There are decisive battles in every conflict, milestone moments that change the course of a war and are duly recorded in the annals of history. Few expected that such a milestone moment in the Afghanistan conflict would have occurred in quite this way.
On Sunday, July 26, Wikileaks.org, a website run by anti-war activist Julian Assange, published over 90,000 documents relating to the war in Afghanistan over the past six years. The documents were released to three major newspapers, The New York Times in the United States, The Guardian in the UK and Der Speigel in Germany. In an interview on the CNN show ‘Larry King Live’, Assange explained that a large coalition of journalists spanning the globe from Karachi to New York had participated in the release.
While the sources of the documents were not released, Assange clarified that his organisation had indeed established the veracity of the documents itself. The newspapers that published stories culled from the data also cross-checked and verified the information they contained.
Within hours of the release, the political landscape surrounding the Afghan war was transformed. As journalists pored over the documents, grisly details emerged of just how dirty, surreptitious and bloody the war in Afghanistan has been. Internal CIA and military memos revealed that civilian casualties in the war in Afghanistan were far higher than reported. Other memos revealed that the US military’s efforts to win Afghan “hearts and minds” were a complete disaster.
In one case, an orphanage built to help Afghan children had no orphans, while other cases detailed the activities of corrupt officials who sold military equipment on the black market and thought nothing of killing their detractors. Drones, so incessantly touted for their precision, often failed and in at least one case had to be shot down by fighter aircrafts. Civilians were mistakenly bombed with 1,000-pound bombs due to faulty intelligence. Taliban victories often went unreported as did the fact that American forces were often unable to make the inroads expected of them. A secret military task force went around Afghanistan carrying out ‘decapitations’ of top leaders identified through secret processes.
None of this is new information for those in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, whose citizens have seen in close proximity the cruelty of a war that remains remote and abstract to ordinary Americans. Still embroiled in the post 9/11 rhetoric that casts the conflict in Afghanistan as crucial to national security, the American media has done little to expose the grim realities of a war where mistakes cost civilian lives. With media coverage largely devoted to stories of soldiers distributing coats, building schools and digging wells, the revelations provided by Wikileaks could well destroy the myth that American forces kill only the definitively evil and rarely take an innocent life.
The height of American ignorance of the region in which US troops are engaged in such a costly war is also illustrated by the congressional reaction to the leak. Scrambling to cover their embarrassment at having failed to monitor the massive bungling detailed in the documents, congressional officials have focused on finding a scapegoat rather than on explaining the mess. Their efforts have largely been directed towards preserving their suitability to being elected by an American public suddenly forced to confront the ugliness of a war sold to them as a goodwill mission designed to empower the Afghan people.
The White House remained similarly defensive, pointing fingers at the irresponsibility of the Wikileaks founder in having revealed such information via the Internet.
With news from the documents still emerging, it is difficult, at this stage, to tell whether Wikileaks.org must be seen in a heroic light or condemned.
For ordinary Americans, the Wiki leaks controversy could be the much-awaited wake-up call that would force them to pay attention to a conflict that has been deceptively cast as essential to US national security. In its renegade and unapologetic stance, the Wikileaks controversy represents the most effective effort by anti-war activists to cast a blow on the increasingly secretive military industrial complex of the United States. If American citizens heed the call, and their elected representatives can get beyond finding scapegoats, the released information provides them with the opportunity to take stock of the series of unnecessary and un-winnable wars that they have foisted on the world in the name of fighting terror.
But 90,000 documents are a lot and for the dwindling American attention span that is constantly assaulted by ‘essential’ issues such as the arrest of Hollywood actress Lindsay Lohan or the glitches in the new iPhone, the questions posed by the details of a disastrous war could easily be forgotten.
The writer is a US-based attorney who teaches constitutional history and political philosophy.
Mohammed Abbasi 