indians are not one bit surprised with what th leaks have shown. It just gives documentary evidence from western sources what is common knowledge in India.
Worse still is that these leaks are not going to do anything to the way US showers Pak with praise and money till its there in Astan. What suckers the US govt has been made by the Pakistanis.
Worse still is that these leaks are not going to do anything to the way US showers Pak with praise and money till its there in Astan. What suckers the US govt has been made by the Pakistanis.
SHASH2K2
New Member
- Joined
- May 10, 2010
- Messages
- 5,711
- Likes
- 730
Its not a scapegoat. Its a RAM and its best to kill him to save other people.
It sucks but sure does it works between usa and pak.OTOH even if india suck up to pak it will get more brazen with more attacks so in india's case the big stick works with pakistan.
DaRk WaVe
Regular Member
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 809
- Likes
- 97
Pentagon: Leaked Afghan reports are not top-secret
(CNN) -- Pentagon officials studying leaked documents about the war in Afghanistan have not yet found anything top secret among them, a Defense Department spokesman told CNN Tuesday.
"From what we have seen so far the documents are at the 'secret' level," Col. David Lapan said. That's not a very high level of classification.
Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not yet looked at all the more than 75,000 documents published on the WikiLeaks.org website on Sunday.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered the Foreign Ministry and National Security Council to study the vast cache of documents as well, Karzai's office said Tuesday.
Journalists and other observers around the world spent Monday poring over the papers which the whistle-blower website says exhaustively chronicle the twists, turns and horror of the 9-year-old war in Afghanistan.
The documents, which date from between 2004 and January 2010, are divided into more than 100 categories. Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan's ties to the Taliban.
The "direct fire" category accounts for the largest number -- at 16,293 reports -- while "graffiti," "mugging," "narcotics" and "threat" each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website's founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.
He said on CNN's "Larry King Live" that the first-hand accounts represent "the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years," through the military's own raw data -- numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.
"We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks," Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.
Assange said some events listed in the reports are "very suspicious," such as reports of skirmishes in which "a lot of people are killed, but no people taken prisoner and no people left wounded."
"In the end, it will take a court to really look at the full range of evidence to decide if a crime has occurred," he said. But earlier, he noted, "This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban."
CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon has denied they are what WikiLeaks claims they are.
The White House Monday condemned the release of the documents as "a breach of federal law," but simultaneously dismissed them as old news.
"I don't think that what is being reported hasn't in many ways been publicly discussed -- whether by you or by representatives of the U.S. government -- for quite some time," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. But he said an investigation into the source of the leak had begun by last week.
"There is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security," he said.
The reports tend to be filled with jargon, like this one that describes a border incident from September 4, 2005:
"The Pakistan LNO [liaison officer] reports that ANA [Afghan National Army] troops are massing and threatening the PAKMIL [Pakistani military] 12km NE of FB Lwara [Firebase Lwara, a U.S. military base] ..."
And that's not even the entire first sentence.
Assange said WikiLeaks withheld some documents that dealt with activity by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, "and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups."
But he said the documents reveal the "squalor" of war, uncovering how a number of small incidents have added up to huge numbers of civilian deaths.
"What we haven't seen previously is all those individual deaths," he said. "We've seen just the number. And like Stalin said, 'One man's death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.' So, we've seen the statistic."
The release of the documents is being called the biggest intelligence leak in history, drawing comparison to the disclosure of the Vietnam-era "Pentagon Papers."
"There hasn't been an unauthorized disclosure of this magnitude in 39 years," said Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime Pentagon official who leaked that multiple-volume secret history of the conflict.
Others disagreed with the comparison. Bruce Riedel, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at
the Brookings Institution, noted that the Pentagon Papers were part of a document prepared for U.S. leaders that analyzed how the United States got into Vietnam, "which assessed successes and failures in a comprehensive way."
"This is really the raw material of the war -- unassessed, raw, fragmentary data that I think in each case, you have to be very careful how much of a larger picture you can conclude from these fragments and snippets," Riedel said.
And CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen said the Pentagon Papers revealed "a huge disconnect between what the American government was saying officially and internally."
"Here, all sorts of American government officials are saying the war is not going very well. No one is disagreeing with that," Bergen said.
But Ellsberg said the documents, "low-level as they are," raise the question of whether the United States has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and whether it should continue to pursue the war.
"They do give us the sense of the pattern of failure, of stalemate, and why we're stalemated -- civilian casualties that recruit for the Taliban ... and raise the question of what we're doing there," he said.
The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks were carried out by the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda, which operated from bases in Afghanistan with the approval of the Taliban, the fundamentalist movement that ruled most of the country at the time.
The invasion swiftly toppled the Taliban, but al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped and remain at large. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is now battling its own Taliban insurgency as well.
Gary Berntsen, who led a CIA commando team in Afghanistan in the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said on CNN's "Rick's List" that the documents "probably are accurate." But Berntsen, now a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, said the reports are likely to be a propaganda coup for the Taliban and "sap morale in the United States."
"It does paint a bleak picture on this," he said. "But it doesn't mean this fight is less worth fighting and trying to make progress on."
And Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put "in context" and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, "is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general."
"There are American troops in harm's way getting shot and killed," Rieckhoff said. "If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back."
Once the jargon of the report is pierced, the stories can be eye-opening.
In a February 5, 2008, incident, Task Force Helmand reported that an Afghan National Police officer -- referred to as ANP -- was in a public shower smoking hashish when two members of the Afghan National Army walked in.
