Courtesy of Wikileaks, which received something on the order of 90,000 US documents about Afghanistan, pretty much the whole of military logs from January 2004 until December 2009, which it then released to the New York Times, der Speigel, and The Guardian, some weeks ago, and has now made publicly available on their site.
Much like the Pentagon Papers, the revelations this far are also generally known:
- Special forces and CIA paramilitaries engage in actions with little regard for civilian casualties, and that the military lies about this.
- That the Taliban operates with little regard for civilian casualties, they “appear to have been prepared to blow up large numbers of people in order to assassinate a single target, such as a high-ranking government official or police chief.”
- That elements of the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus continue to support the Taliban.
- That the Ruling clique in Kabul are unbelievably corrupt.
- That IED use is surging.
These are all well known facts, though these have not been presented in US government documents before, which is also much like the Pentagon Papers.
Needless to say, the Obama White House, notwithstanding its promises for more openness has gone full throated in its denunciation of the release of data, saying that the release of the documents could, “could endanger lives and U.S. security,” even though the facts are so well known that even I have blogged about most of them.
There is no danger to any lives or US security, but it does make it more difficult for Barack Obama to prosecute this deepening fiasco, he will see increasing push-back from his own party on this, and this likely seen as a serious political, threat: It is clear that Obama is terrified of being cast as a peacenik in the 2012 elections.
