The Secret “Afghanistan” Papers Come to Light

The latest revelation by Wikileaks confirms what the current administration has refused to admit to the American people; Afghanistan is a military quagmire for the United States and morally indefensible.  Check out the piece below.  Thanks Brother Ibrahim. Imam Mahdi Bray

Quote of the Day:  “What goes on in the dark ultimately comes out in the light.”

American wars, like most military conflicts, are not carried out in absolute honesty and transparency.  Of course, we are fed notions of “defending our national interests”, or “upholding democracy”, or protecting ourselves from terrorism”.

And all of the above may resonate with what Americans believe to be true about the best of our national character.  But beneath the platitudes and moralizing lie other, less savory, truths about war, and particularly, the current U.S/ NATO military project in Afghanistan, the subject of great speculation and increasing national skepticism.

Many of the untold, horrible realities of this war-now America’s longest one in history-have surfaced with the release of some 91,000 military documents that were previously classified as “secret”.  The leaked papers came to us courtesy of a website called Wikileaks, established in Sweden in 2006 as a convergence of journalists, human rights advocates, and internet bloggers dedicated to uncovering and disseminating news that governments find inconvenient to tell citizens about.  In the case of the Afghanistan documents, we now have the largest public exposure of secret government documents ever in history-and they tell numerous stories of unreported civilian deaths, massive firings on civilian targets, covert U.S. assassination squads, and even evidence of Pakistani government collaboration with the Taliban. The magnitude of this release is bound to be many times more eventful, and potentially devastating, that the June publication of the General McCrystal staff remarks about President Obama and his national security team in Rolling Stone magazine.

It may take some time to wade through the entire body of this on-the-ground chronicle of the war in Afghanistan, produced in large part from combat journals and the reports from soldiers in the fight.  But what we do know is this: civilian deaths from U.S./NATO actions in Afghanistan have been unreported.  And the reports of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with elements of the Taliban has the potential to shatter America’s fragile tactical alliance with the post-Musharraf government in Islamabad.

Just as Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the “Pentagon Papers” led to the decline and ultimate failure of the U.S. wars in Indochina, the Wikipedia leak may have the same effect on the floundering U.S. war in Afghanistan.  Add up (1) local government corruption, (2) the duplicity of an American regional ally, (3) an unplanned change of Allied military command,  (4) a tenacious insurgency, and (5) a skeptical Afghan population, and you have, in sum, a prescription for defeat.  And while few would cheer a Taliban military victory, the Wikileaks secret Afghanistan papers may persuade even more of us that the current U.S. war strategy is simply not going to work.

The White House has commented that the exposure of these documents is “irresponsible”, and could put “American lives in jeopardy”.  Yet the greater irresponsibility would be to blindly sacrifice lives and resources to prosecute a war that is costly, un-winnable, and profoundly misguided.

To read the entire Wikileaks documents on the war in Afghanistan, go to: http://www.wikileaks.org.