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On the Afghans (Updated)
"[Assange] insisted that any risk to informants' lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information." -- The Times of London
As it turns out, I have one more thing to say about Wikileaks. In the past, I have chastised some on the American Right for their apparent belief that what we -- the United States and its allies -- do or fail to do in Afghanistan is of paramount importance in this conflict. My view, as I think I have made clear, is that ultimately the fate of Afghanistan is in the hands of the Afghans. External actors -- the United States and its allies, Iran, Pakistan, etc. -- are important. But our counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan is dependent for its success on the actions of local Afghan actors. I may be misguided to think this and be prejudiced by my admittedly limited experiences, but based upon 10 years spent either fighting or studying conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, I have arrived at the conclusion that in general the actions of local actors matter more than those of external forces. Thus one thing that a critic like Andrew Bacevich and I share in common is a degree of humility about what we can expect from the exercise of American power abroad.
There is a corollary to the above criticism of the Right, though. On the Left, you can often observe a similar phenomenon -- perhaps as the result of a post-colonial education that often preaches the evils of Western interventions through the years -- in that examining a conflict like Afghanistan, or Iraq, things like agency, responsibility and vulnerability are all disproportionately assigned to the (Western) external actor at the expense of local actors. There is a sign near my home in Washington, for example, in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, which reads: "End the War in Afghanistan." The assumption behind such a sign is that the war is for U.S. and other western policy-makers to end. You saw similar signs in 2005 and 2007 exhorting President Bush to "end" the war in Iraq. As if once the United States and its allies ceased combat operations, the war would somehow end and the grievances of local actors be forgotten.
In the same way, the political target for Wikileaks and Julian Assange is most certainly U.S. and allied decision-makers. Why else collaborate with Western media outlets such as the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel and not al-Jazeera or Xinhua? The assumption, again, is that this is an American and Western war in Afghanistan, and thus we should reserve responsibility for what does and does not happen for Western policy-makers. The agency is stripped from Afghan and other local actors. So too is any claim of vulnerability.
I have said before that those western media outlets I mentioned above often labor to protect the lives of U.S. and allied servicemen and intelligence officers when reporting on sensitive stories. I appreciate that, even if Julian Assange, referring to last week's series of articles on the U.S. intelligence community in the Washington Post, considers this kind of stuff "craven". But it does seem as if measures have been taken by Wikileaks to protect U.S. and allied personnel whose lives might be endangered by the leaks. The same cannot be said for the Afghans. A cursory search of the Wikileaks documents by the consistently excellent Afghanistan-based journalist Tom Coughlan revealed hundreds of Afghan lives to have been put at risk by these leaked documents. The mentions of Afghans -- either because they have confounding, non-Western names or because they simply are not considered of importance -- do not seem to have been considered by Mr. Assange and Wikileaks when they decided to dump these documents into the public sphere.
I don't know whether Mr. Assange simply did not understand enough about Afghanistan to realize what he was doing when he leaked these documents or just doesn't care, so myopic is his focus on the governments of the United States and Europe. But when I stop and think about this, I think of one of the good guys in U.S. foreign and defense policy through recent decades, Richard Armitage, and the stories of how in the last days of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, he returned to save hundreds of Vietnamese who had worked with the United States. Long after the U.S. public had moved on -- remember, the iconic image of the fall of Saigon was that picture of our embassy, proving how hard it is for us to focus on anything other than ourselves -- the men and women who had actually fought and bled alongside their Vietnamese counterparts still gave a shit about their well-being. I suspect that's the way it's going to be in Afghanistan, too. For the U.S. and allied soldiers, diplomats and aid workers who have worked alongside Afghans, they matter. They are our peers. For Mr. Assange and others, they're little more than local color. Certainly not lives worth protecting.
Welcome to the world of collateral murder, Wikileaks.
Update: Josh Foust, whose tweets on this deserve credit for getting me so fired up in the first place, has a post up on Registan.
Update II: Glenn Greenwald counters.
As was painfully predictable and predicted, the bulk of political discussion in the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosures focuses not on our failing, sagging, pointless, civilian-massacring, soon-to-be-decade-old war, but rather on the Treasonous Evil of WikiLeaks for informing the American people about what their war entails. While it's true that WikiLeaks should have been much more careful in redacting the names of Afghan sources, watching Endless War Supporters prance around with righteous concern for Afghan lives being endangered by the leak is really too absurd to bear. You know what endangers innocent Afghan lives? Ten years of bombings, checkpoint shootings, due-process-free hit squads, air attacks, drones, night raids on homes, etc. etc.