"ANP felt threatened and a fire fight occurred," the report says. "The ANP fled the scene and was later shot. ANP and ANA commanders held meetings to contain the incident."
An October 15, 2007, incident describes an Afghan National Police highway officer's shooting of another Afghan National Police officer in the shoulder and leg, not seriously. "The shooting was not accidental the policeman had been arguing with each other for a few days," the report said.
In a March 19, 2005, incident, "FOB [Forward Operating Base] Cobra received a local national boy who had received a gunshot wound to his stomach," another report said.
"He had been shot during a green-on-green [Afghans attacking Afghans] firefight in Jangalak Village. The boy and his older brother had heard shooting outside of their compound and went outside to check it out, at which point the boy was shot in the stomach. Another brother had also been shot and died at the compound. No adult males had accompanied the brothers, and only the older brother of the injured boy could provide information on the incident. The older brother explained that men in the village were having personal disputes with each other and had then began shooting at each ones' compounds."
Assange said the documents were "legitimate," but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.
"We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn't mean the CIA is telling the truth," he said.
He said his website is not campaigning against the war.
"WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. ... It should continue in a just way if its to continue at all," he said.
He declined to tell CNN where he got the documents, and said the identities of his sources are less important than the authenticity of the documents they provide. And he denied that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger, and said the documents' publication will help people make informed decisions about whether to support the war.
Assange, an Australian, said the site is coming under "significant pressure" from authorities, including several recent "surveillance events." But he said that due to the response the latest release has received, "It is not politically feasible to interfere with us at a high level."
(CNN) -- Pentagon officials studying leaked documents about the war in Afghanistan have not yet found anything top secret among them, a Defense Department spokesman told CNN Tuesday.
"From what we have seen so far the documents are at the 'secret' level," Col. David Lapan said. That's not a very high level of classification.
Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not yet looked at all the more than 75,000 documents published on the WikiLeaks.org website on Sunday.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered the Foreign Ministry and National Security Council to study the vast cache of documents as well, Karzai's office said Tuesday.
Journalists and other observers around the world spent Monday poring over the papers which the whistle-blower website says exhaustively chronicle the twists, turns and horror of the 9-year-old war in Afghanistan.
The documents, which date from between 2004 and January 2010, are divided into more than 100 categories. Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan's ties to the Taliban.
The "direct fire" category accounts for the largest number -- at 16,293 reports -- while "graffiti," "mugging," "narcotics" and "threat" each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website's founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.
He said on CNN's "Larry King Live" that the first-hand accounts represent "the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years," through the military's own raw data -- numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.
"We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks," Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.
Assange said some events listed in the reports are "very suspicious," such as reports of skirmishes in which "a lot of people are killed, but no people taken prisoner and no people left wounded."
"In the end, it will take a court to really look at the full range of evidence to decide if a crime has occurred," he said. But earlier, he noted, "This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban."
CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon has denied they are what WikiLeaks claims they are.
The White House Monday condemned the release of the documents as "a breach of federal law," but simultaneously dismissed them as old news.
"I don't think that what is being reported hasn't in many ways been publicly discussed -- whether by you or by representatives of the U.S. government -- for quite some time," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. But he said an investigation into the source of the leak had begun by last week.
"There is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security," he said.
The reports tend to be filled with jargon, like this one that describes a border incident from September 4, 2005:
"The Pakistan LNO [liaison officer] reports that ANA [Afghan National Army] troops are massing and threatening the PAKMIL [Pakistani military] 12km NE of FB Lwara [Firebase Lwara, a U.S. military base] ..."
And that's not even the entire first sentence.
Assange said WikiLeaks withheld some documents that dealt with activity by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, "and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups."
But he said the documents reveal the "squalor" of war, uncovering how a number of small incidents have added up to huge numbers of civilian deaths.
"What we haven't seen previously is all those individual deaths," he said. "We've seen just the number. And like Stalin said, 'One man's death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.' So, we've seen the statistic."
The release of the documents is being called the biggest intelligence leak in history, drawing comparison to the disclosure of the Vietnam-era "Pentagon Papers."
"There hasn't been an unauthorized disclosure of this magnitude in 39 years," said Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime Pentagon official who leaked that multiple-volume secret history of the conflict.
Others disagreed with the comparison. Bruce Riedel, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at
the Brookings Institution, noted that the Pentagon Papers were part of a document prepared for U.S. leaders that analyzed how the United States got into Vietnam, "which assessed successes and failures in a comprehensive way."
"This is really the raw material of the war -- unassessed, raw, fragmentary data that I think in each case, you have to be very careful how much of a larger picture you can conclude from these fragments and snippets," Riedel said.
And CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen said the Pentagon Papers revealed "a huge disconnect between what the American government was saying officially and internally."
"Here, all sorts of American government officials are saying the war is not going very well. No one is disagreeing with that," Bergen said.
But Ellsberg said the documents, "low-level as they are," raise the question of whether the United States has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and whether it should continue to pursue the war.
"They do give us the sense of the pattern of failure, of stalemate, and why we're stalemated -- civilian casualties that recruit for the Taliban ... and raise the question of what we're doing there," he said.
The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks were carried out by the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda, which operated from bases in Afghanistan with the approval of the Taliban, the fundamentalist movement that ruled most of the country at the time.
