WIKILEAKS IS NO SURPRISE TO TTPERS

Over this past weekend, the Web organization WikiLeaks made available to selected news organizations copies of nearly 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan.

The vast majority, according to the accounts published Monday (7/26) in the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel (the Mirror), are reports, classified at the relatively low level of "Secret," from American junior officers and non-commissioned officers.

There is little in these accounts that is news to those who have been paying attention.  But the flap over them may alert many who have not been following the situation closely to the fundamental flaws in U.S. policy.

The chief "revelation" is that Pakistan‘s CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence agency, has been providing massive assistance to the Taliban. 

"The one good thing to come out of this latest leak…is that it could spell the end of Pakistan‘s repulsive double game," said former Wall Street Journal editor Tunku Varadarajan.  "This is a game in which that country takes billions of dollars of our aid money…and then blithely, devilishly, mendaciously stabs us in the back by arming, protecting, financing, hiding and advising the same forces against whom this country is at war.  We pay them money so they can help our enemies kill us."

For readers of To the Point, this is not news, for you learned about this long ago.

Further,  Monday’s stories said nothing about what TTPers also know –  the massive corruption of Ahmad Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, or of Ahmad’s close ties to the Taliban.

"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk," National Security Adviser James Jones said.

The administration has a right to be upset.  It shouldn’t be up to news organizations to decide what ought or ought not to be secret. 

"Clearly a Pandora’s Box has been opened," said Gabriel Schoenfeld, who writes often about intelligence matters.  "We shall no doubt soon see the consequences."

But it’s also true governments sometimes classify things as secret just to avoid embarrassment.  If we suffer harm from Monday’s document dump, it likely will be in disclosure of how we learned of Pakistani complicity with the Taliban (sources and methods) than the fact of it, which has been one of the world’s worst kept secrets.

It’s unclear how WikiLeaks obtained the documents.  But last month the Army arrested Specialist Bradley Manning for having provided a classified video from Iraq to the Web site.

WikiLeaks is based in Sweden, beyond the reach of U.S. law.  But the government can, and should, throw the book at Mr. Manning.  It’s probable Mr. Manning had accomplices.  Identifying and punishing them should be a top priority.

But, as Mr. Schoenfeld notes, "now that all this information is in the public domain, it can certainly encourage a better informed public discussion of the war.  If we are going to pay a price for too much openness, we should try to reap whatever benefits we can as well."

If the revelations force the Obama administration to confront Pakistan about its duplicity, the leaks will, on balance, have been beneficial.

If the revelations cause the administration to bypass President Karzai and provide aid directly to the ethnic groups who together comprise 58 percent of the population of Afghanistan and who occupy most of its territory, we may actually prevail.

Jack Wheeler thinks the solution to Afghanistan is to return the various ethnic groups within it to the nations from which the British took them..  The Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Turkmen and Balochs resent domination by the Pashtuns, be they the Taliban or the Karzai brothers.

This might also be accomplished de facto through decentralization.  Gen. David Petraeus, our new commander in Afghanistan, seems to understand this.  He’s seeking to build up local militias.  President Karzai is resisting.

We can prevail in Afghanistan…if we can distinguish our friends from our enemies.  The Pakistanis and Mr. Karzai are not our friends.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.