I don't know if he realizes it, but Mr. Greenwald actually provides a darn good example of the tendencies on the American Left that I described above. No, Mr. Greenwald, the Afghans have not suffered through ten years of war. The conflict to which we have been a party for the past nine-plus years did not start on 12 September 2001. The Marxist coup that shattered the peace enjoyed by most Afghans for the bulk of the 20th Century began in 1978. The Afghan people have thus suffered through 32 years of near continuous conflict. Were the United States and its allies to withdraw from Afghanistan tomorrow, the war would surely continue.
Again, the American Left is as often as bad as the American Right: its pundits reserve all the agency for Western actors and assume history stops and starts when we the United States do something or stop doing something. Afghans and their actions, in this example, are rendered meaningless without Western attention to validate them. But we can no sooner "end" this conflict by pulling everyone out than we can "win" it by snapping our fingers and sending more troops. I have a lot more sympathy for a hard-core neo-isolationist who thinks the United States should just abandon most foreign interventions, consequences be damned, because those guys are usually at least realistic about the way the world works. They understand that life, death, famine and conflict will continue in our absence. For too many others, the history of Afghanistan begins in 2001 (when we the United States started caring about it again) and will end the moment we leave. Were the United States and its allies to leave Afghanistan, though, the conflict would go on: the only thing that would depart that country with our troops would be the short-lived attention of America's self-absorbed punditry.
Andrew you know damn well
Andrew you know damn well that there are no names of high-value assets in the SECRET docs.....duh!
all the Wikileaks docs are SECRET. That is how Manning got them out, by overwriting Lady Gaga cds in a SECRET lvl facility.
Your weepy assertion of "hundreds of names"is just hearsay....c'mon, give examples. if there are "hundreds" you can surely cough up a few specific ones.
do work son.
this all just rightwing spin. Most of the afghani names in Wikileaks lvl SECRET docs are known friendlies and unfriendlies, public figures, translators, contractors and civil servants.
an' if you are so worried
an' if you are so worried about them, get them out, and quit whining about Assange's morality.
bring 'em to america on refugee status! "hundreds" of them.
i would be thrilled to have more muslim brothers and sisters here.
:)
Good point. I have a theory
Good point.
I have a theory that 90% of public discussion about foreign policy is really about domestic politics, in all countries and at all times. A large minority of Americans are disposed to believe their country is always right and its domestic critics always wrong (foreign critics generally don't get noticed until they start blowing things up). A much smaller but still significant minority of Americans believe the reverse: that American power is always wicked and corrupt, a plague upon the world. Neither group addresses more than occasionally the question, "compared to what?" because their fundamental quarrel is not with foreign enemies but with one another.
Europeans operate in a slightly different universe, since so many of them define their political identities by what they are not: i.e. not American. Once again, though, this is mostly about them. It certainly isn't about Afghanistan, raising fairly important questions for Afghans committed to supporting the NATO-supported Afghan government. They know the nature and limits of the commitment to their safety and interests of American and NATO forces in the country, but the course of Western policy in Afghanistan will also be influenced by Americans and Europeans who do not devote a great deal of thought to them at all. Obviously, this would be less of an issue in a war that had not already lasted for almost nine years, but on this specific point that is water under the bridge. Knowing why the Wikileaks document dump may have put Afghan nationals at risk won't be of much comfort to them.
I have always taken pleas to
I have always taken pleas to "end the war" in Iraq/Afghanistan to mean "end our war" in Iraq/Afghanistan. It is certainly my experience that those who have uttered that phrase are thinking only of American blood and treasure and care not one whit for what happens to the locals (unless, of course, they are killed by coalition action, which always constitutes a "war crime"). I cannot tell you how many Progressives here in NYC, despite the pride with which they wear that label, have expressed to me the opinion that "those people have been killing each other for centuries and they'll be killing each other for centuries more."
Great point.
Great point.
"Inspired by @joshuafoust, I
"Inspired by @joshuafoust, I felt the need to stick up for the Afghans."