The invasion swiftly toppled the Taliban, but al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped and remain at large. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is now battling its own Taliban insurgency as well.
Gary Berntsen, who led a CIA commando team in Afghanistan in the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said on CNN's "Rick's List" that the documents "probably are accurate." But Berntsen, now a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, said the reports are likely to be a propaganda coup for the Taliban and "sap morale in the United States."
"It does paint a bleak picture on this," he said. "But it doesn't mean this fight is less worth fighting and trying to make progress on."
And Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put "in context" and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, "is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general."
"There are American troops in harm's way getting shot and killed," Rieckhoff said. "If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back."
Once the jargon of the report is pierced, the stories can be eye-opening.
In a February 5, 2008, incident, Task Force Helmand reported that an Afghan National Police officer -- referred to as ANP -- was in a public shower smoking hashish when two members of the Afghan National Army walked in.
"ANP felt threatened and a fire fight occurred," the report says. "The ANP fled the scene and was later shot. ANP and ANA commanders held meetings to contain the incident."
An October 15, 2007, incident describes an Afghan National Police highway officer's shooting of another Afghan National Police officer in the shoulder and leg, not seriously. "The shooting was not accidental the policeman had been arguing with each other for a few days," the report said.
In a March 19, 2005, incident, "FOB [Forward Operating Base] Cobra received a local national boy who had received a gunshot wound to his stomach," another report said.
"He had been shot during a green-on-green [Afghans attacking Afghans] firefight in Jangalak Village. The boy and his older brother had heard shooting outside of their compound and went outside to check it out, at which point the boy was shot in the stomach. Another brother had also been shot and died at the compound. No adult males had accompanied the brothers, and only the older brother of the injured boy could provide information on the incident. The older brother explained that men in the village were having personal disputes with each other and had then began shooting at each ones' compounds."
Assange said the documents were "legitimate," but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.
"We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn't mean the CIA is telling the truth," he said.
He said his website is not campaigning against the war.
"WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. ... It should continue in a just way if its to continue at all," he said.
He declined to tell CNN where he got the documents, and said the identities of his sources are less important than the authenticity of the documents they provide. And he denied that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger, and said the documents' publication will help people make informed decisions about whether to support the war.
Assange, an Australian, said the site is coming under "significant pressure" from authorities, including several recent "surveillance events." But he said that due to the response the latest release has received, "It is not politically feasible to interfere with us at a high level."
DaRk WaVe
Regular Member
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 809
- Likes
- 97
for the time being, its scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb can be suicidal plus you all know the blast radius of nukes :happy_2:
lets wait & see..
Neil
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2010
- Messages
- 2,818
- Likes
- 3,546
WikiLeaks and the Afghan War
On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.
Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior U.S. and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.
The WikiLeaks
At first glance, it is difficult to imagine a single database in which such a diverse range of intelligence was stored, or the existence of a single individual cleared to see such diverse intelligence stored across multiple databases and able to collect, collate and transmit the intelligence without detection. Intriguingly, all of what has been released so far has been not-so-sensitive material rated secret or below. The Times reports that Gul's name appears all over the documents, yet very few documents have been released in the current batch, and it is very hard to imagine intelligence on Gul and his organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, being classified as only secret. So, this was either low-grade material hyped by the media, or there is material reviewed by the selected newspapers but not yet made public. Still, what was released and what the Times discussed is consistent with what most thought was happening in Afghanistan.
The obvious comparison is to the Pentagon Papers, commissioned by the Defense Department to gather lessons from the Vietnam War and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the Times during the Nixon administration. Many people worked on the Pentagon Papers, each of whom was focused on part of it and few of whom would have had access to all of it.
Ellsberg did not give the Times the supporting documentation; he gave it the finished product. By contrast, in the WikiLeaks case, someone managed to access a lot of information that would seem to have been contained in many different places. If this was an unauthorized leak, then it had to have involved a massive failure in security. Certainly, the culprit should be known by now and his arrest should have been announced. And certainly, the gathering of such diverse material in one place accessible to one or even a few people who could move it without detection is odd.
Like the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. Apart from the charge that the Johnson administration contrived the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of what the Pentagon Papers contained was generally known. Most striking about the Pentagon Papers was not how much surprising material they contained, but how little. Certainly, they contradicted the official line on the war, but there were few, including supporters of the war, who were buying the official line anyway.
In the case of the WikiLeaks, what is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.
The view of the Taliban as a capable fighting force is, of course, widespread. If they weren't a capable fighting force, then the United States would not be having so much trouble defeating them. The WikiLeaks seem to contain two strategically significant claims, however. The first is that the Taliban is a more sophisticated fighting force than has been generally believed. An example is the claim that Taliban fighters have used man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) against U.S. aircraft. This claim matters in a number of ways. First, it indicates that the Taliban are using technologies similar to those used against the Soviets. Second, it raises the question of where the Taliban are getting them — they certainly don't manufacture MANPADS themselves.
If they have obtained advanced technologies, this would have significance on the battlefield. For example, if reasonably modern MANPADS were to be deployed in numbers, the use of American airpower would either need to be further constrained or higher attrition rates accepted. Thus far, only first- and second-generation MANPADS without Infrared Counter-Countermeasures (which are more dangerous) appear to have been encountered, and not with decisive or prohibitive effectiveness. But in any event, this doesn't change the fundamental character of the war.
