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.