YAY! lets bring them all here. that would be epic.
any afghan that you feel is at risk, should get refugee status, plus their families.
after all, it is the military's fault they are exposed, right Andrew?
you guys said their names just deserved SECRET lvl protection.
you didn't think much of them as assets.
:)
Thanks Andrew, as always,
Thanks Andrew, as always, interesting stuff.
If you click the link that
If you click the link that Exum provides, you will see "Among the documents is a 2008 report with a detailed interview with a Taliban fighter considering defection. He is named, with his father's name and village included. Intelligence on other Taliban fighters and commanders in his area is also included."
That may not be blowing a high level source, but that guy's lifespan just shrank because of Julian Assange's ego and ignorance.
Why do all of my provocative
Why do all of my provocative musings about PBS, *Need to Know,* and Naomi Klein keep getting deleted by the CNAS thought-police?
For the record, this rugby playing reader still objects to any self-identified rugby player posting a link that take readers to drivel *explaining* the *geopolitical* rationale behind suicide murder at a rugby club.
@Rabi'a: "if there are
@Rabi'a: "if there are 'hundreds' you can surely cough up a few specific ones."
So that instead of wading through thousands of documents on wikileaks to find a name of someone to target, the Taliban could just find a one-stop shop on abumuqawama?
On another topic, can a case be made in court that disseminating the information publicly is providing actionable intelligence to the Taliban and is there any definition of aid and comfort which would not include providing actionable intel?
Rabi'a, it sounds like you
Rabi'a, it sounds like you don't really understand how classification works...
Great point. I think you
Great point. I think you are blowing it up a bit, but your point is valid. I still would hold those signs, and argue that external actors do count more than you are claiming in the point. My undergrad thesis looked at the productivity of different aid programs in Afghanistan. It's NOT hard to see HOW counterproductive aid has been in some areas. But why wouldn't it be? Those HTS surveys showed plenty of reasons why aid would work in this way. I don't think anyone holding those signs thinks that the equation will be solved as we are flying out of Kabul. Fuck, maybe they do. But, I have to imagine the point they have is that our presences is not helping or even hurting the situation. But yeah, you're right, the situation is shitty either way.
Good point though. The collateral damage line was pretty funny. The guy is short sighted but I think the outlet, if filtered correctly, will do plenty good in this shadowy world- I've thrown em some cash.
"They are our peers. For Mr.
"They are our peers. For Mr. Assange and others, they're little more than local color. Certainly not lives worth protecting."
bullshytt. you have made your "peers" SECRET lvl.
You valued them as only worthy of SECRET lvl protection in a writable media facility. if they were worth more as assets, you would have protected them better.....
Visitor 11:22 then get ALL exposed afghanis out. seems simple. lets do the right thing. you have my 1000% support.
"Julian Assange's ego and ignorance. "
Nope, because that man's life was only of SECRET lvl value to Abu M's war. Assange is just fullfilling his contract with Manning-- to provide maximum exposure of the leaked archives. Which Assange has obviously had possession of since before April 5 when the collateral murder video aired.
What else does Assange have, you might ax yourselves. Does he have 260,000 diplomatic cables like the US gov't asserted on June8? That possibly include extremely embarrassing things like state functionaries calling Prince Bandar a sandnigger or bitching about other Arab heads of state? I can't wait.
Scott 11:24 does the Taliban read Abu Muqawama? why would they believe him if they did? an' America doesn't have a Secrets Act, retard. Assange is not a citizen.
Visitor 11:25 lawl. i think
Visitor 11:25
lawl.
i think i do. a mole, double agent, secret source would be protected with TS codeword classification.
and you know it.
your prospective turned Tali wasn't worth the investment of TS protection.
he wasn't a peer....he was a return to value investment that didnt make the cut.
stop whining about Assange and get those people out, and do it now.
Or are you going to let them die for the PR value?
Some "peers", Exum.
niice morals there dude.
Exum, im sick of you whining
Exum, im sick of you whining about Assange.
YOU didn't protect your data, YOU didn't protect your sources.
You are the failcake here, not Assange.
heres your chance to redeem yourself....if there are compromised afghanis, get them out.
write a post on extracting our "peers", and quit bitching about Assange. the past is dust.
do the right thing.
and perhaps start worrying about when the next shoe is going to drop.
Three posts in the space of
Three posts in the space of ten minutes, and six of the first fifteen on a thread, represent abuse of the privilege offered by the blog's host.
