The Guardian published a number of letters Thursday applauding Wikileaks's publication of its Afghan War Diary.[1] -- The Wall Street Journal had a different view. -- Taking an unabashedly ad hominem approach, the Journal posted an editorial that will appear in Thursday's edition attacking both Wikileaks and the papers that collaborated with the publication of the trove of documents about the Afghan War.[2] -- Like most of U.S. mainstream media, the Journal dismissed the 92,000 documents as containing "no big lies about the war and, judging from what we've seen so far, no small ones either." -- (Apparently its editorialists haven't looked very hard.) -- COMMENT: There's something repulsive in a newspaper that regularly supports policies that cost many their lives and that devastate entire societies pretending to worry about the safety of those who collaborate with the U.S. military....
1.
LETTERS
Guardian (London)
July 29, 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/29/lessons-of-afghan-history
a.
Like Geoff Simmons (Letters, 27 July), we applaud WikiLeaks for exposing the bloody war in Afghanistan, and the Guardian for publishing it (Report, 26 July). The U.K. affection for U.S. warmongering goes hand in hand with Cameron's further development of a war economy (Report, 25 July). Is this why the government wants to end universal jurisdiction, which allows the arrest of suspected war criminals regardless of where their crimes were committed? To end wars and economies based on war, we need brave insiders – like Bradley Manning, the U.S. intelligence officer who allegedly blew the whistle, and Joe Glenton, the first soldier in Europe just released from prison for refusing to serve in Afghanistan.
But our responsibility outside is to protect whistleblowers and refuseniks. To his credit WikiLeaks founder Assange has hired lawyers to defend Manning (Report, 21 June). There are many other ways to show support. Pick one.
Michael Kalmanovitz
www.refusingtokill.net
b.
Having lived for the past four years on the Pakistan border with Afghanistan, I was pleased to see details of the "true Afghan war" published. From the Pakistani side the worst aspect is the U.S.'s violations of international rules with its unmanned drones which relentlessly kill civilians who are promptly labelled militants. This, plus the fact that the Pakistani military and ISI created the Taliban at the West's behest to fight the Russians, explains Pakistan's seeming ambivalence. On both sides of the border the issue is simple: when will the NATO forces quit? This will be the pre-condition for any talks with the Taliban.
Dr. David Gosling
Cambridge
c.
With the furor caused by the leaked U.S. documents on Afghanistan, it may go unnoticed that the 130th anniversary of the battle of Maiwand, which took place during the second Afghan war on 27 July 1880, occurred this week.
We have forgotten this battle, but it remains of huge significance to the Pashtun tribes in southern Afghanistan. The clash took place between a 2,500 British force under General Burrows operating out of Kandahar, and an Afghan force led by Ayub Khan.
Although the Afghans suffered high casualties, the final result was a rout for the British army that lost more than 950 men on their retreat back to Kandahar.
Coupled with the total annihilation of the 6,000 strong British army retreating from Kabul en route to Kandahar in 1842 in the first Afghan war, history tells the Pashtuns that foreign invaders are vulnerable -- something the Russians too learned to their considerable cost.
It's a pity politicians did not read their history before venturing into the hostile, fiercely independent Helmand and blundering into the fourth Afghan war.
Incidentally, there was a third Afghan war in 1919 -- totally forgotten by us too.
Geoff Cowling
Vice-consul Kabul 1970-73, diplomatic service 1966-2005
d.
Simon Jenkins ("A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan," 28 July) is absolutely right in his assessment of the Afghanistan disaster. However, there are a number of questions that he does not address. Why was it that, when anyone "who visited Kabul in the last eight years knew that a Western war of occupation would end in tears," most of the media continued reproducing the official line that the war was a success. Related to this is the question of how, after the Iraq catastrophe, Labor was able to get away with the dispatch of troops to Afghanistan in 2006 and involve us so quickly in another American war. They achieved this by simply denying it was a war until it was too late, a lie as despicable as the earlier weapons of mass destruction scam.
John Newsinger
Professor of modern history, Bath Spa University
e.
Simon Jenkins makes some persuasive points about the conflict in Afghanistan. However, some of his references to the Vietnam war are a little wide of the mark. The idea that "American citizens withdrew their consent" from the war after seeing it on TV is an outmoded one. Public support for the Vietnam war was shaken by the communist Tet offensive of 1968, but recovered under President Nixon with his policy of cutting U.S. troop numbers. Beginning with Daniel Hallin's The Uncensored War, most recent scholarship tends to play down the impact of media coverage on public opinion. Jenkins also claims that the Pentagon papers in 1971 "revealed the deception of the Johnson and Nixon governments" during the war. In fact, the version of the Pentagon papers that was leaked in 1971 related only to events between 1945 and 1967, two years before Nixon took office.
Professor John Dumbrell
Durham University
f.
