WikiLeaks, the Pentagon and the War in Afghanistan |

WikiLeaks, the Pentagon and the War in Afghanistan | Special English | Learning English


Or download MP3 (Right-click or option-click and save link)

This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.

This week, the website WikiLeaks published more than seventy-five thousand American military documents on the war in Afghanistan. These documents from the Army and Marine Corps included secret reports from the past six years.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the problems they describe are not new. But he says their release could harm troops and damage American relationships in that part of the world.

He says intelligence sources and methods will become known, and Afghans who have helped American forces may now be in danger.

AP

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, left, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen at the Pentagon on Thursday

ROBERT GATES: "Will people trust us? Will people whose lives are on the line trust us to keep their identities secret? Will other governments trust us to keep their documents and their intelligence secret?"

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

MICHAEL MULLEN: "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing. But the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."

In London, Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks is still examining fifteen thousand more documents. He says the released documents do not include any top-secret reports or names of informants or information like troop movements.

AP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference in London on Monday

JULIAN ASSANGE: " This material doesn't just reveal abuses, this material describes the past six years of war, every major attack that resulted in someone being detained or someone being killed."

WikiLeaks is a nonprofit organization that publishes documents from governments and businesses. It released the military documents on Sunday. It gave early copies to three news organizations in the United States, Germany and Britain.

The White House is urging WikiLeaks not to not publish any more classified documents about the Afghan war.

In April, the site posted video of an American helicopter strike in Iraq in two thousand seven. That attack killed two Iraqis working for the Reuters news agency.

An American soldier is charged with releasing that video. Army Private Bradley Manning has also come under interest in the latest release of documents.

AFP

Afghan War Diary on WikiLeaks

Some of the documents suggest that members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency are helping insurgent groups in Afghanistan.

Pakistan denies that. And Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says: "These are not new allegations."

JOHN KERRY: "We have been wrestling with these allegations, and we have made some progress."

But a vote in Congress this week showed weakening support for President Obama's war policy among members of his own party.

More than one hundred Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against an emergency spending measure. It included thirty-three billion dollars to send more troops to Afghanistan.

But the bill passed with strong Republican support. The president requested the money in February and the Senate agreed in May.

AP

U.S. Marines south of Kabul in Afghanistan

Democrat David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, explained why he could not support the measure.

DAVID OBEY: "Military experts tell us that it could take up to ten more years to achieve any acceptable outcome in Afghanistan. We have already been there nine years. I believe that is too high a price to pay."

Sixty-six deaths made July the deadliest month yet for American troops in Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File | Threat Level | Wired.com

In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks’ recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.”
The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, is 1.4 GB and is encrypted with AES256. The file’s size dwarfs the size of all the other files on the page combined. The file has also been posted on a torrent download site as well.
WikiLeaks, on Sunday, posted several files containing the 77,000 Afghan war documents in a single “dump” file and in several other files containing versions of the documents in various searchable formats.
Cryptome, a separate secret-spilling site, has speculated that the file may have been posted as insurance in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization’s founder, Julian Assange. In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it.
It’s not known what the file contains but it could include the balance of data that U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning claimed to have leaked to Assange before he was arrested in May.

In chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning disclosed that he had provided Assange with a different war log cache than the one that WikiLeaks already published. This one was said to contain 500,000 events from the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009. WikiLeaks has never commented on whether it received that cache.
Additionally, Manning said he sent Assange video showing a deadly 2009 U.S. firefight near Garani in Afghanistan that local authorities say killed 100 civilians, most of them children, as well as 260,000 U.S. State Department cables.
Manning never mentioned leaking the Afghan War log to WikiLeaks in his chats with Lamo, but Defense Department officials told The Wall Street Journal that investigators had found evidence on Manning’s Army computer that tied him to that leak.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen strongly condemned WikiLeaks’ publication of the Afghan War log at a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday.
Gates said the leak had “potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and our Afghan partners” and said that “tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries” as a result.
Mullen was even more direct and said that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier” or an Afghan informant who aided the United States.
Several media outlets have found the names of Afghan informants in the documents WikiLeaks published, as well as information identifying their location in some instances. A Taliban spokesman told Britain’s Channel 4 news that the group was sifting through the WikiLeaks documents to get the names of suspected informants and would punish anyone found to have collaborated with the United States and its allies.
Wired.com has sent a message to WikiLeaks inquiring about the file.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/wikileaks-insurance-file/#ixzz0vEpkf6Ac

WATCH: Glenn Beck on the Radical Weather Manifesto

Handfull

tehran times : U.S. is no stranger to double-dealing

tehran times : U.S. is no stranger to double-dealing

Following the revelation by WikiLeaks that there have been fresh allegations that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is secretly aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, sections of the U.S. media rushed to accuse Islamabad of supporting both sides of the decade-old conflict. A lengthy op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday said that Pakistan had been involved in double-dealing for years. ""Despite the billions of dollars the United States has sent in aid to Pakistan since September 11.

This Week at War: Pakistan Is Winning the War in Afghanistan

This Week at War: Pakistan Is Winning the War in Afghanistan - By Robert Haddick | Foreign Policy

Pakistan's Game
Of all the players in the Afghan game, Pakistan is running up the highest score. For several decades, Pakistan's policy toward Afghanistan has remained largely unchanged, regardless of who was running the country. That policy is to support Afghanistan's Pashtuns in their seemingly genetic resistance to outside control (outside in this case extends to any government located in Kabul). By supporting Pashtun autonomy, Pakistan establishes for itself a security buffer zone on its northwest frontier, which comes with a friendly auxiliary army -- the Afghan Taliban -- as a bonus.
For nearly nine years, U.S. officials have pleaded with Pakistan to suspend support for the Afghan Taliban and allow Afghanistan to unite under a central government. Pakistani officials have provided a variety of verbal responses to these entreaties but have not changed their policies toward the Afghan Taliban, whose military capability inside Afghanistan only seems to grow.
The United States cannot achieve its goals in Afghanistan while the Afghan Taliban's sanctuaries in Pakistan remain open. The Pakistani government refuses to close or even isolate those sanctuaries. Yet the massive U.S. foreign-assistance pipeline to Pakistan remains open. Why?
U.S. policymakers have seemingly concluded that they have more options and less risk by engaging Pakistan. They tried isolating Pakistan and found that course was neither wise nor sustainable. As a result, the Washington has opted to shower Pakistan with aid and hope that persistent persuasion will eventually result in greater Pakistani action against the Afghan Taliban.
The result has been a spectacular strategic success for Pakistan. Development aid from the United States has never been greater. The United States will deliver long-embargoed F-16 fighters to Pakistan and is providing other upgrades to Pakistan's armed forces. Along with this has come a de facto U.S. security guarantee against the perceived threat from India. Pakistan's diplomatic leverage over the United States has given it a free hand to work with China to upgrade its nuclear complex. Meanwhile, Pakistan's proxy forces in southeast Afghanistan are successfully defending the security buffer zone. Pakistan's dominant position has forced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to virtually sue for peace. This could result in an ethnic partition of Afghanistan that would secure Pakistan's main objective in the conflict.
With its winning position, Pakistan's current task is to arrange a stable end-state that avoids a backlash from the losers. Pakistan and the United States are in a largely zero-sum relationship over Afghanistan. Pakistan's leaders must fashion a settlement (however temporary) that allows the United States to save face, that maintains the U.S. aid pipeline, and that keeps the de facto security guarantee in place. U.S. officials should hope that Pakistan manages the endgame as well as it has managed the rest of the match.

