Leaked reports describe Afghan war, sometimes in mundane detail
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/07/26/afghanistan.wikileaks/index.html?hpt=T2
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(CNN) -- Journalists and other observers around the world spent Monday poring over a vast cache of documents a whistleblower website says are U.S. reports that exhaustively chronicle the twists, turns and horror of the 9-year-old war in Afghanistan.
The whistleblower website WikiLeaks.org published more than 75,000 of the reports on Sunday. The documents date from between 2004 and January 2010, and are divided into more than 100 categories. Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan's ties to the Taliban.
The "direct fire" category accounts for the largest number -- at 16,293 reports -- while "graffiti," "mugging," "narcotics" and "threat" each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website's founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.
He told CNN's "Larry King Live" that the first-hand accounts represent "the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years," from the military's own raw data -- numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.
"We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks," Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.
Assange said some events listed in the reports are "very suspicious," such as reports of skirmishes in which "a lot of people are killed, but no people taken prisoner and no people left wounded."
"In the end, it will take a court to really look at the full range of evidence to decide if a crime has occurred," he said. But earlier, he noted, "This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban."
CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents. The White House condemned the release of the documents as "a breach of federal law," but simultaneously dismissed them as old news.
"I don't think that what is being reported hasn't in many ways been publicly discussed -- whether by you or by representatives of the U.S. government -- for quite some time," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. But he said an investigation into the source of the leak had begun by last week.
"There is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security," he said.
Reader calls leak "irresponsible"
The reports tend to be filled with jargon, like this one that describes a border incident from September 4, 2005:
"The Pakistan LNO [liaison officer] reports that ANA [Afghan National Army] troops are massing and threatening the PAKMIL [Pakistani military] 12km NE of FB Lwara [Firebase Lwara, a U.S. military base] ..."
And that's not even the entire first sentence.
Assange said WikiLeaks withheld some documents that dealt with activity by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, "and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups," Assange said. But he said the documents reveal the "squalor" of war, uncovering how a number of small incidents have added up to huge numbers of civilian deaths.
"What we haven't seen previously is all those individual deaths," he said. "We've seen just the number. And like Stalin said, 'One man's death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.' So, we've seen the statistic."
The release of the documents is being called the biggest intelligence leak in history, drawing comparison to the disclosure of the Vietnam-era "Pentagon Papers."
"There hasn't been an unauthorized disclosure of this magnitude in 39 years," said Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime Pentagon official who leaked that multi-volume secret history of the conflict. He said he wished the WikiLeaks documents had come out earlier, but, "Better late than never."
Others disagreed with the comparison. Bruce Riedel, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at
the Brookings Institution, noted that the Pentagon Papers were part of a document prepared for U.S. leaders that analyzed how the United States got into Vietnam, "which assessed successes and failures in a comprehensive way."
"This is really the raw material of the war -- unassessed, raw, fragmentary data that I think in each case, you have to be very careful how much of a larger picture you can conclude from these fragments and snippets," Riedel said.
And CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen said the Pentagon Papers revealed "a huge disconnect between what the American government was saying officially and internally."
"Here, all sorts of American government officials are saying the war is not going very well. No one is disagreeing with that," Bergen said.
But Ellsberg said the documents, "low-level as they are," raise the question of whether the United States has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and whether it should continue to pursue the war.
"They do give us the sense of the pattern of failure, of stalemate, and why we're stalemated -- civilian casuatlies that recruit or the Taliban for us and raise the question of what we're doing there," he said.
The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks were carried out by the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda, which operated from bases in Afghanistan with the approval of the Taliban, the fundamentalist movement that ruled most of the country at the time.
The invasion swiftly toppled the Taliban, but al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped and remain at large. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is now battling its own Taliban insurgency as well.
Gary Berntsen, who led a CIA commando team in Afghanistan in the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, told CNN's "Rick's List" that the documents "probably are accurate." But Berntsen, now a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, said the reports are likely to be a propaganda coup for the Taliban and "sap morale in the United States."
"It does paint a bleak picture on this," he said. "But it doesn't mean this fight is less worth fighting and trying to make progress on."
And Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put "in context" and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, "is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general."
"There are American troops in harm's way getting shot and killed," Rieckhoff said. "If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back."
Once the jargon of the report is pierced, the stories can be eye-opening.
In a February 5, 2008, incident, Task Force Helmand reported that an Afghan National Policeman [ANP] was in a public shower smoking hashish when two members of the Afghan National Army walked in.
