The leaking of more than 91,000 US military intelligence files on the war in Afghanistan via the whistleblower website Wikileaks has, in all, told us some of what was known, much of what was suspected and all of which was feared by citizens of the states that are contributing to the war.
What might have been hoped for in yesterday’s newspapers was at least an outline of the leaks’ key findings, as reported internationally. This is of particular relevance given the Australia is a party to the war and sustains – and causes — casualties.
Some of the key elements of the Afghanistan Wikileaks include that, at more than 91,000 documents, it vastly overshadows the 1971 Pentagon papers (a little over 4000 documents) and provides a near complete synopsis of how the war has been conducted between 2004 and the end of last year.
The particular relevance of the documents is they beg the question not just of how the war in Afghanistan is being pursued but why Coalition forces are there at all. This is not about “stopping Islamist/al-Qaeda terrorism”, which has long since shifted to numerous other countries. It is a war of national resistance against an invading coalition, supported by Pakistan’s military Inter-Service Intelligence agency in the east and Iran’s Republican Guards in the west.
According to Wikileaks boss Julian Assange: “The war is mediated by Pakistan.” It is also engaging in border clashes with the Afghan national army, their putative allies. Beyond Pakistan’s two-faced approach to the war, Afghani soldiers fight with Afghani police. So much for “training”, which now remains the sole reason Australian forces are in Afghanistan.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are training, arming and equipping Taliban fighters. Equipment supplied includes parts for and complete “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs), which are reported to have become bigger and more deadly, accounting for more than half of all coalition force casualties.
In the 1990s and following the Cold War, it was assumed that new military technology would supersede conventional war-fighting methods, effectively producing casualty-free wars. Afghanistan has shown this theory to be wrong. While computer game technologies are useful against conventional armies, they have limited application in asymmetric warfare.
Casualty rates among civilians in the Afghanistan war are, consequently, much higher than reported. They are treated with a casualness that borders on being “war crimes”.
Beyond civilians, US friendly fire kills Afghanistan forces, Afghanistan forces fire kills US and others, each of the coalition partners kill each other and Afghanis. Everyone appears to be shooting at everyone else.
Following Operation Phoenix in the Vietnam War, assassination is again a preferred method of removing enemy figures, with Task Force 373 among others having the specific job of eliminating high values enemy targets. But assassination works both ways and the Taliban is reported to also use assassination, including poisoning attempts on President Hamid Karzai.
Yet Karzai lives on, as does his reported high level of corruption and that of his senior administrators, which is the primary purpose of engagement between senior Afghanistan government officials and international donors.
So, not only is Karzai and Co. deeply corrupt and presiding over an incompetent and bitterly divided security force, his enemy is supported by Afghanistan’s neighbours, Pakistan and Iran. Karzai’s answer to this is to try to bring elements of the Taliban back into the government. All of this raises the question of what is are the Coalition forces fighting for?
The war in Afghanistan is not about denying terrorism a safe haven, given that has spread far and wide. Osama bin Laden is almost certainly not in or probably not even near Afghanistan.
The Coalition went in to Afghanistan without a clear plan and now has no idea what victory looks like or how to get out. There is at least now a timeline, based on vague guarantees that the Afghanistan national forces will be in a position to assume responsibility for fighting the Taliban by 2014.
In all, the Afghanistan Wikileaks paint a bleak picture of confusion, failure and a war more complex and more unwinnable than even most of its critics have credited.
So, has journalism gone one step too far in releasing information, which the US government claims could endanger lives? Interestingly, Assange has held back some 15,000 documents on the grounds they might do just that.
What the US government response is really about is embarrassment, mostly over being exposed for lying about the progress of the war and not knowing quite how to extricate itself. The leaks will “give comfort to the enemy”, just as the more public 2014 timeline has. Will it reduce Coalition morale? The soldiers know what is happening — they don’t need leaked documents to tell them that.