Photo of disfigured Afghan woman outrages America

Photo of disfigured Afghan woman outrages America - Americas, World - The Independent

A shocking picture of an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose was hacked off after she fled an abusive husband has stirred up the long-running controversy over whether Nato forces should negotiate with the Taliban.

The girl in the picture, which appears on the front of Time magazine this week, also had her ears cut off in the horrifying attack. She is only named in the magazine as Aisha. Tracked to a house where she had taken refuge, she was brought before a judge, who was also a Taliban commander, and rejected her explanation of why she had run away. She was held down by her brother-in-law while her husband used a knife to cut off her ears and nose. Aisha has since taken refuge in a secret women's shelter in Kabul where she expresses terror that the government is seeking a deal with the Taliban.

The use of the picture, next to the headline "What happens if we leave Afghanistan", has already drawn strong praise and criticism alike in the US. Writing on the Slate website, the columnist Tom Scocca called the picture "gut-wrenching" but suggested that "a correct and accurate caption would be 'What is still happening, even though we are in Afghanistan'".

Related articles

• Under the cover of darkness, Nato troops draw Taliban into their trap
• Search the news archive for more stories

But at the website Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote that "we can applaud Time... Aisha is a survivor of atrocity. She's a tool of persuasion. And she's a hell of a photograph."

During Taliban rule in 1996-2001 women were reduced to a condition close to slavery. As the Taliban have grown in strength since 2006 they have attacked girls' schools and teachers. Several women have been killed and many have had to give up their jobs.

What are they calling it now? | The Augusta Chronicle

What are they calling it now? | The Augusta Chronicle

When did the United States of America cease to be a self-respecting nation and become the self-loathing country we have?

We have a president who apologizes around the world for our pre-eminence -- which, by the way has for decades opened an umbrella of protection over free countries worldwide.

The federal government long ago made it clear it would not secure the nation's borders.

And now, it appears treason is no longer going to be considered a crime.

During our war with radical Islam, several traitors have emerged to fight with and promote the enemy. None have been executed as traitors.

Instead, we call them "homegrown" terrorists, making them sound like vegetables rather than turncoats.

When did traitors stop being traitors?

Example: What should happen to someone who leaks or divulges classified Department of Defense information during wartime -- with the express intent of harming that war effort?

Should that person or persons not be tried as traitors or spies?

Such a crime just happened, with the release of some 76,000 of 91,000 documents that WikiLeaks website reportedly has. The documents shook the international war effort by revealing openly for the first time the extent of Iran's and Pakistan's surreptitious aid to Taliban forces killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as other secret documents.

Indignation from our own government has been muted, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai denounced the leaks this week, saying they revealed names of pro-U.S. informants in Afghanistan and endangered their lives.

"Officials are concerned that potential new contacts may be reluctant to help out of the fear that the United States can't protect sources," says CNN.

Absolutely.

"This is a very serious issue," Karzai said.

We agree. So why aren't you hearing more of that kind of concern from our own government?

We hope it's forthcoming, as military officials focus on a suspect, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, who is alleged to have downloaded the documents from a classified military Internet system he had access to as an intelligence analyst. He's already charged with eight counts in a separate data release, reportedly also involving WikiLeaks.

Rather than downplay what amounts to a domestic spy case -- by saying there's nothing revelatory or highly secret in the documents -- U.S. officials should be at least as indignant as our ally Karzai, wouldn't you think?

Whatever the damage -- and that's still being assessed -- whoever mined a secure government website for classified information for the express intent of publishing that material to the world has committed a treasonous act. It only adds to the insult, and the criminal scope, if the perpetrators' intent was to damage the war effort.

They used to call that treason. What are they calling it today?

When they even mention it, that is.

KARZAI: Cleaning up corruption - Washington Times

KARZAI: Cleaning up corruption - Washington Times

With Wikileaks' release last week of 92,000 pages of classified documents about the war in Afghanistan, it seems everyone, naturally, is concentrating on the details and progress of the hot war being fought between Afghan soldiers, coalition forces and the Taliban.

But there is another war being fought - this one mostly out of the limelight of press headlines and caches of leaked documents. It is a battle for the economic soul of the nation, one that will determine whether Afghanistan becomes a thriving capitalist economy or remains one based on tribal rivalries in a zero-sum game.

As important as defeating the Taliban and creating a workable democracy, this financial struggle is critical to how effective a partner Afghanistan will be in the future for the West.

I know this struggle very well, having been at the forefront of investment in the country since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. People think I am delusional when I say that one day Kabul could be like Singapore or Hong Kong, but I firmly believe it. With Gen. David H. Petraeus' new rural security plan in place, I am more confident than ever that there is a realistic chance for success for the efforts by many of us to create a society in which international investment booms and there are opportunities for ordinary Afghans to create a large middle class. The recent finding of immense natural resources in the country is yet another opportunity for financial expansion and extended revenues for the Afghan government that must not be missed.

However, the challenge to creating the new financial Afghanistan is threefold:

First, there is an epidemic of petty corruption on the part of low-level police officials, customs agents and government bureaucrats, who supplement their very low salaries by demanding small bribes for performing the duties they are bound to perform anyway. I believe this largely could be eliminated by higher salaries, reasonable benefits and meritocratic hiring and promotion.

I have strongly urged the national government to do this, but it doesn't have the funds. It's about time that the government started collecting all the taxes owed from the private sector. This is not something that is optional. If the government wants to eliminate petty corruption across the country, it must tackle it financially and with a civil service reform package.

There is a second stage of corruption. This is committed by high-level political officials. Some of these men have entrenched positions of significant power. In many instances, they have been emboldened in their behavior since the fall of the Taliban because, unfortunately, Western forces put security first and often turn a blind eye to political corruption.

This high-level corruption can only be stopped if the international community joins the Afghan government and together they methodically go about dismantling the small fiefdoms of some Afghan political leaders. It will be no small task, but it can be done. But the first joint task force announced last week between Afghan officials and the United States to monitor the billions in cash flown out of Afghanistan each year is an example of how not to do it. These probes should be secret. Announcing them through the U.S. Embassy and the Afghan Finance Ministry only warns the corrupt officials that they must find other ways to transfer their money. Press releases about busting serious corruption at the highest levels should be dispensed after the cases are made.

