United States documents leak of the War in Afghanistan

"The War Logs" are internal U.S. military logs of the War in Afghanistan that were made public on Wikileaks on 25 July 2010. Wikileaks had previously made the logs, some 91,731 documents, covering the period between January 2004 and December 2009, available to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel which published reports per previous agreement on that same day. Most of the documents were classified as "secret", which according to the New York Times is a "relatively low level of classification" for confidential documents. The leak, which is considered to be one of the largest in US military history, revealed information on the deaths of civilians, increased Taliban attacks, and alleged involvement by Pakistan and Iran in the insurgency.

The New York Times described the war logs as "a six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war". The Guardian called the material "one of the biggest leaks in US military history ... a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency". Der Spiegel wrote that "the editors in chief of SPIEGEL, the New York Times and the Guardian have agreed that they would not publish especially sensitive information in the classified material" and that they were "unanimous in their belief that there is a justified public interest in the material".

Content

Pakistani and Iranian support for the Taliban

According to Der Spiegel, "the documents clearly show that the Pakistani intelligence agency is the most important accomplice the Taliban has outside of Afghanistan." The New York Times was especially alarmed by the level of collusion with the Taliban, having concluded that Pakistan "allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders." The Guardian, however, did not think there was "a convincing smoking gun" for complicity between Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban. Evidence that Iran provided extensive assistance to the Taliban was also revealed.

Civilian casualties

Hundreds of civilians have been killed by coalition forces in several instances that were not previously revealed. The press listed several examples of such previously unreported incidents of civilian deaths. David Leigh of The Guardian wrote:

They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes, which eventually led President Hamid Karzai to protest publicly that the US was treating Afghan lives as "cheap". When civilian family members are actually killed in Afghanistan, their relatives do, in fairness, get greater solatia payments than cans of beans and Hershey bars. The logs refer to sums paid of 100,000 Afghani per corpse, equivalent to about £1,500.

In one incident, a U.S. patrol machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers.

On 4 March 2007, US Marines who had been deployed only 3 weeks earlier, opened fire on civilians after witnessing a suicide bombing and making their escape. The Guardian newspaper reported: "The marines made a frenzied escape [from the scene of the bombing], opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in the fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded." The military report of the incident (written by the same soldiers involved in it) later failed to make any reference to the deaths and injuries and none of the soldiers involved were charged or disciplined.

On 21 March 2007, CIA paramilitaries fired on a civilian man who was running from them. The man, Shum Khan, was deaf and mute and did not hear their warnings.

On 16 August 2007, Polish troops mortared the village of Nangar Khel, killing five including a pregnant woman and her baby, in what was apparently a revenge attack shortly after experiencing an IED explosion.

Role of Special Ops greater than previously revealed

Government accounts of coalition activity were, according to The Guardian, sometimes "misleading". The British paper cited as an example a press statement that concealed the fact that the real reason for a coalition presence in a particular area was because a group known as Task Force 373 was on a mission to kill or capture Abu Laith al-Libi. The New York Times reported that the U.S. military had given Afghans credit for missions actually carried out by Special Operations commandos and had attributed the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles. The New York Times said "over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements".

Commentary

Significance of the disclosure

The U.S. deputy national security advisor for communications Ben Rhodes stated that

"Since taking office, President Obama has been very clear and candid with the American people about the challenges that we face in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ... It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009. The war in Afghanistan was under-resourced for many years. ... On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy and new resources for Afghanistan and Pakistan precisely because of the grave situation there".

Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said "it is the most comprehensive history of a war ever to be published, during the course of the war". He compared the release of the war logs with the release of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s.

Blake Hounshell wrote in his blog (on the website of Foreign Policy) that after reading "selected documents" he believed that there is less new information in the documents than The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel were reporting. Hounshell indicated how careful both The Guardian and The New York Times were to note "the raw reports in the Wikileaks archive often seem poorly sourced and present implausible information." Commenting on the Significance of the Documents:

I'd say that so far the documents confirm what we already know about the war: It's going badly; Pakistan is not the world's greatest ally and is probably playing a double game; coalition forces have been responsible for far too many civilian casualties; and the United States doesn't have very reliable intelligence in Afghanistan.

Threat to national security

Rhodes said "we strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations that put the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security". National Security Advisor James L. Jones and Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, both condemned Wikileaks for an "irresponsible" disclosure.

The New York Times wrote

"Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not. Most of the incident reports are marked "secret," a relatively low level of classification. The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests. The Times and the other news organizations agreed at the outset that we would not disclose—either in our articles or any of our online supplementary material—anything that was likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations. We have, for example, withheld any names of operatives in the field and informants cited in the reports".

New York Times coverage

The initial web article in the New York Times on the subject, appearing July 25, was authored by Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt, and Andrew Lehren, and titled "Pakistan Spy Service Aids Insurgents, Reports Assert". It was the lead article in the July 26 print edition of the Times. The article provided a wide range of excerpts from the paper, at some points focusing on coalition successes, and at other times excerpting sections that highlighted coalition failures. Many of the excerpts illustrated American frustrations with local involvement, quoting the sources, noting that "glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials."

External links

• Full Afghan War Diary database (mirror)
• Afghanistan: The War Logs The Guardian
• The War Logs The New York Times
• The Afghanistan Protocol Der Spiegel
• Interview with Julian Assange Channel 4