And then there is the not inconsequential matter, in a democracy, of transparency and accountability. It is interesting, then, that having committed themselves to continued involvement in Afghanistan, that the content of the Wikileaks has been so studiously avoided by both the aspirants for the prime ministership.
The bomb has been dropped, here.
The reverberations will continue.
Professor Damien Kingsbury is in the School of International and Political Studies at Deakin University.
hot dang! sounds like veet-nam. (& didn’t that work out well for us). last person to the helicopters misses out.
The “West” (left and right) is a tad arrogant in seeing and reporting this as a struggle between nativist Taliban resistance and foreign invaders from the Western democracies. That is a neo-colonialist view and quite mistaken. This is a proxy war between China (Pakistan and through them any Taliban force keen to avail themselves of weapons and training, and likewise Iran, who are also a Chinese client state these days) and India, who is Karzai’s main backer and supporting a ton of aid and reconstruction throughout the country. The US and NATO are supporting India for no other reason than the perception it keeps a lid on Pakistani ambition and keeps a lid on Central Asian (post-Soviet) revolt, but they don’t really want to piss of China. India and China are already locked in fierce resource competition and competition for influence in central Asia (to say nothing of influence in Malaysia and Indonesia, which have a grip on Chinese trade-routes) that has barely started and will only get worse. The current state of the Afghan war is stable in so far as no-one feels that they are going to lose out, and their opponents aren’t getting too far ahead. What may happen is that India will need to find more compliant proxies to go into Afghanistan as NATO pulls out, which will destabilize Pakistan and force China’s hand a little.
The PM’s reaction to the Wikileaks was interesting. She promptly referred the matter to an inquiry (that will report to both her and Abbott) thereby shelving Afghanistan as an election issue. This is wholly unacceptable. The Australian public deserves an intelligent debate on Afghanistan and the implications of the recently released documents.
Why, for example, should anyone be surprised that Pakistan supports the Taliban? They were after all instrumental in setting up the Taliban in the first place. The Taliban draws the bulk of its support from the Pashtun people in the south of the country. Pashtum extend across the border and did so for thousand of years before the British drew the Durrand line and artificially separated families from each other.
Nor should we be surprised that the government (and the Coalition) want to avoid a debate about the reasons Australia is supporting the US in Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden whom the evidence overwhelmingly suggests died on or about 13 December 2001 and even less to do with the events of 11 September 2001.
The American planning for this part of the world goes back at least to the 1970s when Brzezinski (Carter’s National Security Adviser) planned to lure the then Soviet Union into Afghanistan, training terrorists (then called the mujihideen) to undermine the Tariki government and wreak havoc in the Muslim dominated republics of the USSR, south-east Iran and the Uighur area of China. That has continued unabated to this day.
The American policy has always been directed to three aims: secure energy sources in the Caspian area and tranmit it to a Pakistan port; encircle China and Russia militarily as part of its avowed goal of “full-spectrum dominance”, and to control the lucrative heroin trade as it did in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Burma during the Vietnam War.
The pathetic rationales for Australia’s involvment in this travesty (and I would argue breach of international law) deserve open and intelligent debate. We are manifestly not well served by that in this election campaign.
Thank you, Damien. The resounding silence on the issue by Gillard and Abbott is shameful. We, the electors, deserve to know what is being ‘accomplished’ in Afghanistan and so far we have been treated to nothing more than spin and propaganda about ‘terrorism’ and al-Qaeda, as if either of these issues are remotely relevant 9 years after the invasion. How much more blood and treasure is to be expended on this proxy conflict? The fact that death squads have been resurrected shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the fact that McChrystal – the architect of ‘direct action’ killings in Iraq whil head of JSOC – was in charge until recently. Liberal democracies are supposed to behave with standards to which the rest of world strives. Enough pointless death.
Why be surprised that the MSM have been slow to publish and/or analyse these many documents? They are busy measuring ear lobes.
Thanks, Crikey, for being what you are. Reliable. Mostly fearless. Prepared to lead the discussion.