A spokesperson for Number 10 has criticised the leaking of 90,000 US military documents relating to the Afghan War, saying: “We lament all unauthorised release of classified material.” The documents paint a grim view of war on the ground and suggest that Pakistan is helping the Taliban.
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama’s “surge” strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
The war logs also detail:
• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.
• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
Wikileaks has proved its worth once again with the massive leak of more than 90,000 pieces of classified material on the Afghanistan war from 2004 to 2009. The whistleblowing site made the files available in advance to three publications — the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel — a perfect example of the sort of collaboration that can take place between “old” and “new” media.
The Guardian reports that the documents reveal how “coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.” It is no secret that the Afghanistan war is unwinnable, nor that it has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians, but what the documents reveal is that the situation is even worse than previously thought.
The White House has chosen to come out fighting, condemning the leak and pointing out that the documents only go through December 2009, the month Obama’s “surge” began. Here’s the official statement: “We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us.”
Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon’s criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them.
This is not so much a leak as a haemorrhage. Anyone with a computer can now read up to 90,000 reports on a war dogged with deaths and a chaotic lack of order. Will Wikileaks continue to effectively ‘steal’ classified information from around the world or will action be taken to halt them.
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Wow… you scarily remind me of me about 8 years ago, though I was a little less blinkered than you back then.
LOL. My nickname was even Toryboy amongst friends and people in my village before I gave it all up when I became Muslim.
Yes this leak is dangerous to your side, but it would not have been if the Americans and the British had not been slaughtering innocent people and lying about it, writing them down as insurgent kills or just forgetting to mention or reducing the number of non combatants killed.
It is dangerous because it will be used in the West to push for a pull out even faster from this disasterous immoral war, it is not dangerous however in Afghanistan where they’ve known this sort of thing has been going off for a long time and hence why the support the Taliban goes up and Taliban controlled areas increase month and month.
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