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The United States has condemned as “irresponsible” the leak of 90,000 military records, saying publication could threaten national security. The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now. The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange (pictured), said he had no reason to doubt the reliability of the reports.Three news organisations had advance access to the records, which also show NATO concerns that Pakistan and Iran are helping the Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistan has denied claims its intelligence agency backed the group. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports. Download MP3
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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp. This is The World. Today’s lead story in three newspapers in the US, Britain, and Germany is, basically, a history of the past six years of the war in Afghanistan. The articles are based on more than 90,000 classified US military documents. The documents were leaked by the internet site WikiLeaks. And they paint a grimmer picture of the war than the official portrayal. In particular, they assert that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have covertly aided the insurgency in Afghanistan, something Pakistan denies. But that’s not all. The World’s Alex Gallafent begins our coverage.
ALEX GALLAFENT: The materials cover just about every US military encounter in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009. They include threat reports from intelligence agencies and descriptions of enemy attacks. There are records of meetings with local leaders, and detailed accounts of coalition operations. Most of the documents are classified secret. David Leigh is an editor with The Guardian in London, one of the three newspapers to receive the leaked documents. He says the detailing of the impact on regular Afghans was a particular revelation.
DAVID LEIGH: The picture that came out was of hundreds of attacks on civilians in which civilians were not only the victims of airstrikes, which we knew about I think because they caused a lot of protests but also, time and again, perfectly innocent drivers and motorcyclists, sometimes women and children, got shot by convoys or patrols just for getting too close, I think because troops are so jumpy and frightened of suicide bombers.
GALLAFENT: Today the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, accused US forces of concealing civilian deaths. Assange told a news conference in London that there could be legal implications.
JULIAN ASSANGE: It is up to a court to decide, clearly, whether something is, in the end, a crime. That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material.
GALLAFENT: In addition, Assange pointed to a deadly missile strike ordered by a secret US-led special forces unit that allegedly hunts down and kills senior Taliban targets. WikiLeaks stated goal is to reveal “unethical behavior” by governments and corporations. A recent magazine profile described the organization as a media insurgency. In London, Julian Assange compared the publishing of the Afghanistan documents with the opening of East German secret police files after the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago.
ASSANGE: This is the equivalent of opening the Stasi archives. It is a history, it is an enormous compendium of material that will affect many different people in different ways.
GALLAFENT: Officials in the United States and Afghanistan assert that there is little in the leaked documents that wasn’t previously known. The White House also says that the material is old news, because it predates President Obama’s own strategy for Afghanistan. But others argue that the sheer level of detail contained in the military documents proves that the war in Afghanistan is not going well. Marvin Weinbaum is a former Afghanistan analyst at the State Department.
MARVIN WEINBAUM: There’s no question that in the past there were a number of incidents that we knew of and that were generally publicized where the US naturally, understandably, if you will, tended to minimize the effect of this collateral damage. This though, does give those people in Afghanistan who’ve been critical of the operation obviously a great deal of fuel for their criticism.
GALLAFENT: WikiLeaks is facing criticism in the United States for releasing the archive. Today one lawmaker said its action amounted to “recklessness.” A Pentagon spokesman called the documents release “criminal.” He added that it would take “days if not weeks” to assess the damage to national security. And this won’t be the last of it. WikiLeaks says there’s a lot more material to come. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.
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