The leaks about Afghanistan are a graphic illustration of why David Miliband cannot lead Labor to victory in a general election. Iraq and Afghanistan will never go away. Miliband is identified with both the discredited Blair and the unfortunate Brown, and the wars will never be exorcised since they are not just expensive and unpopular but amoral. Iraq was condemned by both the Anglican and Catholic churches as an unjust war. To start a war that kills hundreds [sic] of innocent people cannot be justified by pointing to the evil of others. In Afghanistan the original justification for war, the capture of Osama bin Laden, has long been exposed. Now the leaks of allied malpractice open up years of accusation for Cameron and Clegg to exploit.
Graham Taylor
London
g.
Given Britain's high ideals and profound regret over the unintended killing of innocents by the allied troops in the fog of war, is it not time to build a national war memorial in memory of the Innocent Civilian?
Bill Wolmuth
London
2.
Review & outlook
WIKILEAKS 'BASTARDS'
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395500694117006.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Julian Assange, the editor of the WikiLeaks website that on Monday released some 92,000 classified military documents, has told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that he "loved crushing bastards." We wonder if the "bastards" he has in mind include the dozens of Afghan civilians named in the document dump as U.S. military informants. Their lives, as well as those of their entire families, are now at terrible risk of Taliban reprisal.
The past decade has seen more than its share of debates about the government's right to secrecy, the public's right to disclosure, and where the line between them should be drawn: Think warrantless wiretaps, Swift bank codes and terror financing, Valerie Plame, Judy Miller. We've had our say on all of these issues.
But the WikiLeaks story is a new and troubling event. Our initial reaction was that the documents expose no big lies about the war and, judging from what we've seen so far, no small ones either. They reveal nothing that wasn't already widely known about Iranian and Pakistani support for the Taliban. In other words, their value in terms of the public's right to know is de minimis.
But the closer we and others have looked at the documents, it's clear that the WikiLeaks dump does reveal a great deal about the military's methods, sources, tactics and protocols of communication. Such details are of little interest to the public at large, and they are unlikely to change many minds about the conduct, or wisdom, of the war. But they are of considerable interest to America's avowed enemies and strategic competitors such as Russia and China.
"If I had gotten this trove on the Taliban or al Qaeda, I would have called this priceless," says former CIA director Michael Hayden. "If I'm head of the Russian intelligence, I'm getting my best English speakers and saying: 'Read every document, and I want you to tell me, how good are these guys? What are their approaches, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their blind spots?'"
In his defense, Mr. Assange dismisses concerns about harm to U.S. national security, calling it ridiculous. That may be his right as an Australian national, although Australia deploys some 1,500 troops to Afghanistan and has lost more than two dozen men in combat. But Mr. Assange also says he takes threats to individual safety seriously, and he boasts that he has withheld or edited thousands of documents as a precaution against potential harm.
If so, he hasn't done a very good job of it. Yesterday, the Times of London noted that "in just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, The Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to U.S. forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers' names."
The newspaper goes on to note that "named Afghans offered information accusing others of being Taliban. In one case from 2007, a senior official accuses named figures in the government of corruption. In another from 2007, a report describes using a middleman to talk to an alleged Taliban commander who is identified. '[X] said that he would be killed if he got caught interacting with any coalition forces, which is why he hides when we go into [Y].'" The deletions here were done by the London Times, not WikiLeaks.
Perhaps the various countries that host WikiLeaks' servers can provide these informers and their entire families with refugee status now that their lives are in jeopardy. We'd say something similar about the New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel, which coordinated publication of the documents with Mr. Assange. The Times has made a show of seeking to corroborate the information it published, and to delete information the paper believed was especially sensitive (including the names of Afghan informants). It went so far as to urge Mr. Assange not to publish certain documents.
We don't believe in prior restraint, but it is worth asking whether the Times, the Guardian or Der Spiegel are really serving the public, much less allied security interests, in validating Mr. Assange's methods by flying in publishing formation with him. "I don't know, and I'll bet they [WikiLeaks] don't know, if publication of this mass of material is in some ways genuinely harmful to national security," Floyd Abrams, the well-known First Amendment lawyer, told the *Journal* yesterday. "That's one of my problems with their modus operandi."
Mr. Abrams went on to defend the behavior of the Times, which he credited for urging Mr. Assange not to publish certain documents. However, years after the Times exposed the Swift financing operation -- an act we criticized at the time -- we have still found no public benefit from that report. The most notable consequence is that Europe stopped cooperating with the U.S. on the program.
The Pentagon now says it is aggressively pursuing the source of the leak, and we hope the leaker is found and punished. As for Mr. Assange, governments should not be in the business of prosecuting publishers, a la Britain's Official Secrets Act. But publishers should also understand that their rights to publish depend in part on publics that believe their media are doing a public service.
If American voters come to believe that newspapers or websites are cavalier about putting U.S. soldiers or allies at risk against our enemies, politicians will follow the public mood. The press will put its own freedom in jeopardy.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