The third hurdle in the effort to reform Afghanistan economically is the need somehow to stop the tarnishing of many legitimate businessmen by public reports that leave the broad impression that everyone in the country is somehow compromised by corruption. The problem is exacerbated by a veritable cottage industry among some politicians and businessmen who spread lies to foreign correspondents in order to destroy their competition. From 2001 through 2003, rumors or innuendos suggesting sympathy or financial support for al Qaeda were enough to ruin someone's reputation. Since 2004, the smear campaigns have focused on allegations of opium trafficking or some variation of corruption, ranging from money laundering to bribery.

Iran `Hiding Truth' About Nuclear Work, Will Be on G-8 Agenda, Cannon Says - Bloomberg

Iran `Hiding Truth' About Nuclear Work, Will Be on G-8 Agenda, Cannon Says - Bloomberg

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said Iran is “hiding” the truth about its nuclear program and added that the effectiveness of new sanctions will be reviewed by Group of Eight officials when they next meet in September.

Cannon, who presides over meetings of G-8 foreign ministers this year, led a March summit where he helped push for sanctions against Iran that were imposed this week by Canada and the European Union, and earlier by the U.S. Iran has denied allegations from the U.S. and some of its allies that the nuclear program may be intended for weapons development.

Iran “must allow unfettered access to the inspectors and must make sure that it doesn’t develop a nuclear capacity other than for peaceful purposes,” Cannon said in an interview yesterday in Bloomberg’s Ottawa office. “For the last 20 years Iran has indeed been hiding the truth from everybody.”

Canada and EU governments this week imposed their toughest sanctions yet on Iran, backing U.S. efforts to force the country to halt uranium enrichment and stop any pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

“We will analyze how these sanctions are holding,” Cannon said.

The package includes a ban on new investment in or equipment sales to Iran’s oil and natural-gas industries, restrictions on export-credit guarantees and insurance, and closer monitoring of banks doing business with Iran.

The United Nations Security Council imposed a fourth round of restrictions on Iran in June, while President Barack Obama on July 1 expanded U.S. measures targeting Iranian gasoline imports and banking access. Iran is the second-largest oil producer in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia.

China Disagrees

Iran has ignored three previous sets of UN sanctions and rejects Western allegations that it wants to build an atomic bomb. Iran says the nuclear program is designed to generate electricity for a growing population and that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it is entitled to continue such activities.

China disagrees with the EU’s “unilateral” sanctions against Iran and would prefer the nuclear-fuel supply issue be solved through dialogue, Jiang Yu, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, said in comments posted on the ministry’s website yesterday.

Cannon said G-8 ministers will also discuss North Korea when they next meet.

“We have two states, Iran and North Korea, who aren’t behaving in a responsible fashion,” Cannon said. “They will be in our discussions.”

‘Highest’ Condemnation

North Korea has been under renewed international pressure since a South Korean warship was sunk in March. An international panel said it was torpedoed by a North Korean submarine, a charge that country has denied.

“We have condemned that to the highest extent,” Cannon said of the ship’s sinking. Canada, which helped with the international investigation of the sinking, said in May it would impose new sanctions on North Korea.

Cannon, 62, has been foreign minister since October 2008, and began in the federal cabinet as transport minister when he was first elected in 2006 in a Quebec district. He comes from a political family, with five relatives having served in Parliament and three others in Quebec’s provincial legislature.

On Afghanistan, where Canada has 2,800 soldiers, Cannon reiterated the country’s military mission will end next year. Canada has had 151 military casualties in Afghanistan, more than in any conflict since the Korean War, and a diplomat was also killed.

Afghanistan

Prime Minister Stephen Harper hasn’t outlined a detailed plan for Canada’s involvement after next year. In a speech that opened the last session of Parliament in March, the government said, “After 2011, our effort in Afghanistan will focus on development and humanitarian aid.”

“We will be looking at the ways that we are going to be going forward in those areas, as well as our diplomatic relations with the government of Afghanistan,” said Cannon, who this month attended a major donors’ summit in Kabul.

“The international commitment is strong enough, the support is strong enough to be able to help this country in the right direction,” Cannon said. “The biggest risk of course is to fall back to the periods that are pre-2001.” The Taliban regime ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

The Conservatives led by Harper lack a majority of seats in the House of Commons and won opposition support to extend the combat mission to 2011. Now that the military mission is ending, Cannon said the government may not need to return to Parliament to seek a vote on its plans in Afghanistan.

“The only reason why previously we went through this and we had a motion is that called upon the engagement of Canadian forces elsewhere,” Cannon said. “The prime minister will make the determination as to what he indeed wants to do with the opposition parties.”

Occupying forces stoke anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan

Occupying forces stoke anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan – US marine - RT Top Stories

Afghan civilians are growing ever more discontent from seeing US and coalition forces throughout their country, thinks former US marine Jake Diliberto.

“Anti-American sentiment grows because the population does not feel safe. They do not feel as protected as the counter-insurgency campaign thinks it can provide,” Diliberto said.

With strong street rioting gripping Afghanistan's capital Kabul – a city widely thought of as the safest place in the country – even worse situations takes place in distant provinces, claims Diliberto.

“Kabul is supposed to be one of the safest places in all of Afghanistan. And if Kabul is in upheavals, you can surely bet that the rest of Afghanistan is ten times worse than that,” said Diliberto.

Afghan women fear peace may come at cost of rights

Nation & World | Afghan women fear peace may come at cost of rights | Seattle Times Newspaper

MAHMUD-I-RAQI, Afghanistan — Women's precarious rights in Afghanistan have begun seeping away. Girls' schools are closing; working women are threatened; advocates are attacked; and terrified families are increasingly confining their daughters to home.

For women, instability, as much as the Taliban, is the enemy. Women are casualties of the fighting, not only in the conservative and embattled Pashtun south and east but also in districts in the north and center of the country where other armed groups have sprung up.

As Afghan and Western governments explore reconciliation with the Taliban, women fear the peace they long for may come at the price of rights that have improved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001.

"Women do not want war, but none of them want the Taliban of 1996 again; no one wants to be imprisoned in the yards of their houses," said Rahima Zarifi, the Women's Ministry representative from the northern Baghlan province.

Interviews throughout the country with at least two dozen women and girls suggest a nuanced reality: Fighting constricts women's freedoms nearly as much as a Taliban government, and conservative traditions already limit women's rights in many places.

Some women view a resurgence of the Taliban or other conservative groups as potentially catastrophic.

"It will ruin our life," said Shougoufa, 40, as she sorted through sequins and gold sparkles at the bazaar in the city of Pul-e-Khumri in Afghanistan's north.

"I am a tailor and I need to come to the bazaar to buy these things," she said. "But if the Taliban come, I will not be able to come. Already we are hearing some girls cannot go to their work anymore."

In teachers' tea-break rooms, beauty-shop training sessions, bazaars and the privacy of their homes, young women worry their parents will marry them off early, so they will not be forced to marry Taliban.