Supply Lines and Sanctuaries
What it does raise is the question of supply lines and sanctuaries. The most important charge contained in the leaks is about Pakistan. The WikiLeaks contain documents that charge that the Pakistanis are providing both supplies and sanctuary to Taliban fighters while objecting to American forces entering Pakistan to clean out the sanctuaries and are unwilling or unable to carry out that operation by themselves (as they have continued to do in North Waziristan).
Just as important, the documents charge that the ISI has continued to maintain liaison and support for the Taliban in spite of claims by the Pakistani government that pro-Taliban officers had been cleaned out of the ISI years ago. The document charges that Gul, the director-general of the ISI from 1987 to 1989, still operates in Pakistan, informally serving the ISI and helping give the ISI plausible deniability.
Though startling, the charge that Islamabad is protecting and sustaining forces fighting and killing Americans is not a new one. When the United States halted operations in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, U.S. policy was to turn over operations in Afghanistan to Pakistan. U.S. strategy was to use Islamist militants to fight the Soviets and to use Pakistani liaisons through the ISI to supply and coordinate with them. When the Soviets and Americans left Afghanistan, the ISI struggled to install a government composed of its allies until the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. The ISI's relationship with the Taliban — which in many ways are the heirs to the anti-Soviet mujahideen — is widely known. In my book, "America's Secret War," I discussed both this issue and the role of Gul. These documents claim that this relationship remains intact. Apart from Pakistani denials, U.S. officials and military officers frequently made this charge off the record, and on the record occasionally. The leaks on this score are interesting, but they will shock only those who didn't pay attention or who want to be shocked.
Let's step back and consider the conflict dispassionately. The United States forced the Taliban from power. It never defeated the Taliban nor did it make a serious effort to do so, as that would require massive resources the United States doesn't have. Afghanistan is a secondary issue for the United States, especially since al Qaeda has established bases in a number of other countries, particularly Pakistan, making the occupation of Afghanistan irrelevant to fighting al Qaeda.
For Pakistan, however, Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic interest. The region's main ethnic group, the Pashtun, stretch across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Moreover, were a hostile force present in Afghanistan, as one was during the Soviet occupation, Pakistan would face threats in the west as well as the challenge posed by India in the east. For Pakistan, an Afghanistan under Pakistani influence or at least a benign Afghanistan is a matter of overriding strategic importance.
It is therefore irrational to expect the Pakistanis to halt collaboration with the force that they expect to be a major part of the government of Afghanistan when the United States leaves. The Pakistanis never expected the United States to maintain a presence in Afghanistan permanently. They understood that Afghanistan was a means toward an end, and not an end in itself. They understood this under George W. Bush. They understand it even more clearly under Barack Obama, who made withdrawal a policy goal.
Given that they don't expect the Taliban to be defeated, and given that they are not interested in chaos in Afghanistan, it follows that they will maintain close relations with and support for the Taliban. Given that the United States is powerful and is Pakistan's only lever against India, the Pakistanis will not make this their public policy, however. The United States has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.
This is duplicitous only if you close your eyes to the Pakistani reality, which the Americans never did. There was ample evidence, as the WikiLeaks show, of covert ISI ties to the Taliban. The Americans knew they couldn't break those ties. They settled for what support Pakistan could give them while constantly pressing them harder and harder until genuine fears in Washington emerged that Pakistan could destabilize altogether. Since a stable Pakistan is more important to the United States than a victory in Afghanistan — which it wasn't going to get anyway — the United States released pressure and increased aid. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants.
The WikiLeaks seem to show that like sausage-making, one should never look too closely at how wars are fought, particularly coalition warfare. Even the strongest alliances, such as that between the United States and the United Kingdom in World War II, are fraught with deceit and dissension. London was fighting to save its empire, an end Washington was hostile to; much intrigue ensued. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance is not nearly as trusting. The United States is fighting to deny al Qaeda a base in Afghanistan while Pakistan is fighting to secure its western frontier and its internal stability. These are very different ends that have very different levels of urgency.
The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isn't going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they won't be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.
The Pakistanis also know that the Americans are leaving and that the Taliban or a coalition including the Taliban will be in charge of Afghanistan when the Americans leave. They will make certain that they maintain good relations with the Taliban. They will deny that they are doing this because they want no impediments to a good relationship with the United States before or after it leaves Afghanistan. They need a patron to secure their interests against India. Since the United States wants neither an India outside a balance of power nor China taking the role of Pakistan's patron, it follows that the risk the United States will bear grudges is small. And given that, the Pakistanis can live with Washington knowing that one Pakistani hand is helping the Americans while another helps the Taliban. Power, interest and reality define the relations between nations, and different factions inside nations frequently have different agendas and work against each other.
The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.
We are left with the mystery of who compiled all of these documents and who had access to them with enough time and facilities to transmit them to the outside world in a blatant and sustained breach of protocol. The image we have is of an unidentified individual or small group working to get a "shocking truth" out to the public, only the truth is not shocking — it is what was known all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/2010...GIRtitle&elq=68d69c34ead04f30abfb4a513f8fc5a5
On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.
Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior U.S. and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.
The WikiLeaks
At first glance, it is difficult to imagine a single database in which such a diverse range of intelligence was stored, or the existence of a single individual cleared to see such diverse intelligence stored across multiple databases and able to collect, collate and transmit the intelligence without detection. Intriguingly, all of what has been released so far has been not-so-sensitive material rated secret or below. The Times reports that Gul's name appears all over the documents, yet very few documents have been released in the current batch, and it is very hard to imagine intelligence on Gul and his organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, being classified as only secret. So, this was either low-grade material hyped by the media, or there is material reviewed by the selected newspapers but not yet made public. Still, what was released and what the Times discussed is consistent with what most thought was happening in Afghanistan.
