A massive new leak by Wikileaks of more than 90,000 pages of classified materials covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009 dominates the front page of the New York Times today, one of the outlets to receive the papers along with The Guardian and Der Spiegel.
The Times' initial report gives the basic overview:
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal....
The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001....
The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.
• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.
The White House has condemned the leak and in a statement from national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, vows: "These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people."
With an American public becoming increasingly impatient with the ongoing war, which has been ill-defined from it's outset when the Bush administration abandoned the pursuit of bin Laden, and now the release of these documents will bring that conversation front and center. But that will be only if Atrios's prediction doesn't come true. The conversation about this should not be over the leak itself, but what it reveals about this decade-long war.
We'll be writing more about this critical story as we have time to settle in after Netroots Nation and read through the masses of information available. In the meantime, the Times has devoted a large section of its site to the documents.