Afghanistan war logs

American politics

Democracy in America

Afghanistan war logs

by M.S.

AM I the only one who found yesterday's WikiLeaks publication of internal American military documents from the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre somewhat unsurprising? The documents seem largely to tell us things we already knew. Former and current elements of the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) are believed to have maintained their longstanding links with the Taliban, and to have helped Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces plan suicide bombings and attacks on Afghan and American forces and other targets. Corruption is widespread among Afghan police and security forces. American and allied attacks have accidentally killed large numbers of civilians, as well as many of their own and Afghan allied troops. The New York Times's summary of the "war logs" says they present "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." But I found the documents oddly reassuring: they indicate that American forces, in their internal communications, recognise how grim the situation is, and are not living in an unrealistic fantasy world.

Spencer Ackerman is a fantastic reporter on war issues and Afghanistan, and his initial reaction lent the documents considerably more weight: the document dump "has the potential to be strategically significant, raising questions about how and why America and her allies are conducting the war." But by this afternoon he was wondering whether the documents weren't "overhyped old news." If the release of the war logs does have a big impact, it seems to me it's because of the general tone and angle of the coverage, rather than the contents themselves. What the documents show is that the military's internal intelligence doesn't make the war look any better than it looks to the press and other outsiders. This will likely widen the gap between the necessarily optimistic official pronouncements of military commanders and the Obama administration, and the public's assumptions about what those officials are telling each other in private. In other words, it's likely to create an increased impression of hypocrisy on the part of officials who continue to proclaim that the war is going well and that its challenges are manageable. I'm an eternal optimist, so my take on this, combined with the recent announcement that David Petraeus has succeeded in persuading Hamid Karzai to permit the organisation of village militias, is that American leaders are looking with increasing urgency to find a way to declare victory in Afghanistan, and get out.