I don't know and don't care why a commenter might choose to chatter away like this, but the purpose of a comment section is to add value to a blog, not merely to add static. In Exum's place I would either ban the commenter or suspend comments altogether until a way could be found to keep spam of this kind off the board.
I don't agree with
I don't agree with endangering Afghan lives, but what are people like Assange supposed to do? Go through "official" channels? We've seen how well that works- sweep it under the rug until the election cycle has passed and the philistines are occupied with another Kardashian or Lohan escapade. Obama has shown himself to be an enemy of transparency to an even greater degree than Bush. Fact, from the evidence at hand, the Villagers are determined to remain global hegemon and they don't care if they hollow out the West and directly or indirectly cause the deaths of thousands to remain hegemon. They are also determined to destroy man's last, best hope (the US) with their sleazy left vs. right dog and pony show, that all but the thickest Archie Bunkers are seeing past. Nobody who genuinely thinks outside the agreed upon parameters of debate is allowed into the councils of the great and wise for ideological and economic reasons, or if they are, they are smarmily patronized like poor Bacevich. This isn't just the WOT, btw, it also applies to the war on drugs. The stakes are very high, AM, American democracy and the soul of our nation hangs in the balance.
@Rabi'a: "Visitor 11:22 then
@Rabi'a: "Visitor 11:22 then get ALL exposed afghanis out. seems simple. lets do the right thing. you have my 1000% support."
And let's set all of out Predators on autodestruct while we're at it. Before they were outed, they were valuable assets to us who could operate because anonymity gave them some degree of security. Now we should choose between keeping them safe and allowing them to be of service to their communities and to us. Taking an agent out of service is like taking a weapon off the field.
"Scott 11:24 ... an' America doesn't have a Secrets Act"
Providing actionable intelligence should be treated no differently from providing Stinger missiles. Perhaps we don't have the authority to apprehend foreigners who supply arms to the Taliban, but Assange should receive no protection that the Taliban's materiel suppliers do not.
sowwy Zath, i was just
sowwy Zath, i was just expecting my usual treatment here.
i think you don't much like what i said, did you?
Exum better shut me up before Sully links here and people read this.
Do the right thing Exum....if there are compromised afghanis, put your shoulder to the wheel and get them out.
Instead of whining about Assange.
Abu M- gotta admit that was
Abu M- gotta admit that was a funny line about collateral murder
Thru April the DoD has obligated 5.5 Billion for Afghanistan...War ain't cheap folks
I'll just leave this here (from CRS report RL33110).
"If both the Administration's FY2010 Supplemental and FY2011 war request are enacted, total war-related funding would reach almost $1.3 trillion (since 2001), including $802 billion for Iraq, $455 billion for Afghanistan, $29 billion for enhanced security, and $6 billion that cannot be allocated. Of this cumulative total, 62% would be for Iraq, 35% for Afghanistan, and 2% for enhanced security."
"And let's set all of our
"And let's set all of our Predators on autodestruct while we're at it."
might as well. all the preds and reapers do is make more Taliban via influence on consanguinous and social network connections.
Welcome to the world of
Welcome to the world of collateral murder
unfunnie, and wrong. if any afghanis die because WE FAILED TO PROTECT CLASSIFIED DATA and then FAILED TO EXTRACT THEM POST COMPROMISE it is OUR FAULT.
Not Assange's.
"And let's set all of our
"And let's set all of our Predators on autodestruct while we're at it."
might as well. all the preds and reapers do is make more Taliban via influence on consanguinous and social network connections.
Isn't that in the Wikileaks docs too?
Andrew: well said.
Andrew: well said.
Check out what ex-Pakistani
Check out what ex-Pakistani intelligence chief Gul is saying in the Pakistani press:
Ex-Pakistan Spy Chief Blasts WikiLeaks Report, Islamabad
“It is possible that the Afghan intelligence has been planting this false information to get funding from western private contractors” Gen. Gul told Asharq Al-Awsat yesterday.
“It is a widely known fact that Pentagon has given contracts to private groups for intelligence gathering in Afghanistan. The U.S. Pentagon has allocated one billion dollars for this” Gen. Gul said during the interview “They have to do something to justify this huge allocation of funds to the private contractors” he said...