"ANP felt threatened and a fire fight occurred," the report says. "The ANP fled the scene and was later shot. ANP and ANA commanders held meetings to contain the incident."
An October 15, 2007, incident describes an ANP highway police officer's shooting of another Afghan national police officer in the shoulder and leg, not seriously. "The shooting was not accidental the policeman had been arguing with each other for a few days," the report said.
In a March 19 2005 incident, "FOB [Forward Operating Base] Cobra received a local national boy who had received a gunshot wound to his stomach," another report said.
"He had been shot during a green-on-green [Afghans attacking Afghans] firefight in Jangalak Village. The boy and his older brother had heard shooting outside of their compound and went outside to check it out, at which point the boy was shot in the stomach. Another brother had also been shot and died at the compound. No adult males had accompanied the brothers, and only the older brother of the injured boy could provide information on the incident. The older brother explained that men in the village were having personal disputes with each other and had then began shooting at each ones' compounds."
The New York Times reported Sunday that military field documents on WikiLeaks suggest that Pakistan, an ally of the United States in the war against terror, has been running a "double game" by allowing its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency to meet with the Taliban. The talks included "secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders," reported the newspaper, which had prior access to the documents.
Though it is not news that Pakistan has a relationship with the Taliban, "the extent of it, the depth of it, the texture of that relationship is now laid out in copious detail," Riedel said. "We already had a very strained relationship in Pakistan over this issue, for several years. This is going to pressure that relationship even more."
But Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said the government now in power in Pakistan is committed to battling the Taliban.
"The misgivings of past cannot always easily be overcome," he said. "But what we can change is the future, and that's what we will do," he added.
"This government was voted in on a platform in which we said very clearly, 'We will fight terrorists, and we will defeat them. And as long as this government has the legitimacy and support of parliament, that's exactly what it will do," Haqqani told CNN's "The Situation Room." He blamed the leak on unnamed parties he said are "trying to give Pakistan a bad name," but said raw intelligence reports "cannot be the basis of undermining what is now emerging as a truly meaningful partnership in our region."
"You know that things are getting a lot better, and Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States are working together right now to essentially defeat the terrorists," he said.
But Afghanistan's government expressed amazement at the documents.
"The Afghan government is shocked with the report that has opened the reality of the Afghan war," said Siamak Herawi, a government spokesman. He said Washington needed to deal with the ISI, which he said had "a direct connection with the terrorists," including al Qaeda.
"These reports show that the U.S. was already aware of the ISI connection with the al Qaeda terrorist network," he said. "The United States is overdue on the ISI issue, and now the United States should answer."
Numerous reports name Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's intelligence service. But Gul rejected the accusations Monday.
"These reports are absolutely and utterly false," Gul said . "I think they [the United States] are failing and they're looking for scapegoats."
Assange said the documents were "legitimate," but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.
"We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn't mean the CIA is telling the truth," he said.
He declined to tell CNN where he got the documents, and says the identities of his sources are less important than the authenticity of the documents they provide. And he denied that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger, and said the documents' publication will help people make informed decisions about whether to support the war.
Assange, an Australian, said the site is coming under "significant pressure" from authorities, including several recent "surveillance events." But he said that due to the response the latest release has received, "It is not politically feasible to interfere with us at a high level."
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An archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished picture of the war in Afghanistan that is, in many respects, more grim than the official portrayal.
The documents are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
The documents about 92,000 reports from January 2004 through December 2009 illustrate why, after the U.S. has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.
As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence.
The reports usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen end the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Secret units such as Task Force 373 a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives work from a "capture/kill list" of about 70 insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
The military is employing more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets, though their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drones' weaponry.
Such aircraft are also being used often in Pakistan, as was evidenced Sunday. Unmanned U.S. aircraft fired missiles at houses in two different parts of northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 12 militants in attacks that occurred hours apart, intelligence officials told The Associated Press.
The CIA has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct raids.
From 2001 to 2008, the CIA paid the budget of Afghanistan's spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary. Overall, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases, they show that the American military made misleading public statements attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.
White House officials vigorously denied having presented a misleading portrait of the war.
"On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," said Gen. James Jones, the White House national security adviser, on Sunday.
He also condemned the decision to make the documents public, denouncing "the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security."
Pakistani treachery?
The classified reports also show that Americans fighting in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Islamabad receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants.