In the Pashtun-dominated district of Taghob, east of Kabul, girls' schools have been closed and any teaching is done at home, the provincial education director said.

That does not trouble some local officials.

"Look, our main priority is to feed our people, to provide rest and to protect their lives," said Haji Farid, a member of parliament. "Why are people focusing on education and sending girls to school? Boys walk three, four, five kilometers to their school. How can a girl walk two, three, four kilometers? During a war you cannot send a girl beyond her door. No one can guarantee her honor. So it is hard to send your daughter to school."

In Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul, all unstable southern provinces, there are girls' schools open in the provincial capitals, but in outlying districts there are few, if any. In Zabul province, there are six schools for girls, but few families send their girls to school because of the fighting, said Muhammad Alam, acting head of the provincial education department.

Situation worsens

In Baghlan province, in northern Afghanistan, the situation for women has steadily worsened in the past year. Zarifi, the Women's Ministry representative, has endured assassination attempts and demonstrations against her work. Three months ago, a female member of the provincial council was paralyzed in an attack, and a woman was stabbed to death in the provincial capital this month.

By contrast, most of Kapisa province, which is northeast of Kabul, is peaceful. There is a mediation program in the capital to help women and girls when they face domestic violence. In the predominantly ethnically Tajik north there are large, lively schools for girls, where families even allow those who are married to complete high school.

Women's advocates are concerned that they are increasingly being shut out of political decisions. At an international conference in Kabul on July 20, President Hamid Karzai said nothing about how women's rights might be protected in negotiations.

The first meeting on negotiations, held by Karzai on July 22 with former leaders who had fought the Taliban, did not include any women, despite government pledges.

Although Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also has pledged that she will not desert Afghan women and that any deal with the Taliban that traded peace for women's rights was "a red line," women remain wary.

"Right now it's a big challenge for women to go to school and work, but at least according to our constitution and laws they have the right to do so," said Nargis Nehan, 31, an Afghan women's advocate.

"If the Taliban come back, by law women will be restricted and not allowed to leave their homes," she said, adding, "Maybe not everywhere, but in those districts where they are in power."

Constrained lives

Afghanistan's women have long led exceptionally constrained lives. The combination of a male-dominated tribal culture in which women have been often treated as little more than chattel, combined with a conservative practice of Islam and a nationwide lack of education, meant that long before the Taliban arrived in the mid-1990s, women had few opportunities beyond the home.

The mujahedeen leaders who forced out the Soviets in the late 1980s were as conservative as the Taliban in many places, keeping women at home to preserve family honor instead of educating them or integrating them into the government.

In Mahmud-i-Raqi, 12 teenage girls recently sat around a small trunk filled with beauticians' tools — combs, boxes of hair dye, scissors, nail polish, hair spray — and watched as the instructor demonstrated how to cut off split ends evenly.

In most places, this scene would not be a sign of women's liberation, but in this corner of Afghanistan, it meant a great deal. The girls, ages 15 to 17, had been allowed to come from their villages to the provincial capital; they will take home a trunk of beauty goods and can earn their own money in their homes by offering beauty services to women in their villages.

This chance at determining a little of their future is what they fear will be threatened if the Taliban return through a negotiated peace settlement.

"They will beat us and forbid us from this freedom, the freedom to come here, to this class; they will stop us from doing things," said Biboli, 16.

The greatest fear is that no one is listening, said Habiba Shamim, one of the teachers of the class. "Please," she said. "Carry our words to people."

YouTube - Casualties Rise for U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

YouTube - Casualties Rise for U.S. Troops in Afghanistan

US Congress war spend busts $1 trillion mark

US Congress war spend busts $1 trillion mark / World / Home - Morning Star

Two Afghan children look on as a US marine walks past a patrol in Helmand

US President Barack Obama has approved legislation to pay for his Afghanistan surge on the same day that three more US soldiers died in blasts in Helmand.

Congress passed the $59 billion (£38bn) Bill on Tuesday after Republicans stripped it of cash for domestic stimulus programmes.

The new war spending pushes the total Congress has allotted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond $1 trillion (£640bn).

Mr Obama had called for a swift passage of the Bill - which includes more than $33.5bn (£22bn) for the additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan - and to pay for other Pentagon "operational expenses."

The signing took place just days after the unauthorised release of thousands of classified documents about the war that revealed the gulf between Western war propaganda and the brutal reality on the ground.The leak has intensified public debate over the increasingly bloody conflict.

The three US soldiers who died on Thursday brought the death toll this month to at least 63 and surpassed the previous month's record as the deadliest for US forces in the war, now in its ninth year.

The violence continued unabated on Friday across the country as British and Afghan troops launched a new offensive in the Sayedebad area of Helmand to try to flush out or kill guerillas who have been attacking Nato and Afghan troops holed up in nearby Nad Ali and Marjah.

Nato has failed to solidify control of Marjah since 15,000 of its troops stormed into the agricultural community five months ago.

And, in Kabul, crowds threw stones and set fire to a jeep which was involved in a traffic accident in which two Afghan civilians were killed and two injured. The drivers, who fled the scene, were apparently Westerners.

Elsewhere, four Afghan civilians were killed and three injured when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in Zabul province.

In Kandahar a candidate in September's parliamentary election escaped assassination when a bomb planted on a motorcycle exploded.

The Interior Ministry said a woman and a child were killed and another child was wounded in the blast.

How We Must Fight | FrumForum

On July 29th, Vice President Biden confirmed what many of us have long feared and suspected — the Obama administration intends to cut and run in Afghanistan well before the mission there is complete.

How We Must Fight | FrumForum

We’re in Afghanistan for one express purpose: al Qaeda, [which is a] threat to the United States. Al Qaeda: it exists in those mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are not there to nation-build. We’re not out there deciding we’re gonna turn this into a Jeffersonian democracy and build that country. We made it clear, we’re not there for 10 years. We are there to defeat al Qaeda, which is a clear and present danger to the United States, [and to stop it from] operating out of that area.

