Will WikiLeaks Help End the Afghan War?
The brave hope of the soldier who sent 92,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks was that the disclosure of willful, casual slaughter of civilians by coalition personnel (with ensuing cover-ups), the utter failure of "nation-building," the venality and corruption of the coalition's Afghan allies and the complicity of Pakistan's intelligence services with the Taliban would cause a wave of revulsion in the United States and among its coalition allies against the war.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange skillfully arranged simultaneous publication of the secret material in The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. The story broke on the eve of a war-funding vote in the U.S. Congress.
But on Tuesday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives said aye to a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a $33 billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114.
To be sure, more congressmen voted against escalation than a year ago when the no's totted up to only 35. That's a crumb of comfort, but the cruel truth is that within 24 hours the White House and the Pentagon, with the help of influential papers like the Washington Post, had successfully finessed the salvoes from WikiLeaks.
'WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war' was the Washington Post's Tuesday morning headline. Beneath this headline, the news story said the leaks had been discussed for only 90 seconds at a meeting of senior commanders in the Pentagon. "Senior officials" in the White House even brazenly claimed that it was precisely his reading of these same raw intelligence reports a year ago that prompted President Obama "to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration."
There's some truth in the claim that, long before WikiLeaks, the overall rottenness and futility of the Afghan War had been graphically reported in the press. Earlier this year, for example, reporting by Jerome Starkey of the London Times blew open the U.S. military's cover-up after special forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February 2010 raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed.
It's oversell to describe the WikiLeaks package as a latter-day Pentagon Papers. But it's undersell to dismiss the revelations as "old stories," as detractors have been doing. The WikiLeaks file is a damning series of snapshots of a disastrous enterprise.
The sad truth is that wars are not often ended by disclosures of their horrors and futility in the press, with consequent public uproar. After Ron Ridenhour and then Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre in 1968—when more than 500 men, women and babies were methodically beaten, sexually abused, tortured and then murdered by American GIs in Vietnam—there was public revulsion, then an escalation in slaughter. The war ran for another seven years.
It is true, as Noam Chomsky pointed out to me, when I asked him for positive examples, that popular protest in the wake of press disclosures "impelled Congress to call off the direct U.S. role in the grotesque bombing of rural Cambodia. Similarly in the late '70s, under popular pressure, Congress barred Carter, later Reagan, from direct participation in virtual genocide in the Guatemalan highlands." Even though New York Times editors edited out the word "indiscriminate" from Thomas Friedman's news report of Israel's bombing of Beirut in 1982, his and other dispatches from Lebanon prompted President Reagan to order Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to stop, and he did.
But as Chomsky concluded in his note to me, "I think one will find very few such examples, and almost none in the case of really major war crimes."
What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls or fears it will. With the U.S. war in Afghanistan, none of these conditions has yet been met.
The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA's history until that time.
Here we are, more than three decades later, half-buried under a pile of horrifying reports about a destroyed land of desolate savagery, and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats, often from liberals, about WikiLeaks' "irresponsibility" in releasing the documents. Shoot the messenger!
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The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979
Mr. Cockburn loses his credibility when he pins the destruction of Afghanistan on the U.S. Afghanistan has never been never much more than what it is today. Another example of how the U.S. Empire is just a washed-up version of the British Empire, with all of the latter's faults and none of her virtues.
Worth noting, nevertheless, the US built the road the USSR road in on, in the early '60s. Ron Paul mentioned as much in the '80s, during that House stint. If Cockburn is wrong, it's with the dates.
I'd dispute that notion, NGPM.
The American Empire once heroically flew in its planes to violate a Stalinist blockade in Berlin, and handed over food and supplies to more than a million impoverished Germans (many of them former Nazis). The British Empire never conducted any such noble act, and would never have greeted former enemies like Germans with such kindness.
The American Empire had leaders like Harry Truman, who read Thucydides and Cicero in the original Latin and became a President only after he had centuries of human knowledge on his shoulders. On the other hand, the British Empire celebrates Prime Minister Arthur "Bob's your uncle" Balfour, a lightweight who only got anywhere in life from family members pulling strings for him.
Both are the bad kind of empires, but the American Empire, having stuck around for much shorter, still showed many of the better ideals of high civilization.
