Tinmore, you got ahead of me. Been following this all day:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26isi.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
The War Logs: Reaction to Disclosure of Military Documents on Afghan War - At War Blog - NYTimes.com
The New York Times said:
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 drones 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 Afghanistans 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.
There's a series of problems and questions over it:
1) Is it a good thing for Wikileaks to be releasing this information?
2) Is Pakistan just incompetent/unable to deal with the Taliban and its internal sectors allied with the Taliban or is it actually
aiding them?
3) Is there really any chance to "win" in Afghanistan?
What these documents show is that this war is developing in the most complex of manners. It's not in any way unlikely that segments of Pakistani intelligence is actively aiding efforts of the Taliban, though I would definitely say that it is not official government policy to
condone it (though probably unofficial government policy to sort-of, kind-of quietly allow it to happen).
The key thing to understand here is that Pakistan is a very young and underdeveloped state in almost each and every way. Pakistan simply does not have the monopoly of force in its territory. When you see a map of Pakistan and see the hard boundaries, you are not seeing a reality. A huge chunk of the border region with Afghanistan is run by tribal leaders and warlords, which the government (by all accounts a totally unstable quasi-democracy) cannot push too far lest it risks losing all influence (however limited) in these regions. Many of these share familial ties and ideological similarities with the Taliban and as such want and do help them in their crusade against the Americans.
So the problem for the Pakistani government is that no matter how much it would want to crush these areas and acquire the absolute monopoly of force in all its regions, it is incapable of doing so. So they have to walk a very fine line to keep the wishes of these unruly constituencies at bay by either allowing them to attack the US or even aiding them.
In other words, that sort of thing is not going to cease occuring. No matter if the US cancels all aid, no matter if they are threatened, the fact is that Pakistan does not have the capacity to stop the attacks. The problem with this is that, if the US stops all colaboration with Pakistan, then what? Doing so would doom the war effort. Where else would the US be able to attack the Afghan insurgency from, other than inside Afghanistan? How would it stop the back-and-forth movements of rebels along Pakistan?
Yes, the War
is unwinnable. And these documents show it more than anything, which in effect makes the release of them all the more important. It's a way of saying "Look, it's not happening. Give it up." And its true. Unless the Pakistani government decides to fully and totally support the mission (which it
cannot do, regardless of what it says), the Insurgency
will be kept alive. If the insurgency is kept alive, the United States cannot win.
Chances are that once the withdrawal starts in 2011, either Karzai will consume the Taliban command into the government structure, or he will be deposed and the Taliban will come back to power. Or both.