The problem with Biden’s statement is that nation-building is a necessary and integral part of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency strategy; and counterinsurgencies typically take a long time to fight and to win. Indeed, according to General McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, counterinsurgencies typically take some 14 years to prosecute.
Moreover, despite what conservative critics like Ralph Peters say, nation-building isn’t some liberal do-gooder project that we do because it makes us feel good. We nation-build because before we can leave Afghanistan, we need indigenous Afghan security forces and governmental entities to whom we can entrust authority and responsibility.
Biden’s comments are extremely disconcerting because they show that he is fundamentally at odds with the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. The question is: does the Vice President speak for the commander-in-chief?
I say this because in a counterinsurgency, the objective is not to kill your way to victory. That’s simply not feasible, as General Petraeus himself has acknowledged. The objective, instead, is to secure the population and isolate the enemy. Because when the enemy is isolated and deprived of his means of support within the population, he ceases to be factor
Thus we nation-build.
We build schools, hospitals and indigenous local governing bodies. We build security forces and tribal and municipal councils. We build basic infrastructure — roads, irrigation networks, water and sewage treatment plants et al. And we build-up — and buck-up — our allies: those Afghans who are risking life and limb to work with us so as to free their country from the savage grip of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The problem with Biden’s so-called counterterrorism strategy is that it won’t work: because the fundamental problem in Afghanistan is political, not military.
The country lacks adequate security and effective governance. And the only way to remedy this problem is to wage a classic (and necessarily long-term) counterinsurgency campaign to restore adequate security and at least a minimal level of effective governance. Afghanistan is simply too geographically complex and diffuse, too decentralized and unwieldy, and too populated and tribal to think that killing a select group of bad guys there will neutralize its terrorist threat.
Of course, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick W. Kagan, has observed, the U.S. military learned this lesson in Iraq:

Perhaps the most important lesson of Iraq that is transportable to Afghanistan is this: It is impossible to conduct effective counterterrorism operations (i.e., targeting terrorist networks with precise attacks on key leadership nodes) in a fragile state without conducting effective counterinsurgency operations (i.e., protecting the population and using economic and political programs to build support for the government and resistance to insurgents and terrorists).

In fact, Kagan notes, a counterterrorism policy was tried in Iraq in 2006, before the surge, and it failed miserably.

U.S. Special Forces teams had complete freedom to act against al-Qaeda in Iraq, supported by around 150,000 regular U.S. troops, Iraqi military and police forces of several hundred thousand, and liberal airpower. We killed scores of key terrorist leaders, including the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in June 2006. But terrorist strength, violence, and control only increased over the course of that year. It was not until units already on the ground applied a new approach—a counterinsurgency approach—and received reinforcements that we were able to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq (even without killing its new leader).

Why, then, is Biden promoting a counterterrorism policy that is destined to fail? Does he know something about the president’s plans and intentions that Obama himself has not yet fully revealed?
Maybe so. Obama has said that the United States will continue to help the Afghan people for many years to come, but that “that is different from us having troops on the ground.”
No it’s not. The only ones who can provide the Afghan people with the type of economic and developmental assistance that Obama says he favors are the men and women of the United States military. And even if, miraculously, international aid agencies grow more willing to help Afghanistan, they most certainly will require the safety and security blanket of the U.S. military.
So why the rush to leave Afghanistan (or Iraq for that matter)? We’ve been in Germany and Japan, after all, for 65 years. What’s so bad about being in Afghanistan (or Iraq) for a decade or more?
The truth is that American military forces, forward deployed, are a stabilizing force for good in the world. And the idea of retreating back to fortress America is no longer tenable in an increasingly small and interdependent world.
Let’s do Afghanistan right. Let’s stabilize the country so that we never have to fight another war there. Otherwise we’ll be mired in an unending Afghan conflict that ultimately threatens the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan; and the results, then, truly could be catastrophic.

Obama Facing New Pressure From Left on Afghanistan

Obama Facing New Pressure From Left on Afghanistan | USA

It has been a difficult week for supporters of the war in Afghanistan.

NATO announced that six more U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for July to at least 66 and surpassing the previous month's record as the deadliest for American forces in the nearly nine-year-old war.

But the focus was on the secret military documents leaked by the Internet website WikiLeaks that highlighted the military difficulties in Afghanistan.

Longtime liberal critics of the war in Congress, like Democratic Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, took the opportunity to weigh in.

"I believe this war to be a tragic failure that continues to undermine rather than advance our national security interests," Woolsey said. "The American people are running out of patience, and with 114 members of the House [of Representatives] voting this week against the war spending supplemental [funding bill], Congress is beginning to catch up to the public."

Woolsey referred to a House vote on a war funding bill for Afghanistan and Iraq. The bill passed by a margin of 308 to 114, but 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans voted no. Last year on a similar bill, only 32 Democrats voted no.

Virginia Democratic Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia was initially a supporter of the war in Afghanistan, but no more.

"You have lost me, for whatever it is worth, in terms of the viability of this mission," he said.

Obama administration officials, from the president on down, condemned the leaks as reckless and dangerous. But they also said the material released by WikiLeaks will not undermine the mission in Afghanistan.

"These documents represent a mountain of raw data and individual impressions, most several years old, devoid of context or analysis," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said. "They do not represent official positions or policy, and they do not, in my view, fundamentally call into question the efficacy of our current strategy in Afghanistan and its prospects for success."

President Obama finds himself relying more than ever on Republican support to prosecute the war in Afghanistan, even as Republicans seek to block his agenda on most other issues.

Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have vowed to keep the pressure on Mr. Obama on Afghanistan, as he did in a recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

"We cannot afford defeat in Afghanistan," he said. "The moral effects around the planet, the increase in morale of the radical jihadists and the damage to western civilization will be incalculable. Great powers should be careful about starting, but once they start they should be relentless and implacable about winning."

Gingrich, by the way, is one of a growing number of prominent Republicans considering a run for president in 2012.

Opinion polls suggest public support for the war in Afghanistan has slipped in recent months.

The latest Quinnipiac University poll found 43 percent support the president's handling of the conflict, while 46 percent disapprove.

But the polling on Afghanistan is complicated. That same Quinnipiac poll also found that by a margin of 59 to 34 percent, Americans believe that preventing terrorists from using Afghanistan as a base of operations is still a worthwhile goal for the United States.

On the other hand, only 44 percent believed the war is worth the cost in a recent ABC News Washington Post poll, down from 56 percent in March of last year.

"And so the question is, even if it is real successful, is it worth the cost and effort and money and so forth? And I think a lot of that previous support is turning to, if not opposition, at least to a sort of weariness and discontent," said John Mueller, who monitors public opinion on the war at Ohio State University.

Some analysts predict that the discontent among liberal Democrats over the war will grow in the months ahead.

"I think Obama is going to feel under great political pressure from his political left to at least have a token withdrawal next summer," said political expert Tom DeFrank of the New York Daily News.

The Obama administration would like to begin a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by July of next year, depending on circumstances on the ground. Pressure from the president's liberal Democratic base is likely to have an impact on that decision, says former assistant secretary of state Teresita Schaffer.

"The administration has a political problem. This war is increasingly unpopular," she said. "You've got congressional elections coming up in a few months, another presidential election coming up in 2012. Obama's got a problem with the Democrats. He's got a different kind of problem the Republicans, and I think there is every reason to think that Obama would like for the build-down to be meaningful."

But in terms of this congressional election year, public opinion polls show that the war in Afghanistan still ranks well below the economy and jobs as a top issue for U.S. voters.

Move America toward the exit in Afghanistan | Seattle Times Newspaper

Move America toward the exit in Afghanistan | Seattle Times Newspaper

ALL of the frustration and futility of U.S. military and political efforts at the ground level in Afghanistan were pointedly revealed by thousands of leaked documents.

