WikiLeaks, the Pentagon and the War in Afghanistan |

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


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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

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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'".

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• 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.