The documents suggest that Pakistan, ostensibly an ally of the U.S., 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.
Much of the information raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan cannot be verified and probably comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.
But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable. Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside al-Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan's militant groups and al-Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI with al-Qaeda is difficult.
The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan's unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.
The reports suggest the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.
Accusations that Pakistan is aiding insurgent groups are usually met with angry denials, particularly by the Pakistani military, which insists that the ISI severed its remaining ties to the groups years ago. An ISI spokesman in Islamabad said Sunday that the agency would have no comment until it saw the documents.
Resilient insurgency
The archive is an incomplete record of the war. It is missing references to many seminal events and does not include more highly classified information. The documents also do not cover events in 2010, when more troops were deployed.
The reports portray a resilient, canny insurgency that has bled American forces through a war of small cuts. Sabotage and trickery have been weapons every bit as potent as small arms, mortars or suicide bombers. So has Taliban intimidation of Afghan officials and civilians applied with pinpoint pressure through threats, charm, violence, money, religious fervor and populist appeals.
The reports repeatedly describe instances when the insurgents have been seen wearing government uniforms, and other times when they have roamed the country or appeared for battle in the very pickups that the U.S. had provided the Afghan army and police force.
The reports also paint a dismal picture of the Afghan police and soldiers at the center of the American exit strategy. The Pentagon is spending billions to train Afghan forces to secure the country.
But the police have proved to be an especially risky investment and are often described as distrusted, even loathed, by Afghan civilians.
The reports recount episodes of police brutality, corruption, extortion and kidnapping. Some police officers are accused of collaborating with insurgents, smugglers and bandits.
The documents show how the best intentions of Americans to help rebuild Afghanistan through provincial reconstruction teams ran up against a bewildering array of problems from corruption to cultural misunderstandings as they tried to win over the Afghan public by helping repair bridges, build schools and train local authorities.
And, incident by incident, the reports resemble a police blotter of the myriad ways Afghan civilians were killed not just in airstrikes, but in ones and twos in shootings on roads or in villages, in misunderstandings or in a crossfire. Many cases were not reported to the public at the time.
The toll of the war reflected in mounting civilian casualties left the Americans seeking cooperation and support from an Afghan population that grew steadily more exhausted, resentful, fearful and alienated.
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Wikileaks takes new approach in latest release of documents
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072602084.html
Wikileaks' decision to transfer tens of thousands of raw classified field reports on the Afghan war to the New York Times and two European news organizations reflects the growing strength and sophistication of the small nonprofit Web site, founded three years ago to fight what it considers excessive secrecy
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange called the release of nearly 92,000 individual reports portraying a sputtering Afghan war effort "the nearest analogue to the Pentagon Papers." He was referring to the secret military documents that helped shift public opinion about the Vietnam War after they became public in 1971.
"It provides a whole map, if you like, through time, of what has happened during this war," said Assange, a native of Australia, in a television interview broadcast Sunday on Britain's public-service Channel 4.
He acknowledged that some will judge harshly the Web site's airing of classified documents, but he insisted that Wikileaks was not breaking the law or putting troops at risk. For the first time, Wikileaks decided unilaterally to delay the release of some documents because of the possibility that putting them out immediately could cause harm, he said.
"We believe that the way to justice is transparency, and we are clear that the end goal is to expose injustices in the world and try to rectify them," Assange said.
In a separate interview on Monday, Assange said information in the documents about killings of Afghan civilians and covert operations appeared to offer evidence that would support criminal charges against members of the U.S.-led coalition.
"It is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime," Assange told reporters, according to the Associated Press. "That said . . . there does appear to be evidence of war crimes."
The publication of the documentsis expected to feed an appetite for greater disclosure about the war, now in its ninth year.
"People want more details," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation for American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "They want greater clarity and greater candor than they have gotten up to this point. Wikileaks, in this case, has filled a void left by the Pentagon."
The White House responded critically to the documents' release. "The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security," national security adviser James Jones said in a statement.
Jones called the leaks "irresponsible" and said the White House only learned from news organizations that the documents would be posted online. A senior administration official said officials are reviewing the documents to decide whether to take legal action against the site.
Assange asserted that Wikileaks does not "have a view about whether the war should continue or stop." But he added: "We do have a view that it should be prosecuted as humanely as possible."
Wikileaks, an amorphous network run by volunteers in more than a dozen countries, gained global prominence this year when it posted a video of a secret U.S. military helicopter attack in Iraq that killed civilians. An edited, 17-minute version of the gunship-footage video appeared on the Wikileaks site on April 5 under the heading "collateral murder," a label that drew harsh criticism from military officials and many media commentators.