President Obama has an extraordinary opportunity to speed up America's departure from Afghanistan.

The question is less about what the public learned from a six-year span of documents published by WikiLeaks, and more about what Congress already knew of the conditions the documents describe. How well-informed have our lawmakers been, and how skeptical have their questions been about a war that was alternately launched, ignored and reinvigorated with a surge.

Congress has spent at least $300 billion on a war that was kept out of the budget until Obama took office. Lawmakers rarely articulate a reason for being in Afghanistan. One can safely assume the bloodshed and expense would have drawn more attention if a war tax were imposed or a military draft was conscripting young people.

Political hubris and extraordinary war profits have sustained a conflict that is losing support at home and never enjoyed much support in the region, as the leaked documents remind us. U.S. forces cannot rely on the loyalty of the Afghan army, police or a genetically corrupt central government. In the face of foreign occupiers and lethal confrontations, Afghans stay close to the clan, community and religious affiliations they know best.

Pakistan is not a reliable or trustworthy ally. Any allegiance to the red, white and blue will only last until the latest $500 million check clears. The Pakistani intelligence service, long thought to provide safe haven for the Taliban, apparently does so with impunity, according to those published leaks.

The same reports suggest the Taliban have heat-seeking missiles, not unlike the weaponry the U.S. provided the same Taliban insurgents to take down Soviet aircraft. Bush administration officials worried in 2001 about the reappearance of those missiles.

The U.S. is trying to win over a culture it does not understand and wants us out of its homeland.

Fighting global terrorism is a different assignment than trying to remake one country in our Western image. Exiting Afghanistan does not preclude efforts to feed and educate its population, promote democracy or wean its economy off drug profits.

Certainly the most repugnant argument to stay in Afghanistan — or any unpopular conflict — is that leaving demeans the sacrifice of fallen soldiers. The intention is a vulgar, desperate attempt to intimidate and preclude debate.

Respect for the willingness of brave men and women to put themselves in harm's way incurs a deep obligation not to squander their courage in the name of arrogance and greed.

America cannot afford the blood and treasure consumed by the Afghan war. President Obama serves the nation best with a swift, orderly departure.

Jewish Group Opposes Muslim Center Near Ground Zero - NYTimes.com

Jewish Group Opposes Muslim Center Near Ground Zero - NYTimes.com

An influential Jewish organization on Friday announced its opposition to a proposed Islamic center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan, intensifying a fierce national debate about the limits of religious freedom and the meaning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The decision by the group, the Anti-Defamation League, touched off angry reactions from a range of religious groups, which argued that the country would show its tolerance and values by welcoming the center near the site where radical Muslims killed about 2,750 people.

But the unexpected move by the ADL, a mainstream group that has denounced what it saw as bigoted attacks on plans for the Muslim center, could well be a turning point in the battle over the project.

In New York, where ground zero has slowly blended back into the fabric of the city, government officials appear poised to approve plans for the sprawling complex, which would have as many as 15 stories and would house a prayer space, a performing arts center, a pool and a restaurant.

But around the country opposition is mounting, fueled in part by Republican leaders and conservative pundits. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches.

The complex’s rapid evolution from a local zoning dispute into a national referendum highlights the intense and unsettled emotions that still surround the World Trade Center site nine years after the attacks.

To many New Yorkers, especially in Manhattan, it is a construction zone, passed during the daily commute or glimpsed through office windows. To some outside of the city, though, it stands as a hallowed battlefield that must be shielded and memorialized.

Those who are fighting the project argue that building a house of Muslim worship so close to ground zero is at best an affront to the families of those who died there and at worst an act of aggression that would, they say, mark the place where radical Islam achieved a blow against the United States.

“The World Trade Center is the largest loss of American life on our soil since the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And we have not rebuilt it, which drives people crazy. And in that setting, we are told, why don’t we have a 13-story mosque and community center?”

He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.”

Several family members of victims at the World Trade Center have weighed in against the plan, saying it would desecrate what amounts to a graveyard. “When I look over there and see a mosque, it’s going to hurt,” C. Lee Hanson, whose son, Peter, was killed in the attacks, said at a recent public hearing. “Build it someplace else.”

Those who support it seem mystified and flustered by the heated opposition. They contend that the project, with an estimated cost of $100 million, is intended to span the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim, not widen it.

Oz Sultan, the programming director for the center, said the complex was based on Jewish community centers and Y.M.C.A.’s in Manhattan. It is to have a board composed of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders and is intended to create a national model of moderate Islam.

“We are looking to build bridges between faiths,” Mr. Sultan said in an interview.

City officials, particularly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have forcefully defended the project on the grounds of religious freedom, saying that government has no place dictating where a house of worship is located. The local community board has given overwhelming backing to the project, and the city’s landmarks commission is expected to do the same on Tuesday.

“What is great about America, and particularly New York, is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us?” Mr. Bloomberg asked recently.

“Democracy is stronger than this,” he added. “And for us to just say no is just, I think — not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.”

Still, the arguments against the Muslim center appear to be resonating. Polling shows that a majority of Americans oppose building it near ground zero.

YouTube - Pakistan's UN Ambassador on WikiLeaks

YouTube - Pakistan's UN Ambassador on WikiLeaks

Pakistan likes Al Qaeda more than America - CSMonitor.com

Pakistan likes Al Qaeda more than America - CSMonitor.com

The Pakistan Taliban may be responsible for attacks that have killed more than 1,000 civilians this year. The US may be in the midst of providing the country with $7.5 billion in aid. But average Pakistanis like the United States less than Al Qaeda and just a little more than the Taliban.

Related Stories

• Blog: Bombing of packed Pakistan mosque likely to further inflame region
• Half of Afghanistan Taliban leadership arrested in Pakistan
• Wikileaks reinforces the claim that Pakistan supports the Taliban

Roughly 17 percent of Pakistanis have a favorable view of the US in a new poll by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, while 59 percent described the US as an "enemy" of Pakistan. The Taliban's numbers? About 15 percent view the group favorably (up from 10 percent a year ago). Al Qaeda pips both groups, with 18 percent of Pakistanis viewing the group favorably, up from 9 percent a year ago.
The survey was conducted among 2,000 Pakistanis from April 13-28, 2010.
The findings are likely to add more fuel to the domestic debate over whether American largess is advancing US interests in the region. A vast trove of United States government documents released by the website Wikileaks this week added more evidence for the belief that Pakistan supports the Taliban inside Afghanistan, leaving many Americans wondering if some of the aid to Pakistan isn't ending up in the hands of Taliban operatives trying to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan. Capturing the mood, influential US humorist Jon Stewart said this week: "We have ostensibly put a hit out on ourselves. This is insanity."
In Pakistan, opposition to conditions attached to the $7.5 billion aid package and ongoing concern about civilian causalities in US drone strikes aimed at Al Qaeda leaders are major factors fueling anti-Americanism, says Christine Fair, a political scientist at Georgetown University.