The obvious comparison is to the Pentagon Papers, commissioned by the Defense Department to gather lessons from the Vietnam War and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the Times during the Nixon administration. Many people worked on the Pentagon Papers, each of whom was focused on part of it and few of whom would have had access to all of it.
Ellsberg did not give the Times the supporting documentation; he gave it the finished product. By contrast, in the WikiLeaks case, someone managed to access a lot of information that would seem to have been contained in many different places. If this was an unauthorized leak, then it had to have involved a massive failure in security. Certainly, the culprit should be known by now and his arrest should have been announced. And certainly, the gathering of such diverse material in one place accessible to one or even a few people who could move it without detection is odd.
Like the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. Apart from the charge that the Johnson administration contrived the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of what the Pentagon Papers contained was generally known. Most striking about the Pentagon Papers was not how much surprising material they contained, but how little. Certainly, they contradicted the official line on the war, but there were few, including supporters of the war, who were buying the official line anyway.
In the case of the WikiLeaks, what is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.
The view of the Taliban as a capable fighting force is, of course, widespread. If they weren't a capable fighting force, then the United States would not be having so much trouble defeating them. The WikiLeaks seem to contain two strategically significant claims, however. The first is that the Taliban is a more sophisticated fighting force than has been generally believed. An example is the claim that Taliban fighters have used man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) against U.S. aircraft. This claim matters in a number of ways. First, it indicates that the Taliban are using technologies similar to those used against the Soviets. Second, it raises the question of where the Taliban are getting them — they certainly don't manufacture MANPADS themselves.
If they have obtained advanced technologies, this would have significance on the battlefield. For example, if reasonably modern MANPADS were to be deployed in numbers, the use of American airpower would either need to be further constrained or higher attrition rates accepted. Thus far, only first- and second-generation MANPADS without Infrared Counter-Countermeasures (which are more dangerous) appear to have been encountered, and not with decisive or prohibitive effectiveness. But in any event, this doesn't change the fundamental character of the war.
Supply Lines and Sanctuaries
What it does raise is the question of supply lines and sanctuaries. The most important charge contained in the leaks is about Pakistan. The WikiLeaks contain documents that charge that the Pakistanis are providing both supplies and sanctuary to Taliban fighters while objecting to American forces entering Pakistan to clean out the sanctuaries and are unwilling or unable to carry out that operation by themselves (as they have continued to do in North Waziristan).
Just as important, the documents charge that the ISI has continued to maintain liaison and support for the Taliban in spite of claims by the Pakistani government that pro-Taliban officers had been cleaned out of the ISI years ago. The document charges that Gul, the director-general of the ISI from 1987 to 1989, still operates in Pakistan, informally serving the ISI and helping give the ISI plausible deniability.
Though startling, the charge that Islamabad is protecting and sustaining forces fighting and killing Americans is not a new one. When the United States halted operations in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, U.S. policy was to turn over operations in Afghanistan to Pakistan. U.S. strategy was to use Islamist militants to fight the Soviets and to use Pakistani liaisons through the ISI to supply and coordinate with them. When the Soviets and Americans left Afghanistan, the ISI struggled to install a government composed of its allies until the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. The ISI's relationship with the Taliban — which in many ways are the heirs to the anti-Soviet mujahideen — is widely known. In my book, "America's Secret War," I discussed both this issue and the role of Gul. These documents claim that this relationship remains intact. Apart from Pakistani denials, U.S. officials and military officers frequently made this charge off the record, and on the record occasionally. The leaks on this score are interesting, but they will shock only those who didn't pay attention or who want to be shocked.
Let's step back and consider the conflict dispassionately. The United States forced the Taliban from power. It never defeated the Taliban nor did it make a serious effort to do so, as that would require massive resources the United States doesn't have. Afghanistan is a secondary issue for the United States, especially since al Qaeda has established bases in a number of other countries, particularly Pakistan, making the occupation of Afghanistan irrelevant to fighting al Qaeda.
For Pakistan, however, Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic interest. The region's main ethnic group, the Pashtun, stretch across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Moreover, were a hostile force present in Afghanistan, as one was during the Soviet occupation, Pakistan would face threats in the west as well as the challenge posed by India in the east. For Pakistan, an Afghanistan under Pakistani influence or at least a benign Afghanistan is a matter of overriding strategic importance.
It is therefore irrational to expect the Pakistanis to halt collaboration with the force that they expect to be a major part of the government of Afghanistan when the United States leaves. The Pakistanis never expected the United States to maintain a presence in Afghanistan permanently. They understood that Afghanistan was a means toward an end, and not an end in itself. They understood this under George W. Bush. They understand it even more clearly under Barack Obama, who made withdrawal a policy goal.
Given that they don't expect the Taliban to be defeated, and given that they are not interested in chaos in Afghanistan, it follows that they will maintain close relations with and support for the Taliban. Given that the United States is powerful and is Pakistan's only lever against India, the Pakistanis will not make this their public policy, however. The United States has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.
