UPDATE 2010 GMT: Nick Schifrin at ABC follows up on the angle that the Wikileaks documents show officials from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence aiding the Afghan insurgency.Al Jazeera interviews the former head of ISI, General Hamid Gul, who denies the claims:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqkQKk9S_8E&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
Afghanistan: At Least 45 Civilians Killed in Rocket Attack
Afghanistan: The Wikileaks “War Diary” of 91,000 Documents
General Kayani’s “Silent Coup” in Pakistan: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Mull)
UPDATE 1655 GMT: And how is Afghan President Karzai using the Wikileaks "War Diary"? To turn attention to Pakistan: "The recent documents leaked out to the media clearly support and verify Afghanistan's all-time position that success over terrorism does not come with fighting in Afghan villages, but by targeting its sanctuaries and financial and ideological sources across the borders. Our efforts against terrorism will have no effect as long as these sanctuaries and sources remain intact."UPDATE 1515 GMT: Amy Davidson in The New Yorker starts from one incident revealed in the Wikileaks document:
The Obama Administration has already expressed dismay that WikiLeaks publicized the documents, but a leak informing us that our tax dollars may be being used as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day. It will take some time to go through everything WikiLeaks has to offer—the documents cover the period from January, 2004, to December, 2009—but it is well worth it, especially since the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up...."
And reaches this conclusion:After more than eight years at war, how carefully are we even looking at Afghanistan? The [New York] Times had a piece in Sunday’s paper on the strange truth that our expenditure since 9/11 of a trillion dollars on two wars has barely scraped our consciousness. Fifty-eight Americans have died in Afghanistan so far this month; one of them—Edwin Wood, of Oklahoma—was eighteen years old. Maybe the WikiLeaks documents will make those numbers less abstract."
UPDATE 1455 GMT: Andrew Bacevich assesses in The New Republic:"The real significance of the Wikileaks action is...[that] it shows how rapidly and drastically the notion of 'information warfare' is changing. Rather than being defined as actions undertaken by a government to influence the perception of reality, information warfare now includes actions taken by disaffected functionaries within government to discredit the officially approved view of reality. This action is the handiwork of subversives, perhaps soldiers, perhaps civilians. Within our own national security apparatus, a second insurgent campaign may well have begun. Its purpose: bring America’s longest war to an end. Given the realities of the digital age, this second insurgency may well prove at least as difficult to suppress as the one that preoccupies General Petraeus in Kabul."
And Andrew Sullivan on his Daily Dish blog:When one weighs the extra terror risk from remaining in Afghanistan, the absurdity of our chief alleged ally actually backing the enemy, the impossibility of an effective counter-insurgency when the government itself is corrupt and part of the problem, the brutality of the enemy in intimidating the populace in ways no civilized occupying force can counter, the passage of ten years in which any real chance at success was squandered ... the logic for withdrawal to the more minimalist strategy originally favored by Obama after the election and championed by Biden thereafter seems overwhelming.
When will the president have the balls to say so?
UPDATE 1445 GMT: Simon Tisdall in The Guardian of London uses the documents to write, "How the US is Losing the Battle for Hearts and Minds".Meanwhile we have posted on a specific incident on Friday which demonstrates the complications of military intervention and that supposed battle for hearts and minds, "At Least 45 Civilians Killed in Rocket Attack".UPDATE 1145 GMT: The BBC is working the angle, "Cases of Afghan civilians allegedly killed by British troops have been revealed among thousands of leaked US military documents....The records include references to at least 21 incidents involving UK troops. The Ministry of Defence said it had been unable to verify the claims and it would not speculate on specific cases."UPDATE 1140 GMT: Wikileaks director Julian Assange is currently holding a press conference. Take-away quotes: "The course of the war needs to change. The manner in which it needs to change is not yet clear"; "It’s war, it’s one damn thing after another. It is the continuous small events."UPDATE 0920 GMT: "The Afghan government is shocked with the report that has opened the reality of the Afghan war," said spokesman Siamak Herawi.UPDATE 26 July 0910 GMT: The White House has issued a far-from-surprising response to the Wikileaks "War Diary". National Security Adviser General James Jones said such classified information "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk".(Older readers may remember that the "national security" line was the response put out by the Nixon White House when the "Pentagon Papers" on the Vietnam War were published in 1971.)And by the way, Jones added --- repeating a line put out by White House officials within hours of the story breaking --- the episode has little to do with us: the documents cover 2004 to 2009, before President Obama "announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan".UPDATE 2205 GMT: Simon Tisdall in The Guardian has a different approach based on the documents: "Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan, according to classified US military intelligence reports contained in the war logs."UPDATE 2155 GMT: Der Spiegel has posted a full package of articles. It also has an exposé of the Pakistan connection with the Taliban but also considers "German Naivety" with "trouble in the growing north" and profiles "Task Force 373", the US "black" unit hunting down targets for death or detention (the Guardian also has an article on the unit). It also has the first critiques of American operations: one on drones --- "the flaws of the silent killer" --- and one on "The Shortcomings of US Intelligence Services".UPDATE 2145 GMT: The second New York Times article is a snapshot of Combat Outpost Keating:"The outpost’s fate, chronicled in unusually detailed glimpses of a base over nearly three years, illustrates many of the frustrations of the allied effort: low troop levels, unreliable Afghan partners and an insurgency that has grown in skill, determination and its ability to menace."
UPDATE 2140 GMT: The first New York Times special report based on the Wikileaks documents focuses not on American but Pakistani involvement:Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports to be made public Sunday.
The documents, to be made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place. But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable."UPDATE 2130 GMT: The New York Times has now posted a few of the documents and its first article on "The War Logs" of Wikileaks. The take-away points:¶ 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. White House officials vigorously denied that the Obama administration had presented a misleading portrait of the war in Afghanistan.---
Nick Davies and David Leigh write for The Guardian of London:A
huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in
Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents,
Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website
Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in
US military history. The files, which were made available to the
Guardian, the
New York Times and the German weekly
Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and over 1,000 US troops.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US navy sailors captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
The
war logs also detail:
• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.
• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban has acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
• How the Taliban has caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of its roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of "under-resourcing" under Obama's predecessor, saying: "It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009."
The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."
The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in
military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents. Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests in the past, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers. At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, although this is likely to be an underestimate because many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 18:46 
UPDATE 27 July: From Reuters....