Blaming Blackwater, India

A surge of conspiracy theories that absolve the Taliban for recent sectarian attacks and instead blame outside forces may help explain the decreased perception of a threat from the Taliban.
“The narrative is these attacks are being carried out by India or Blackwater,” says Professor Fair, referring to the controversial US security contractor now known as Xe. And ordinary Pakistanis are dismayed by what they see as increasingly close US ties with rival India. About 53 percent of Pakistanis described India as the greatest threat to the country, while 23 percent see the Taliban as the greatest threat.
In the Main Market shopping area of Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural hub, traders and shoppers are almost unanimous in voicing dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.
“What kind of friends are the Americans? They are our false friends and in reality are trying to tear us apart. That’s why they are maintaining good relations with India who back the Taliban, while at the same time giving our leaders money to fight the Taliban,” says Muhammad Yousuf, a retired shopkeeper, while sipping tea after Friday prayers.
Several people express the view that the Taliban were not behind attacks on two-Ahmadi sect mosques in May that killed more than 100 people, or the attack on the Data Ganj Baksh shrine in Lahore in July that killed some 40 people.

Majority of Pakistanis still consider India as a threat: Poll

Majority of Pakistanis still consider India as a threat: Poll

Though terror groups continue to strike in their country, a majority of Pakistanis still consider India as a major threat, view America as an enemy and are far less concerned about Taliban and al-Qaeda.

While Pakistanis express serious concerns about the US, they have also deep worries about neighbour and longtime rival India than extremist groups within Pakistan, according to the prestigious Pew Research Centre opinion poll carried out inside Pakistan.

"When asked which is the greatest threat to their country - India, the Taliban or al-Qaeda - slightly more than half of Pakistanis (53 per cent) choose India, compared with 23 per cent for Taliban and just 3 per cent for al-Qaeda," it said.

However, despite the deep-seated tensions between India and Pakistan, most Pakistanis want better ties with India.

Roughly seven-in-ten (72 per cent ) said it is important for relations with India to improve and about three-quarters support increased trade with India and further talks between the two rivals, it said.

Leak of secret cables feared

Leak of secret cables feared

WASHINGTON - THE US State Department expressed concern on Friday that secret diplomatic cables might have been leaked to the WikiLeaks website in addition to a mass of military files on Afghanistan.

'There were a handful of cables that came out among this tranche of (92,000 military files published online), maybe five or six,' State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters.

'So that infers that, yes, there may well have been some State Department cables in whatever was transmitted to WikiLeaks,' he said. 'We can't verify that.' 'Do we have concerns about what (State Department documents) might be out there? Yes, we do,' Mr Crowley said.

'When we provide our analysis of situations in key countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, we distribute these across the inter-agency, including to military addresses,' Mr Crowley said, adding that some are classified documents. 'So is the potential there that State Department documents have been compromised? Yes,' Crowley said.

He said the State Department had the same interest as the US military in protecting sources it uses for information about what is happening in the world and for formulating policies. 'If those sources are compromised, we lose valuable information and sources. In many cases, human sources can be put at risk,' Mr Crowley said.

He said he does not believe the State Department has determined what documents might have been downloaded and potentially leaked, but expressed hope that WikiLeaks would not release any further documents it might have. He said the State Department had sent messages to WikiLeaks - apparently to find out if it has additional documents and prevent them from being published - but had received no reply. -- AFP

White House: Not given access to documents - UPI.com

White House: Not given access to documents - UPI.com

WASHINGTON, July 30 (UPI) -- A claim that U.S. officials were offered a chance to review stolen military documents before they were posted on the WikiLeaks site is untrue, officials say.
"It's absolutely false that WikiLeaks contacted the White House and offered to have them look through the documents," Marine Corps spokesman Col. David Lapan said in a Defense Department release.
The Web site published tens of thousands of classified documents that detailed field reports from Afghanistan and an alleged Pakistani partnership with the Taliban. Also published were documents with identifying information on Afghan informants who work or have worked with the U.S. military, the release said.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the White House was contacted prior to the release of the documents for help in reviewing them to make sure innocent names were not released. White House officials declined, Assange said.
"We never had the opportunity to look at any of the documents in advance to determine anything," Lapan said. "The documents were brought to the attention of the White House, but no copies of documents, or opportunities to review were given."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Defense Department has asked the FBI to assist in investigating the leak of the classified material.

WikiLeaks Media Reaction: A Frenzy Of Frantic Yawning Over Nine-Year Long War (VIDEO)

WikiLeaks Media Reaction: A Frenzy Of Frantic Yawning Over Nine-Year Long War (VIDEO)

WikiLeaks Mastermind Julian Assange: Evil Genius or Visionary Hacker?

WikiLeaks Mastermind Julian Assange: Evil Genius or Visionary Hacker?

As they said about John Galt in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged:" Who is Julian Paul Assange?

He is, of course, the lean, tall, and pale 39-year-old Australian master hacker at the white-hot center of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks and, after revealing thousands of secret Afghan battlefield reports this week, the subject of investigation by U.S. authorities.

By now we've heard quite a bit about the Assange mystique and his cutesy named web site. WikiLeaks devotes itself to obtaining and posting secret government documents and information from unnamed sources. With WikiLeaks' heightened profile, stories about Assange have appeared recently in several publications, on TV, on the Internet, on cable, yet he remains one of the most elusive and enigmatic figures of the moment.

With a handful of unpaid volunteers working in secret in remote places like Iceland, Assange -- with a backpack carrying not a laptop but a desktop computer -- has obtained classified material that cast a shadow on the American military, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He rattled official Washington and its allies and drew the world's attention with the disclosure this week of 76,000 leaked classified documents from Afghanistan on its website and in the pages of The New York Times, the Guardian in Britain and the magazine Der Spiegel in Germany.

In a weeklong series of press conferences and interviews from London, the publicity-savvy Assange, donning a professorial tone and Zen-like demeanor, contended that the documents showed that perhaps thousands of war crimes might have been committed in Afghanistan.

"It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime," he said. "That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material." That is a major reason, he suggested, why he released the documents.

The Pentagon struck back. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday called the leak a breach the military would "aggressively investigate and prosecute." Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his sources are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier, or that of an Afghan family."

Assange, who is reportedly working and living in northern Europe, has said he had no plans to travel to the United States for fear of being detained. U.S. government lawyers are reportedly looking into the possibility of charging WikiLeaks and Assange with a crime, like "inducing or serving as co-conspirators in violations of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national security information,'' according to The New York Times.

On Thursday, U.S. authorities said they had found evidence linking Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Crescent, Okla., to the leak of the Afghan war reports. Manning was charged in July with illegally obtaining State Department cables and disseminating a secret video, which he is believed to have turned over to WikiLeaks, showing a U.S. helicopter firing on and killing a group of civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad. Manning, an Army intelligence specialist, has been held in Kuwait and is being moved to Quantico, Va., where he will be held and may face court martial.