"This is not intelligence information. I am an intelligence man and know that these are fabricated lies and not intelligence information. These private contractors know nothing about gathering intelligence information and the only thing they know is justify these large allocations and therefore we see them issuing these fabricated reports."
As noted, the timing of this Wikileaks release is not coincidental, as it has replaced the Washington Post expose on private intelligence contracting in news headlines - for example, the topic of AbuM's NYT editorial was not the Dana Priest / William Arkin series and the possible risks it poses to private intelligence contractors, but the Wikileaks fluff.
Wikileaks sent the material to the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel - the same outlets that spent the most time covering the ClimateGate emails in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference. Curiously, Wikileaks did not reach out to the Washington Post or coordinate with their private intelligence investigation, either... curious, isn't it? Almost as if they're working as a front group for large corporate interests - I mean, the climate emails were normal scientist chatter, obtained via illegal hacking efforts, and multiple investigations cleared the UEA scientists (the involvement of UEA in Saddam's biowarfare projects in the 1980s is another story - look up Dr. Germs).
Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, who AbuM would probably classify as "leftist" said this about Wikileaks in 2007, when they asked for FAS backing:
In the absence of accountable editorial oversight, publication can more easily become an act of aggression or an incitement to violence, not to mention an invasion of privacy or an offense against good taste.
And more recently:
WikiLeaks says that it is dedicated to fighting censorship, so a casual observer might assume that it is more or less a conventional liberal enterprise committed to enlightened democratic policies. But on closer inspection that is not quite the case. In fact, WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals.
P.S. The real historical issues with Afghanistan are neither leftist nor rightist, but have to do with the fact that from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, it was a Cold War battlefield. From the 1930s to the 1960s, it was generally progressing, with a stable relationship between the civilian and religious authorities. Marxist destabilization was initiated in the 1960s, leading to clashes in the 1970s with Afghan nationals, followed by immense U.S. and Saudi support during the major Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, followed by blatant neglect in the 1990s, with growing interest in the region's pipeline potential for Central Asian oil and gas exports in the late 1990s.
Both the Soviet Union and the NATO alliance thus have large debts to Afghanistan - which would be best repaid by promoting local development efforts in partnership with local actors - landowners, farmers, and so on. Such partnerships would also be key to defeating the Taliban, as the CNAS military "leaked" report makes pretty clear - but do the private intelligence contractors have the faintest idea who those local actors really are?
Wikileaks is bogus crap, in any case - that's one fairly solid conclusion to be derived from this episode.
I officially recall any
I officially recall any positive thought I may have had about Assage. Thats just cold murder. And to top it off, its pretty fucking close to a racist act of differentation. If this is true, thats just sick. Damn, thats stupid. Why does the activist lefties have to be so stupid so much of the time?Elf: point conceded.
Lets hope that point comes across to mr. Assage. And I sure hope someone is going through those transcripts and initiate some sort of protection for those involved, at least the most central, so we dont compåound the screwup. Also, hope that this leads to better sec when reporting friendly contacts? Must have been a quite open base, one ISI/AQ plant wouldda been able to acess it at that level?
this post seems to be
this post seems to be echoing Lee Smith's (the Strong Horse) main thesis of the exaggeration and over simplification of western capability and influence in the region, and the lack of appreciation for the actions and drive of local actors.
@Fnord I officially recall
@Fnord
I officially recall any positive thought I may have had about Assage.
Why? isn't this our screw up? WE radicalized Manning with the SECRET classification/coverup of the collateral-murder video, WE failed to protect classified data. Manning exported 92,000 files out of a secret facility....at least. Now WE are apparently going to let Assange hang our friendlies out to dry without extracting them while pointing mad fingers at his timing.
Wikileaks contract with Manning is that Assange would get maximum exposure for the data. On April 5 the collateral murder video was released. On July 26 first Wikileaks set.
"WikiLeaks said the release Sunday "did not generally include top-secret organizations," and that it had delayed the release of the remaining 15,000 documents as part of what it called "a harm minimization process demanded by our source," but said it would release the documents later, possibly with material redacted."
Apparently Manning also demanded harm minimization.
So you guyz are still in bidness--you have your high value TS operatives and friendlies still in place, all the high value assets. So I guess you will let any SECRET lvl afghani friendlies get greased for the PR value instead of extracting them. Couple hundred or so?
