LEAKED RECORDS ON AFGHANISTAN CAMPAIGN:THE WHITE House has reacted angrily to what may be the most massive leak of secret documents in history – the publication of 92,000 classified reports which provide a daily diary of the war in Afghanistan from January 2004 through December 2009.
“The US strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security,” Gen Jim Jones, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, said in a statement reacting to the publication of the documents by WikiLeak.org .
The group, which says it reveals government secrets because it believes in transparency, gave the documents to the New York Times, the Guardianand German magazine Der Spiegela month ago, on condition they waited until late on Sunday to publish them.
Calling the leaks “irresponsible”, Gen Jones complained that “Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents.”
The US has spent $300 billion (€230 billion) in Afghanistan, now the longest war in US history. Although the Wikileaks documents, most of which were drafted by low-level US officers in the field, contain no earth-shattering secrets, they have provoked renewed and unwelcome public scrutiny of the war just five weeks after the sacking of Gen Stanley McChrystal, then the top US commander in Afghanistan.
The documents provide new evidence of the perfidy of members of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, whose collusion with the Taliban and al-Qaeda was known. The US is giving Pakistan $1 billion annually to help it fight extremists, but classified reports tell how networks of suicide bombers are recruited and trained in Pakistan. As late as October of last year, the New York Timesreports, the ISI dispatched suicide bombers into Afghan population centres.
Gen Jones noted that most of the period chronicled by the reports predates the new Afghan strategy announced by Mr Obama last December. He said Pakistan and the US “have deepened our important bilateral partnership” but acknowledged that “the Pakistan government, and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, must continue their strategic shift against insurgent groups”.
Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, said the reports “reflect nothing more than single-source comments and rumours”.
The documents reveal that insurgents are equipped with surface-to-air missiles, like those the US-backed Mujahideen used against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In at least one case, the downing of a Chinook helicopter in which five Americans, a Briton and a Canadian were killed in 2007, a military spokesman lied to journalists – suggesting the chopper was hit by small arms fire and not a missile.
At a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels, British foreign secretary William Hague seemed to suggest the leaks were irrelevant. “We’re not going to spend our time looking at leaks. We’re going to carry on with the internationally agreed strategy.”
But John Kerry, chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, said the documents “raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan.”