The swirl surrounding WikiLeaks has increased the media focus on Assange.

Julian Paul Assange (pronounced AH-SANJ), an obsessive hacker and computer master, is a citizen of the globe, an itinerant warrior of the cyber age, a philosopher and visionary of the encrypted universe. He has been called "The Robin Hood of Hacking," more a physicist and mathematician, the two disciplines he studied at the University of Melbourne, than a swashbuckling James Bond. His mission -- "to maximize the flow of information to maximize the amount of action leading to just reform" -- may seem grandiose and quixotic but he is said to attract a small following of volunteers and donors.

In a relatively short time, he has fashioned a persona tailored-made for a media fascinated with celebrity. His life seems to be an accumulation of charming and intriguing anecdotes. Like a character out of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," he is a stealth operator, living secretively and pursuing his goal single-mindedly. He moves under the radar around the world, though he seems to favor the icy countries of northern Europe.

But he's no European Viking. He's a product of the Asian tropics. He was born in 1971 in Townsville in northeastern Australia. He was partly home-schooled and partly not schooled at all. By the time he was 14, he and his mother, a painter, actress and artist's model, had reportedly moved 37 times.

His parents met at a protest against the Vietnam War. According to The Guardian, his father studied architecture. But the couple apparently did not marry and split when Julian was very young. His mother then married a theater director. They moved often, and when Julian was 8 years old, his mother left her husband and began dating a musician with whom she had a child, a boy. That relationship, according to a profile of Assange in The New Yorker, became abusive and they separated. Afraid that the musician would take away her younger son, she took Julian and the child and disappeared. Julian moved from city to city with her from the age of 11 to 16.

A computer-smart teenager, Assange began hacking and assumed the code name Mendax, from the Latin splendide mendax, or "nobly untruthful." He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives and, according to The New Yorker, they successfully broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including Pentagon networks. Websites did not exist yet -- it was 1987 -- but hackers could disrupt computer networks and telecom systems. Assange was in his element.

But his life was about to change. At 18, he fell in love with a 16-year-old in Melbourne and married her after she became pregnant. They had a son. But like his own mother, he couldn't settle down to a domestic, ordinary life. Hacking remained a grand passion.

A few years later, in 1991, when Assange was 20, he and a few fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian telecom company. He was caught, charged and eventually tried, but a sympathetic judge let him off with a fine. While he awaited trial for three years, his wife left him, taking their son. He became so depressed he checked himself into a hospital, moved in with his mother, and slept in parks. But the worst time of his life came later, during his eight-year custody battle for his son. In 1999, a custody agreement was finally worked out. By then his hair, which had been dark brown, had turned completely white.

In 2006, Assange founded WikiLeaks. He wanted to use the website as "an instrument of information warfare.'' With a fervor that would become a trademark, Assange didn't sleep for days while building the site, and he wouldn't eat. The website works in mysterious ways. It is hosted on a Swedish Internet server. Submissions to WikiLeaks are routed through a cyber maze that crosses in and out of several nations. Secrecy is at a premium.

Assange and his volunteers gather documents and videos that governments and agencies keep secret and publish them on WikiLeaks.org. The site is only three-and-a-half years old but it has already made a name for itself, publishing online an archive of secret information, including Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account and the Standard Operating Procedures at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo, Cuba. In the spring, WikiLeaks released a secret U.S. helicopter cockpit video showing American soldiers killing at least 18 people, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad in 2007. The video ignited a debate about U.S. conduct in the war.

Then on Sunday came "The War Logs," one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history. Now WikiLeaks and Assange are famous. Assange said this week that he was expecting a "substantial increase in submissions" from whistleblowers.

Now that he is a celebrity, Assange may find it harder to escape the media's scrutiny. For the time being he is presumably moving quietly from place to place, carrying his desktop computer in a rucksack, his clothes in a bag, finding shelter somewhere far from prying eyes, staying up all night, his fingers busily tapping on the keyboard, decrypting the next trove of secrets.

Much bigger than the Vietnam leak - Hindustan Times

Much bigger than the Vietnam leak - Hindustan Times

Last weekend, WikiLeaks.org published its gold edition — the ‘Afghan War Diary’, a collection of 91,000 documents snitched from US military networks. They reveal that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) maintains an assassination squad, that collateral damage is seriously under-reported,

that Pakistan helps the US with one hand and the Taliban with the other, that the Inter-Services Intelligence ordered the 2008 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul and paid blood money for the killing of Indian contractors in Afghanistan.

Amazing stuff, but isn’t it common knowledge? It can amaze only if it is expedient to feign amazement. And so an amazed US State Department gave India a self-righteous ‘heads up’ on the developments and clamoured for Pakistan to act on 26/11. Pakistan was urbanely amazed that anyone could suspect it of chicanery. And a small army of retired colonels who surfaced to harrumph about security breaches and data theft was amazed at the idea that media leaks could change the course of a war.

Actually, they were right. The Afghan war is on an unalterable trajectory. The only difference that the leaks can make is to precipitate troop withdrawal by depriving President Obama of support for the war. Otherwise, they can only force the players to make polite noises and keep up appearances, such as giving India a “heads up”, ironically alerting us to the validity of our own allegations about Pakistan using militants as instruments of foreign policy.

But the diary does confirm our worst suspicions, and we can now hazard the trajectory of the war. It was already clear that the US would withdraw at some time because Washington’s war is on terrorism, not Afghanistan. After the leaks, it is equally clear that the US cannot wipe out the Afghan Taliban, fairly strong adversaries who can win by surviving, like cockroaches survive holocaust. And if Pakistan is maintaining unofficial links with them, it knows that after Uncle Sam goes home, the Taliban will control Afghanistan. It’s certainly a heads up for India, but it’s not the one so kindly proffered by the US.

WikiLeaks has published only a portion of the damaging material at its disposal. It’s a developing story, so it’s a good idea to understand this whistleblower network.

It’s a Cold War-style dead drop, a point where anyone can leave information anonymously, which is then made public on the web. It is a mysteriously reclusive but otherwise regular international organisation based in Sweden and Iceland. It’s front man, Julian Assange, affects an air of fugitive victimhood which the media loves but which harms professional perceptions of the validity of his work.

But there is nothing mysterious about him. He is an Australian hacker with a libertarian ethic who has 31 charges against him. That looks like serial carelessness but let’s not be judgmental because with WikiLeaks, he has broken new ground.

Its revelations are being compared with the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of the Vietnam War leaked in 1971, but that’s like comparing Stilton with processed cheese. The Pentagon Papers provided pre-digested analysis. WikiLeaks.org gives you a whiff of the stink of war — raw logs straight from the military’s data churn. To understand a dirty war steered by spin doctors, it’s prescribed reading.

Pratik Kanjilal is publisher of The Little Magazine

The views expressed by the author are personal.