NP. Highly cost viable.
All for the greater good, right?
Now I wonder what else Assange has. Do you suppose he has TS data? And how about those diplomatic cables?
I fully expect that any
I fully expect that any SECRET lvl afghani friendlies exposed in the docs are going to get greased instead of extracted.
Firms up the narrative, right Exum?
@gunboat diplomat, Yes I
@gunboat diplomat,
Yes I noticed that article about the Pakistani ISI being seriously pissed off by Wikileaks.
Link also here
Some people have speculated that the USA could target Assange for assassination.
I think that is extremely unlikely.
But the ISI?
WE failed, WE failed, WE
WE failed, WE failed, WE failed.....to what? Teach a bratty little PFC that the world wasn't full of sunshine and kittens before we let him in the army? to protect ourselves from every single one of the hundreds of thousands of people with Secret clearance? I don't even know what you're ranting about with the "hanging out to dry" comment - I've heard numerous reports of local commanders trying to reach the burned contacts. I do appreciate the way you refuse to assign any moral responsibility to Assage, considering all he had to do was break out some whiteout and we wouldn't have a problem. He's the biggest colonialist S.O.B. in this story, and I refuse to believe that he could be so naive as to not realize the danger his leaks would present to the Afghans. On some conscious or sub-conscious level, Assage wants the Afghan collaborators dead so he can embarass the US and directly harm the war effort.
Yup we failed. we did not
Yup we failed. we did not protect our classified data.
what are data protection protocols for, if not to protect data?
And like i said, i have only seen ONE example of a potential outing. The good stuff is all safe behind the TS wall.
I am happy to know local commanders are trying reach the burned contracts. I'd love for Exum to push for amnesty for all the burned contacts, instead of snarking about it being Assanges fault.
It is our fault.
We have the moral responsibility, not Assange.
THE, at least Assange
THE, at least Assange believed he was targetted by the US already.
He left switzerland to go underground in late May/early June.
Did he think the Swiss were going to give him up? umm...they don't do that as i recall.
From AM's link: "In another
From AM's link: "In another from 2007, a report describes using a middleman to talk to an alleged Taliban commander who is identified."
Rabi'a: You say we should just get all our agents out of Afghanistan. So, how are we supposed to get our agents embedded in the Taliban out? Our contacts with them are probably limited because anything else would arouse suspicion. Likewise for such a person to suddenly leave his post.
"We have the moral responsibility, not Assange."
By that standard, we're responsible for the Oklahama City bombing, not Tim McVeigh. After all, we're supposed to protect our government facilities and we failed.
@Rabi'a, Well I would fear
@Rabi'a,
Well I would fear the ISI a lot more than Obama's CIA.
Beware of tall dark strangers, Mr Assange.
That's some serious shit you've got yourself into there.
Also loud noises. I would definitely avoid loud noises.
Serously though, all joking
Serously though, all joking aside,
Assange should go to the nearest Australian embassy and ask for protection.
He is playing a very dangerous game with some very motivated people.
"Assage wants the Afghan
"Assage wants the Afghan collaborators dead so he can embarass the US and directly harm the war effort."
he has already harmed it, quite a bit i think.
and he doesn't want the collaborators dead. he just said that ANY risk to informant lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information. like i said, i don't see a lot of risk.
the collaborator names for the most part are known friendlies, civil servants, etc.....low level assets.
the good stuff is still behind the TS wall.
But what Assange did is speed up the ending of your mean little war.
Wikileaks on the whole is a critical mass of data that proves we are losing, and that we can't win.
Cudlips like McCain and Palin won't be raving about the Surge and the Anbar Awakening anymore, like they did in 2008.
This is the beginning of the end for COIN too.
There won't be any fundage for a failed doctrine.
Pretty soon COIN will just be something politicians want to scape off their shoe......an evil smelling pile of expensive, bloody shit.
@ Rabi'a: Can you name a
@ Rabi'a: Can you name a single major thinker who subscribes to your diffusion theory of culpability? Your position is blaming the victim at its worst (Your father was shot to death in a home invasion? Guess he should have owned a gun!) We don't have any proof or even strong evidence of negligence on the part of the US in this matter, and it is patently absurd to think that you can make a system leaker-proof or defector-proof. Moreover, it's ridiculous to think that a single major leak that occurs after 9 years of conflict is indication of a significant "failure". On the other hand, the redaction of names irrelevant to the political purpose of the leak is a simple step to avoid easily forseeable consequences. You're only engaging in these intellectual back flips to defend a figure whose political ends you support, without regard for his methods.