This is duplicitous only if you close your eyes to the Pakistani reality, which the Americans never did. There was ample evidence, as the WikiLeaks show, of covert ISI ties to the Taliban. The Americans knew they couldn't break those ties. They settled for what support Pakistan could give them while constantly pressing them harder and harder until genuine fears in Washington emerged that Pakistan could destabilize altogether. Since a stable Pakistan is more important to the United States than a victory in Afghanistan — which it wasn't going to get anyway — the United States released pressure and increased aid. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants.
The WikiLeaks seem to show that like sausage-making, one should never look too closely at how wars are fought, particularly coalition warfare. Even the strongest alliances, such as that between the United States and the United Kingdom in World War II, are fraught with deceit and dissension. London was fighting to save its empire, an end Washington was hostile to; much intrigue ensued. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance is not nearly as trusting. The United States is fighting to deny al Qaeda a base in Afghanistan while Pakistan is fighting to secure its western frontier and its internal stability. These are very different ends that have very different levels of urgency.
The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isn't going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they won't be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.
The Pakistanis also know that the Americans are leaving and that the Taliban or a coalition including the Taliban will be in charge of Afghanistan when the Americans leave. They will make certain that they maintain good relations with the Taliban. They will deny that they are doing this because they want no impediments to a good relationship with the United States before or after it leaves Afghanistan. They need a patron to secure their interests against India. Since the United States wants neither an India outside a balance of power nor China taking the role of Pakistan's patron, it follows that the risk the United States will bear grudges is small. And given that, the Pakistanis can live with Washington knowing that one Pakistani hand is helping the Americans while another helps the Taliban. Power, interest and reality define the relations between nations, and different factions inside nations frequently have different agendas and work against each other.
The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.
We are left with the mystery of who compiled all of these documents and who had access to them with enough time and facilities to transmit them to the outside world in a blatant and sustained breach of protocol. The image we have is of an unidentified individual or small group working to get a "shocking truth" out to the public, only the truth is not shocking — it is what was known all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/2010...GIRtitle&elq=68d69c34ead04f30abfb4a513f8fc5a5
if suicide bomber presses button in Banigala say 12kt fission device, it will hardly cover even 20% of isb.:happy_2:
DaRk WaVe
Regular Member
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 809
- Likes
- 97
Isb, too small, even a dirty bomb will be enough for my city
But on a serious note, dust will settle down & nothing much will happen, all these reports don't say anything new in case of ISI, US has been putting blame on ISI for quite long time now but you all know ISI drifting away from US means a bigger mess. Its a mutual partnership but plagued with distrust, americans don't seems to be going any where (apparently) so this 'tuu tuu mae mae' will continue as long as ISAF is there in A-stan but this wiki leak seems to be something that was orchestrated for some additional gaols
DaRk WaVe
Regular Member
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 809
- Likes
- 97
'Guardian' Reporter Weighs In On Leaked Records : NPR
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
More this hour on the trove of leaked intelligence reports published by the group WikiLeaks yesterday. Most of the world has just had a to start sifting through the documents, but three publications - The New York Times, the German magazine Der Spiegel and the British daily The Guardian - were granted early access.
We turn now to one of the reporters who's had a chance to look at the documents in detail.
SIEGEL: Declan Walsh is the Pakistan and Afghanistan correspondent for The Guardian. He's in London, where he has been reporting on these documents.
And, Declan Walsh, there's so much here. I'd just like to ask you about a couple of treads. One of them, the allegation that Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, is in collusion with the Taliban. What new evidence is there of that in these documents, and how strong is that evidence?
Mr. DECLAN WALSH (Pakistan and Afghanistan Correspondent, The Guardian): The real question is how seriously one should take all of these reports. A lot of them appear to have been sourced either from Afghan intelligence officials, who have traditionally a long history of rivalry with the ISI, or from paid informers. So, really, it's very difficult to know from this great mass of reports and some very sensational allegations.
Some of the reports say that the ISI plotted to kill the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, that they smuggled weapons and ammunition and surface-to-air missiles into Afghanistan in order to shoot down NATO warplanes.
So these are very serious allegations, but there's such a mass of them that it's hard to know which ones one should actually take seriously, and that's the problem within this group.
SIEGEL: Now, I also read an account in one of these documents of Osama bin Laden holding regular meetings as recently as 2006 with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and others in attendance to plan suicide bombings, 2006. CIA Director Leon Panetta has said the last time the CIA had good intelligence on bin Laden's location was in the early 2000s. Does that suggest to you that what we read here in the 2006 threat report is information that the CIA probably does not regard as good intelligence?
Mr. WALSH: I think it probably does. And, you know, there's a number of references to Osama bin Laden. Again, a lot of them seemed to be barely credible. The meeting that you're referring to was described as a meeting with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban chief, Mullah Omar, and his two deputies, Mullah Baradar and Mullah Dadullah.
And now, most experts believe that it's highly unlikely that even if those four individuals were inclined to meet that they actually would sit in the same room if only for security reasons.
There's a number of other references to Osama bin Laden in the files. In one, there's a report that he flew to North Korea with an insurgent leader in 2005 in order to shop for rockets to use against the coalition in Afghanistan. There are also reports that an insurgent commander had created a poison powder that would be added to the food of coalition soldiers, and he called that Osama Kapa.
SIEGEL: In that particular report, the detail of the person who was distributing this powder not only has his name and height, the appearance of his eyes, the address of his store, which he locks whenever the police are in, remarkable detail about the person who allegedly was distributing Osama Kapa.
