The Afghanistan War Logs Update

Sunday night's post: NYT: The Afghanistan War Logs

The Pentagon Papers they're not. The New York Times and the Guardian, among others, are touting the massive leak of 92,000 classified documents relating to the Afghanistan War, which was unearthed by the Wikileaks website. What bombshells do these secret memos contain? Pretty much none, if you are an even marginally attentive follower of the news. In fact, the only new thing I learned from the documents was that the Taliban have attacked coalition aircraft with heat-seeking missiles. That is interesting to learn but not necessarily terribly alarming because, even with such missiles, the insurgents have not managed to take down many aircraft - certainly nothing like the toll that Stingers took on the Red Army in the 1980s.

-- Max Boot

A swelling chorus of voices is pondering the roles of New and Old Media in the Wikileaks disclosure, with its effect being compared to that of Tet and the Pentagon Papers (see here, here, here, and here, for example). These analogies are overblown - wildly so, in my view - but there is nevertheless an important New/Old Media dynamic to watch in this case. The question in the coming days will be whether the Old Media - of which Time, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, et al. are members - can establish a counterfactual narrative and make it politically decisive. Will Congress, for example, consider itself bound to accept the narrative that this massive leak amounts to a set of game-changing revelations? I predict not. Although John Kerry has stated already that the leaked documents "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," my sense is that there is simply too much knowledge of that reality, both in Congress and among the public, for the political gambit to go anywhere. Much credit for that knowledge must go to New Media - independent online reporters like Michael Totten, Michael Yon, and Commentary's Max Boot, websites like Long War Journal and Small Wars Journal - which has labored to bring the war to the average reader in a level of detail unimaginable even two decades ago.

-- J. E. Dyer

Anyone who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I'm a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that's the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper.

-- Andrew Exum

Just because some documents are classified doesn't mean that they're news or even necessarily interesting. A case in point is the cache of 92,000 secret documents about the Afghanistan war that someone leaked to WikiLeaks, which passed them on to the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, and Der Spiegel in Germany. All three published several of these documents - presumably the highlights - in today's editions. Some of the conclusions to be drawn from these files: Afghan civilians are sometimes killed. Many Afghan officials and police chiefs are corrupt and incompetent. Certain portions of Pakistan's military and intelligence service have nefarious ties to the Taliban. If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today's must be the first one you've read.

-- Fred Kaplan

A huge leak of U.S. reports and this is all they get? I know of more stuff leaked at one good dinner on background. I mean, when Mother Jones yawns, that's an indication that you might not have the Pentagon Papers on your hands. If anything, the thousands of documents remind me of what it is like to be a reporter: Lots of different people telling you different things. It takes awhile to learn how to distinguish the junk from the gold.

-- Tom Ricks

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization's latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to "opening the Stasi archives" in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also compared the leak to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers. Both claims are a bit difficult to swallow. The Stasi were famous for creating a total surveillance state and gathering comprehensive evidence of political "crimes" against their own citizenry; the Pentagon Papers revealed Kennedy's involvement in the overthrow of Diem, and Nixon's decision to illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos. The WikiLeaks archive is... daily incident reports. Incident reports can be revealing, if they say something new. But these don't.

-- Joshua Foust

By now it isn't news that Wikileaks has leaked tens of thousands of war records in what they call the Afghanistan War Diary. It consists of a catalog of thousands of daily incident reports (each incident of an IED, contact with the enemy, casualties, etc., is summarized in an incident report). The reports make for a choppy and stilted read, but for those who are —to endure it, there is information here and there that compromises operational security. Joshua Foust points out that the names of certain collaborators are in these reports, but that likely doesn't matter to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. All of the information is classified and it should not have been released.

-- Herschel Smith

Longtime readers of The Long War Journal will not be shocked by these reports. For years, Tom Joscelyn and I have been documenting the involvement of the Pakistani military and intelligence services with various terror groups. See Pakistan's Jihad and Analysis: Al Qaeda is the tip of the jihadist spear for summary reports from 2008 and 2009. Also, Hamid Gul has long been known to support the Taliban and al Qaeda. For a summary of the activities of Hamid Gul and others, see US moves to declare former Pakistani officers international terrorists.

-- Bill Roggio

Longtime Afghanistan watchers are diving into Wikileaks' huge trove of unearthed U.S. military reports about the war. And they're surfacing, as we initially did, with pearls of the obvious and long-revealed. Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan veteran and Center for a New American Security fellow, compared the quasi-revelations about (gasp!) Pakistani intelligence sponsorship of Afghan insurgents and (shock-horror!) Special Operations manhunts to news that the Yankees may have lost the 2004 American League pennant. It's a fair point, but it conceals what's really valuable about the leaked logs: they're a real-time account of how the U.S. let Afghanistan rot.

-- Spencer Ackerman

"The War Logs" (Continued)

Leaks Add to Pressure on White House Over Strategy - New York Times

Bin Laden Among Latest Wikileaks Afghan Revelations - BBC News

Afghanistan War Logs - Time

The AfPak Papers - Wall Street Journal

WikiLeaks Disclosures Unlikely to Change Course of War - Washington Post

'War Logs Could Shatter Hopes of Success in Afghanistan' - Der Spiegel

'Weeks to Assess' Afghan War Leak - BBC News

Leak Leaves White House Defensive About War Policy - Los Angeles Times

White House Blasts Wikileaks for Documents Leak - Washington Times

Document Leak May Hurt Efforts to Build War Support - New York Times