The Afghanistan WikiLeaks

The NY Times keeps hope alive:

Document Leak May Hurt Efforts to Build War Support
By ERIC SCHMITT and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — The disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased pressure on President Obama to defend his military strategy as Congress prepares to deliberate financing of the Afghanistan war.

The disclosures, with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed, landed at a crucial moment. Because of difficulties on the ground and mounting casualties in the war, the debate over the American presence in Afghanistan has begun earlier than expected. Inside the administration, more officials are privately questioning the policy.

The WaPo says, no big deal:

WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war

By Greg Jaffe and Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, July 27, 2010; A01

In the first 24 hours after the unauthorized release of more than 91,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan, a few things became clear to the officials, lawmakers and experts reading them:

-- New evidence that the war effort is plagued by unreliable Afghan and Pakistani partners seems unlikely to undermine fragile congressional support or force the Obama administration to shift strategy.

-- The disclosure of what are mostly battlefield updates does not appear to represent a major threat to national security or troops' safety, according to military officials.

-- The documents' release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war's importance, military analysts said. Some have criticized Obama for not explaining the administration's strategy for bolstering the weak Afghan government and countering the Taliban's rise.

In a guest piece in the NY Times, Andrew Exum wonders where the news is:

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. 

...

Mr. Assange [of WikiLeaks] has said that the publication of these documents is analogous to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, only more significant. This is ridiculous. The Pentagon Papers offered the public a coherent internal narrative of the conflict in Vietnam that was at odds with the one that had been given by the elected and uniformed leadership.

The publication of these documents, by contrast, dumps 92,000 new primary source documents into the laps of the world’s public with no context, no explanation as to why some accounts may contradict others, no sense of what is important or unusual as opposed to the normal march of war.

Mr. Exum is quoted in the WaPo article with this pithier summary of his argument:

"I'm going to bed, but if I were to stay up late reading more, here is what I suspect I would discover," Andrew Exum, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security, wrote on Sunday night. " 'Afghanistan' has four syllables . . . LeBron is going to the Heat. . . . Liberace was gay.' "

Comments

[Rob Crawford]

Liberace was gay.

Wait. What?

[It begins.]

Apparently this Administration has used its new authority over the internet in order to shut down the wikileaks site.
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[matt]

it is interesting reading; contact reports, low level analysis. All it really does is fill in some information gaps. No smoking guns, no shocking revelations.

Having said that, the intelligence analyst most likely to have been the source is going to be fried.

[bmcburney]

Can anyone find out if the identity of Joe Wilson's wife is revealed anywhere in those 97,000 documents? If it was, this could be a big story.