Mr Sanjay:
The Brits were also in on the relief of Berlin, and they played a big part in it. Also, the airlift served the political interests of America as well as Britain, while the relief of, say, the Czechs and Hungarians, did not.
Empires can be brutal and exploitative enterprises, and while it's true that the British did many terrible things in the course of empire, that empire did bestow benefits on some of the colonised peoples in the long run, such as British legal and government forms. What has the American empire bestowed on it's colonies, besides vulgar pop-'culture'?
While the Brits did the same thing to the Boer republics that the American empire did to the Confederacy, they treated the Boers far, far better after that war than what the South got. Britain also has produced some great statesmen, though of course the quality went way down in the 20th century.
I see no reason to believe that the American empire could hold a candle to the British.
@3: The British Empire gave the world Common Law. The U.S. Empire gave the world television and pornography. Both committed their share of sins, but the latter had none of the virtues. With regards to Germany, that was a purely pragmatic act of Cold War strategy--it happened to be the right thing to do. But an even better thing to do would have been for the U.S. to occupy and dismember the Prussian Empire after the FIRST World War, pre-empting the 56,000,000 European slaughtered of the Second--then head East and help the Whites get back their country before the Bolsheviks unleashed a 100-million-lives-strong chain of murders upon the world. Unfortunately, American public opinion was thirstier for the glorious image of "making the world safe for democracy" than for playing a serious role in the geopolitics of a flagging Christendom. That being the case, then, it would clearly have been better to STAY HOME in 1916.
@5: So far as I know, though, Britain never pretended the conquest of South Africa to be anything but a "conquest." Also, with regards to the results, while their tactics may have been horrifying, but based on what I know about French and BeNeLux history I'd rather be under the rule of British Tories than under Franco-Dutch Huguenots.
Mr. Sanjay, the British Empire also had much to do with the abolition of international east-west slave routes. Though not completely successful their effort was almost single-handed.
"The brave hope of the soldier who sent 92,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks was...." What kind of moron is this man Cockburn? A PFC sends ninety-two thousand top secret documents to WikiLeaks right under the noses of MI and the CIA, plus many of those 845,000 top secret geniuses getting paid to prevent this sort of thing. Stuff like this just happens. Someone with the highest security clearances wrote the codes needed to transfer files to an non-secure site on a piece of paper and forgot about it.
Yes Dan, if some of the stronger arguments from the fringe are true, it is quite likely that this indeed is just a clever front for the establishment itself.
I am not given to conspiracies, but this Assange fellow revealed nothing new. It could be correct that it's a means to create anti-Pakistan sentiment in the West.
Yet, I don't like the fringe much. When the Gulf Oil Spill happened, it seemed obvious to me that it was a spill that could be cleaned up within a few months without harm. Crazy conspiracists on the Left and Right nonetheless started throwing the craziest ideas immediately, with some idiot Leftists alleging a Goldman Sachs partnered evil corporate conspiracy and idiot Rightists suggesting a Mossad sabotage.
The most ridiculous hyperbole was calling it "the worst environmental disaster to ever happen since Chernobyl" or "a spill that will never be cleaned up", even though it's already fully cleaned up, and environmentalists explained that it barely qualifies as an environmental disaster.
Much in the same way, I still keep some skepticism towards the premature theories about Assange that the fringe just threw out.
Prateek, what bearing does the suspicion among some unidentified Leftist that GS was behind the leaks or some Rightists' suggesting Mossad involvement have on investigating the true source and purpose of the leaks, particularly where the official line is absurd on the face of it? You've probably gotten the main purpose right, however, and that is discrediting Pakistan as a prelude to overt war, which is proceeding pari passu with the disinformation campaign and call for war against Iran. If discrediting Pakistan was the purpose, then dismissing Mossad involvement smacks of crazy itself.
Oh no, it seems my post got messed up.
I gave an example.
Everytime an event happens, internet conspiracy theorists and even mainstream columnists start rushing to conclusions.
They did so when the Gulf Oil Spill happened ("GS shorting BP!" or "Mossad sabotaged oilwell!").
And they are prematurely doing so in these leaks.
Two very different situations, but certain people's behaviour very similar.
WikiLeaks is irrelevant. Bill Kristol wants the war in Afghanistan to continue so it will continue. He is sort of a permanent foreign secretary.