Mr. WALSH: That's right. Experts who have looked over these reports for us have told us that, paradoxically, sometimes the more detail you see in a report, the less likely it is to be true.
People who are giving this information are creating very elaborate stories in order to affect an air of plausibility. Whereas in actual fact, you know, this just may not have been true at all.
SIEGEL: Which raises the question, I mean, is the quality of the information in this huge in line with its quantity? That is do you, as someone who covers Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan, do you find yourself having been immersed in all of this for weeks revising your view of what you cover or having some more detail, some dubious detail about what it is you write about?
Mr. WALSH: What these reports have provided is a greatly textured picture of the war from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground who are writing these reports. There are intelligence reports of greatly varied quality. Some appear to be good. A lot of them seem to be highly dubious.
On the other hand, the accounts of American soldiers' own lives, you know, of engagements with the Taliban, those appear to be relatively honest accounts, and they certainly provide some very striking details about the chaos of war, of the difficult decisions people have to make, of the misunderstandings that often have very serious consequences in places like Afghanistan.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
More this hour on the trove of leaked intelligence reports published by the group WikiLeaks yesterday. Most of the world has just had a to start sifting through the documents, but three publications - The New York Times, the German magazine Der Spiegel and the British daily The Guardian - were granted early access.
We turn now to one of the reporters who's had a chance to look at the documents in detail.
SIEGEL: Declan Walsh is the Pakistan and Afghanistan correspondent for The Guardian. He's in London, where he has been reporting on these documents.
And, Declan Walsh, there's so much here. I'd just like to ask you about a couple of treads. One of them, the allegation that Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, is in collusion with the Taliban. What new evidence is there of that in these documents, and how strong is that evidence?
Mr. DECLAN WALSH (Pakistan and Afghanistan Correspondent, The Guardian): The real question is how seriously one should take all of these reports. A lot of them appear to have been sourced either from Afghan intelligence officials, who have traditionally a long history of rivalry with the ISI, or from paid informers. So, really, it's very difficult to know from this great mass of reports and some very sensational allegations.
Some of the reports say that the ISI plotted to kill the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, that they smuggled weapons and ammunition and surface-to-air missiles into Afghanistan in order to shoot down NATO warplanes.
So these are very serious allegations, but there's such a mass of them that it's hard to know which ones one should actually take seriously, and that's the problem within this group.
SIEGEL: Now, I also read an account in one of these documents of Osama bin Laden holding regular meetings as recently as 2006 with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and others in attendance to plan suicide bombings, 2006. CIA Director Leon Panetta has said the last time the CIA had good intelligence on bin Laden's location was in the early 2000s. Does that suggest to you that what we read here in the 2006 threat report is information that the CIA probably does not regard as good intelligence?
Mr. WALSH: I think it probably does. And, you know, there's a number of references to Osama bin Laden. Again, a lot of them seemed to be barely credible. The meeting that you're referring to was described as a meeting with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban chief, Mullah Omar, and his two deputies, Mullah Baradar and Mullah Dadullah.
And now, most experts believe that it's highly unlikely that even if those four individuals were inclined to meet that they actually would sit in the same room if only for security reasons.
There's a number of other references to Osama bin Laden in the files. In one, there's a report that he flew to North Korea with an insurgent leader in 2005 in order to shop for rockets to use against the coalition in Afghanistan. There are also reports that an insurgent commander had created a poison powder that would be added to the food of coalition soldiers, and he called that Osama Kapa.
SIEGEL: In that particular report, the detail of the person who was distributing this powder not only has his name and height, the appearance of his eyes, the address of his store, which he locks whenever the police are in, remarkable detail about the person who allegedly was distributing Osama Kapa.
Mr. WALSH: That's right. Experts who have looked over these reports for us have told us that, paradoxically, sometimes the more detail you see in a report, the less likely it is to be true.
People who are giving this information are creating very elaborate stories in order to affect an air of plausibility. Whereas in actual fact, you know, this just may not have been true at all.
SIEGEL: Which raises the question, I mean, is the quality of the information in this huge in line with its quantity? That is do you, as someone who covers Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan, do you find yourself having been immersed in all of this for weeks revising your view of what you cover or having some more detail, some dubious detail about what it is you write about?
Mr. WALSH: What these reports have provided is a greatly textured picture of the war from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground who are writing these reports. There are intelligence reports of greatly varied quality. Some appear to be good. A lot of them seem to be highly dubious.
On the other hand, the accounts of American soldiers' own lives, you know, of engagements with the Taliban, those appear to be relatively honest accounts, and they certainly provide some very striking details about the chaos of war, of the difficult decisions people have to make, of the misunderstandings that often have very serious consequences in places like Afghanistan.
Last edited:
its a mutual partnership of perfidy on each other.As for wikileaks or say Matt Waldman's LSE report these things gonna be coming out into media as usual nothing new coz once the perceptions is made it becomes a stick to beat the dead horse.chikane ghare pe paani dalne wali baat huyee.
listened to it on radio.Seems like NYT is blowing hot. WaPo/npr/Guardian/Pentagon is blowing cold. The game continues.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/w...ressure_as_leak_energizes_war_critics/?page=1
Kerry under pressure as leak energizes war critics
The leak of classified documents that suggest the American-backed Pakistani government has been secretly helping the Taliban has intensified scrutiny of the policy of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, who has pushed for billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan as part of the Afghanistan war strategy.