"By that standard, we're
"By that standard, we're responsible for the Oklahama City bombing"
false analogy. we are not responsible for terrorist attacks.
don't enlist collaborators unless you can protect them. the failure of our SECRET data protocol exposed them.
it is our responsibilty to extract them if they are in danger.
"You say we should just get all our agents out of Afghanistan."
No i did not....i said the burned contacts should get amnesty.
the Taliban embedds are high value assets---we protected their idents behind the TS wall.
they are in no danger.
Andrew Really poor argument.
Andrew
Really poor argument. Afghans are dying in Afghanistan by the thousands who wouldn't die otherwise because the US and NATO are pursuing a war there. What may or may not be learned by the Taliban from the Wikileaks documents won't change that. Further, the Taliban have been going after "traitors" for a while with gruesome efficiency. Quite frankly, you're assuming that the Taliban counterintelligence effort will be made significantly more efficient because of the Wikileaks documents. I doubt that.
RH
Rabia believes she is
Rabia believes she is baiting Exum and others into supporting a mass transfer of Afghan collaborators to the United States, she should save her breath, she's preaching to the choir.
Exum is a liberal internationalist, a kissing cousin of the neocon, and they both adhere to the failed American policy of Invade the world, invite the world, in debt to the world.
Liberal internationalists love Somalis in Minnesota, Iranians in Beverly Hills, and Salvadorans all over DC.
Just be patient, Hundreds of thousands of Afghans will be here soon enough, scamming, cheating, and honor killing all over our once proud country.
You know if we just ignore
You know if we just ignore this crazy lady, she will give up and leave?
In re: Collateral Murder. I
In re: Collateral Murder.
I don't think Assange in anywhere close to the US in that regard. Put Afghanistan and Iraq together. Here's the light stuff:
The first intimation that the blockade would continue even though Iraq had been evicted from Kuwait came in an offhand remark by Bush at a press briefing on 16 April 1991. There would be no normal relations with Iraq, he said, until ‘Saddam Hussein is out of there’: ‘We will continue the economic sanctions.’ Officially, the US was on record as pledging that sanctions would be lifted once Kuwait had been compensated for the damage wrought during six months of occupation and once it was confirmed that Iraq no longer possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or the capacity to make them. A special UN inspection organisation, Unscom, was created, headed by the Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, a veteran of arms control negotiations. But in case anyone had missed the point of Bush’s statement, his deputy national security adviser, Robert Gates (now Obama’s secretary of defence), spelled it out a few weeks later: ‘Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore,’ Gates continued, ‘Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.’
...Visiting Iraq in that first summer of postwar sanctions I found a population stunned by the disaster that was reducing them to a Third World standard of living. Baghdad auction houses were filled with the heirlooms and furniture of the middle classes, hawked in a desperate effort to stay ahead of inflation. In the upper-middle-class enclave of Mansour, I watched as a frantic crowd of housewives rushed to collect food supplies distributed by the American charity Catholic Relief Services. Doctors, most of them trained in Britain, displayed their empty dispensaries. Everywhere, people asked when sanctions would be lifted, assuming that it could only be a matter of months at the most (a belief initially shared by Saddam). The notion that they would still be in force a decade later was unimaginable.
But it was worth it. Right?
Visitor 10:50 "It is certainly my experience that those who have uttered that phrase are thinking only of American blood and treasure and care not one whit for what happens to the locals"
It's my experience that you're talking out your ass.
Famous lib wimp blogger Atrios puts it this way:
We Are The World's Daddy
The obvious logical flaw in Rick Stengel's WAR FOREVER cover is that abuse of women and children by Taliban-minded folk is... happening. Also happening, freedom bombs. Dead and maimed innocent civilians. Strange inscrutable Afghans who get upset when people bust into their homes in the middle of the night with guns and dogs. Dead US troops.
But nothing good happens without our presence. So stay we will, perhaps until the war machine kicks the soccer ball somewhere else and Stengel dutifully follows it. Obviously the country won't fall for the stealing babies from incubators story again, though you never know...
Well said.