In this case, rather than conduct its own assessment of the documents, Wikileaks selectively provided the files to the Times, the London-based Guardian newspaper and the German magazine Der Spiegel. The three outlets agreed to publish simultaneously, though each organization did its own reporting and produced its own stories.
The move to let established journalistic organizations do the reporting and analysis "may reflect a maturing of the organization and model that they have adopted," Aftergood said.
The news organizations said they agreed they would not disclose anything likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations. The Guardian Web site noted that most of the material, though classified "secret" at the time, "is no longer militarily sensitive." At the request of the White House, the Times also urged Wikileaks to withhold harmful material from its Web site.
In a statement on its Web site, Wikileaks said it delayed the release of about 15,000 reports from the total archive "as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source." After further review, Wikileaks said, "these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits."
Wikileaks has declined to identify the person behind the latest leak. Assange said the names of leakers are generally unknown, even to the organization.
Lt. Cmdr. Bill H. Speaks, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, declined to say whether military officials are investigating if Pfc. Bradley Manning, recently charged with leaking classified military documents, provided this latest material to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks' methods have often overshadowed the significance of the documents it sought to publish. Governments and corporations around the world have sought to shut down the organization through the courts or, in some cases, through cyber attacks on the Web site. Both the Pentagon and CIA in internal documents have declared Wikileaks a national security threat.
Assange said he expects that Americans will respond as they did nearly 40 years ago to the Pentagon Papers.
"They will see the extensive range of abuses, and if they are intelligent they will say, 'This will not happen again; we will put in procedures to stop these abuses, to stop this,'" he said.
Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Craig Whitlock contributed to this report
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What the Wikileaks files TRULY reveal
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The release of 90,000 secret U.S. military files by the whistleblower website Wikileaks, in its broadest context, reveals that the Obama administration and the Pentagon brass have been and still are fully aware that they are not only losing the war in Afghanistan, but also have no possibility of winning.
The documents present a powerful indictment against the Pentagon, the Obama administration and the Bush administration for their failure to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan. They provide documentary evidence of the killing of hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians by U.S. and NATO troops.
The files reveal that the Pentagon set up a secret commando unit called Task Force 373 that is nothing other than a death squad. Task Force 373, made up of Army and Navy Special Operatives, is seeking to assassinate individuals from an assembled list of 2,000 targets.
And despite rosy-sounding publicity missives coming from the Pentagon, the information released on Wikileaks shows an obvious pattern of intensifying bomb attacks against U.S. and NATO forces.
The decision by the Obama administration to send 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 is exposed as nothing other than a decision to send more human beings to their death in an ongoing war that cannot be won, so as to avoid taking the political responsibility for a military setback. That is the rule that all U.S. policymakers abide by. No matter what, they must avoid the appearance of military defeat at the hands of an armed resistance.
The White House condemned the release of the classified documents in the most disingenuous and hypocritical way. It denounced those who provided the files for putting the lives of U.S. and partner service members at risk. That is turning reality upside down. It is the Obama administration that is putting the lives of U.S. service members and Afghan civilians at risk every day by continuing a war just so that it can avoid the political backlash for suffering a defeat on its watch.
The released documents paint a grim picture that is repeated over and over again involving a large number of previously unknown incidents where U.S. and NATO troops shot and murdered unarmed drivers and motorcyclists.
The documents reveal another incident where French troops used machine guns to strafe a bus full of children in 2008. A military patrol machine gunned another bus, wounding or killing 15 of its civilian passengers. In 2007, Polish troops rained mortar fire down on an Afghan village, killing a wedding party, including pregnant women, in a revenge attack for an earlier insurgent assault.
In April of this year, Wikileaks published the now-famous classified video of a U.S. Apache helicopter murdering 12 Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding children. The Pentagon arrested Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst in Iraq and has been holding him incommunicado in recent months. Wikileaks has not disclosed whether Manning was the source of the leak of the classified video or the recently released documents, but has announced that it will help provide legal assistance for Bradley Manning.
For months now, the web of lies spun by the White House and Pentagon about the Afghan war has started to come undone. Public support for the Afghan war, along with support from inside the military ranks, continues to decline. But it will take a resurgent anti-war movement to convert this latent frustration into a powerful political force that can finally bring the criminal occupation to an end.
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