Afghanistan questions U.S. silence over Pakistan's role
(Reuters) - The United States has pursued a contradictory policy with regard to the Afghan war by ignoring Pakistan's role in the insurgency, the Afghan government said on Tuesday, following the leak of U.S. military documents.
The classified documents released by the organization, WikiLeaks, show current and former members of Pakistan's spy agency were actively collaborating with the Taliban in plotting attacks in Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, in its first reaction to the leak, Afghanistan's National Security Council said the United States had failed to attack the patrons and supporters of the Taliban hiding in Pakistan throughout the nine-year conflict.
"With regret ... our allies did not show necessary attention about the external support for the international terrorists ... for the regional stability and global security," the council said in a statement.
Afghanistan has long blamed Pakistan for meddling in its affairs, accusing the neighbor of plotting attacks to destabilize it. Islamabad, which has had longstanding ties to the Taliban, denies involvement in the insurgency and says it is a victim of militancy itself.
The National Security Council did not name Pakistan, but said use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy was a dangerous gamble and had to be stopped.
"Having a contradictory and vague policy against the forces who use terrorism as a tool for interference and sabotage against others, have had devastating results," it said.
At a news conference later on Tuesday, council head Rangeen Dadfar Spanta was more specific, questioning the billions of dollars in cash aid and military assistance Washington has given to Pakistan over the years.
"It is really not justifiable for the Afghan people that how come you give to one country $11 billion or more as help for reconstruction or strengthen its security or defensive forces, but from other side the very forces train terrorism," he said.
He warned that the war would not succeed unless there was a review of Afghan policy by Washington that focuses on Taliban sanctuaries and bases in Pakistan and their supporters.
Those supporting militants should be punished rather than be treated as an ally, said Spanta, who served for years as foreign minister in President Hamid Karzai's government until last year.
The White House has condemned the WikiLeaks disclosures, saying it could threaten national security. Pakistan said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible.
The documents numbering tens of thousands also said that coalition troops had killed hundreds of Afghan civilians in unreported incidents and often sought to cover up the mistakes that have shaken up confidence in the war effort among many in Afghanistan.
On Monday, the Afghan government said it had spoken in private and in public meetings with its Western allies about the need to stop civilian deaths.
"In the past nine years (since Taliban's fall) thousands of citizens of Afghanistan and from our ally countries have become victimised," it said.
Kabul urges West to review Pakistan policy after leaks
By Sardar Ahmad (AFP) – 12 hours ago
KABUL — Afghanistan's national security adviser called on the West Tuesday to review policy towards Pakistan after leaked Pentagon documents pointed to Pakistani double-dealing in the Afghan war.
Kabul has consistently accused Pakistan's intelligence agency of supporting Taliban insurgents -- including masterminding attacks against Afghan and US-led targets in the country. Islamabad denies the claims.
Kabul said information contained in documents released on whistleblowing website WikiLeaks on Sunday backed its long-held position.
Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, President Hamid Karzai's national security advisor, took issue with US aid to Pakistan, which last year secured a 7.5 billion-dollar non-military package from Congress spread over the next five years.
"It's not justifiable for Afghans to see a country given 11 billion dollars in reconstruction aid and to support its security forces, and then see those same forces training terrorists," said Spanta.
"At least we Afghan politicians are not able to explain this to the Afghan people," he said, calling on US and NATO troops to deal with insurgents before they infiltrated Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in Pakistan.
A secretive US drone war routinely targets Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked groups holed up in Pakistan's lawless border districts with Afghanistan.
Karzai has ordered Spanta and Afghan foreign minister Zalmai Rasoul to "study the leaked US documents," a statement from the president's office said.
Afghanistan's National Security Council (NSC) said the leaked Pentagon documents showed the country's Western allies had an incoherent approach to fighting a Taliban insurgency, now in its ninth year and at its deadliest.
"Having a contradictory and unclear policy towards those forces who have used terrorism as a tool of interference and destruction against others has had disastrous consequences," it said in a statement, referring to Pakistan.
The NSC said thousands of Afghans and citizens of allied countries had been killed in the last nine years and called on its international supporters to formulate a united policy to deal with militancy.
The leaked documents dating from 2004 to 2009 were released to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and Germany's Der Spiegel by WikiLeaks.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the US military's top officer, denied that information in the documents questioned US strategy or relations with Pakistan.
Mullen said he was "appalled" at the leak, but that the information had been taken into account during a strategy review last year and that Washington made clear to Islamabad its concerns about possible links to militant groups.
US relations with Pakistan have "dramatically" improved in the past year and Pakistan has launched offensives against Islamist extremists in the northwest, involving tens of thousands of troops, Mullen said.
According to the New York Times, Pakistani agents and Taliban representatives meet regularly in secret "to organise networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders".
Although relations between Kabul and Islamabad have also improved since a civilian government replaced Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf in 2008, Afghan and NATO commanders say Taliban leaders operate from Pakistan.
The leaked files also indicated that civilian deaths have been covered up, and that Iran is funding Taliban militants eight years after the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the radical Islamist regime from power.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied those charges in an interview, telling CBS television: "We do not support any group".
Civilian casualties are an extremely sensitive issue in Afghanistan, with leaders fearing that the deaths of ordinary Afghans in military operation encourage people to sympathise with the Taliban.
NATO and Afghan authorities are investigating a rocket strike that Karzai said killed 52 civilians in a southern Taliban stronghold last Friday. NATO has denied involvement.