And not too many of your usual skels on this thread, AM, romancing about thug life. A pleasant surprise.
well said.
well said.
@Rabi'a A couple of your
@Rabi'a
A couple of your rants refer to "Afghanis". The Afghani is the official currency of Afghanistan and you seem to be referring to it in the plural form. When you state “then get ALL exposed afghanis out”, are you advocating that “we” take all of Afghanistan’s money? Or are you saying we should just take some of their money? Please answer in the form of another rant.
Leak response 101:
Leak response 101: marginalize the information and villify the messenger. Leaks are as old as secrets. Not sure why all the milbloggers are high-fiving each other for selling such an obvious response so symmetrically. Oh well.
You know Exum....it seems to
You know Exum....it seems to me that one criteria for building trusted networks is um.....trust.
I bet the Wikileaks revelations are going to make it a lot harder to recruit afghan collaborators.
Visitor 11:22
"that guy's lifespan just shrank because of Julian Assange's ego and ignorance."
Nope, if his lifespan shrank it is because our security protocols failed and WE outed him as an american sympathizer.
Assange has just turned up the heat on your nasty little forever war, and you want to give him a black eye before the next shoe drops.
You don't really get the
You don't really get the thesis, do you Rabi'a?
Why? isn't this our screw up? WE radicalized Manning with the SECRET classification/coverup of the collateral-murder video, WE failed to protect classified data. Manning exported 92,000 files out of a secret facility....at least. Now WE are apparently going to let Assange hang our friendlies out to dry without extracting them while pointing mad fingers at his timing.
First, Manning may have leaked some of these files, but he's now under arrest and not talking to anyone. Wow, look at how Wikileaks protects its sources! Bob Woodward would never have gotten another off-the-record interview in his life if he blew sources like Wikileaks does - all kinds of sources, apparently, not just his own! That alone should raise a few eyebrows.
Wouldn't it be curious if Manning also had leaked a bunch of files on Iraq, but if Wikileaks, not wishing to open that particular can of worms, flushed those ones down the drain? That's what I'm guessing happened. Maybe Assange is a little MI6 rat, who knows? A public perception operation? It wouldn't be the first time, would it?
The hysteria about Assange being "assassinated" fits the bill, too. His appearances on liberal lefty front groups like Democracy Now! (Radcliffe - Ford Foundation crap) are also aimed at maximum hype, minimum content - kind of like the 9/11 Truthiness nonsense trotted out en masse from 2003 onwards, isn't it?
Second, isn't this just the kind of thing some private intelligence contractor would do - one looking to deflect attention from the Washington Post expose on the gross failures of U.S. private intelligence contractors in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the bloated blind budgets, and so on? You have to admit, the timing of the release seems carefully planned.
Most idiotic comment seen in
Most idiotic comment seen in some time:
"Assange has just turned up the heat on your nasty little forever war, and you want to give him a black eye before the next shoe drops."
Gunboat. It is our failure
Gunboat.
It is our failure to adequately protect classified information including SECRET contact names.
Now it is our DUTY to get burned contacts to safety.
NONE of our high value assets like embeds and double agents were burned....all the released data is SECRET.
High value assets are TS codeword classified...to PROTECT THEM.
Manning gave Wikileaks the collateral murder video and the 92,000 af-pak docs at the same time (undisclosed). He also reportedly gave Assange 260,000 sensitive diplomatic cables, and who knows what else at the same time.
On April 5 Assange released the collateral murder video. He immediately opened contact with the three newpapers after that. By the end of May Assange had disappeared from Wikileaks headquarters in Switzerland. By June 8 the US gov't was officially hunting Assange because Manning had told them about the diplomatic cables.
I think Manning was acting on his conscious and did not attempt a defense or to escape his trial.
We don't know what Assange has. Praps the military knows or Manning's trial lawyers.
Assanges contract with Manning was to release the material in such a way as to maximize exposure. Assange released the video to involve the big three newspapers.....praps he felt the WaPo had too much house bias. :)
He released the 92K docs as soon as he had them ready. I imagine we will have a period of 3 or 4 months for the docs to sink in, and then there will be another release....or possibly right before midterm elections, for maximum effect.
The prime directive of Manning and Assange is to discredit the meaningless unwinnable war in afghanistan.
The releases of classified documents will be spaced to do that in the most efficient way possible, without causing information overload.
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