Afghan WikiLeaks: Is There Much New?

(July 26) -- U.S. officials are condemning the leak of more than 91,000 military intelligence records on the Afghan war, saying the publication could threaten the safety of American and allied troops. But while the Pentagon may be outraged, many experts are questioning whether the trove of documents actually reveals anything new or truly damaging about the nine-year-old conflict.

The collection of confidential papers was released by the WikiLeaks website -- which earlier this year put out a 2007 video of an Apache helicopter firing on a group of unarmed Iraqis -- and includes previously unreported details about Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces, and official concerns that Pakistan's intelligence service was training and funding the Taliban. The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel were given advanced access to the records and today splashed reports about the documents across their front pages.

White House National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones condemned WikiLeaks and the news outlets, saying in a statement that the release "put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk." He also pointed out that the documents described a period from January 2004 to December 2009 and mostly dealt with decisions taken during the Bush administration. Jones noted this was before President Barack Obama "announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan."

Among the documents given the most publicity are those alleging cooperation between members of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the Taliban. The Times reports that in July 2008, the CIA's deputy director, Stephen R. Kappes, presented Pakistani officials with evidence that the ISI helped plan a suicide bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul in which 58 people were killed. Later, in August 2008, one intelligence paper contained a report that an ISI colonel was plotting with the Taliban to kill Afghan President Hamid Karzai, although it offered no information on how or when the hit would be carried out.

One figure who repeatedly pops up throughout the documents is Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who headed the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistan worked with the CIA to provide weapons and funding to Afghan militias battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. When the Cold War conflict ended, Gul allegedly stayed in contact with the mujahedin, many of whom would later join the Taliban. The former spymaster, who still has close ties with Pakistan military and intelligence agencies, is accused of recruiting suicide bombers at madrassas near Peshawar, a gateway to the tribal areas, and ferrying them north to Afghanistan. He is also alleged to have met with senior Taliban figures in 2009 and plotted a truck bombing in retaliation for the earlier assassination of al-Qaida's head in Pakistan.

Gul dismissed the allegations, telling the Times that they were "absolute nonsense" and that "American intelligence is pulling cotton wool over your eyes."

Other Pakistani officials have also sought to trash claims of cooperation with the Taliban. "I think that the American leadership knows what Pakistan is doing," Pakistan's ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, told the BBC. "We have paid a price in treasure and in blood over the last two years. More Pakistanis have been killed by terrorists, including our military officers and intelligence service officials. We are not going to be distracted by something like this."

Both the U.S. and Pakistan have now assigned teams of analysts to scour the records and decide whether sources or locations were at risk.

However, many commentators have pointed out that while the documents add a lot of color to the ongoing conflict, most simply confirm long-known facts about the war. In his 2007 book "Frontline Pakistan," for example, veteran Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain accused ex-spy boss Gul of meeting with Osama bin Laden in Peshawar at a 2001 gathering of radical Islamists.

And Andrew Exum, a fellow of the Center for a New American Security, noted in a blog post that the intelligence community was well aware that elements in the ISI still supported the Afghan insurgency. He went on to sarcastically predict what other revelations might be contained in the top-secret papers: "'Afghanistan' has four syllables ... Liberace was gay."

The leaked records also include detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive U.S. special operations unit known as Task Force 373, which the Guardian says are tasked with hunting 2,000 senior Taliban and al-Qaida figures who will be killed or captured "without trial." While the papers relating to the unit contain some interesting details about these raids -- such as the damning revelation that the squad has accidentally killed numerous civilians, children and police officers who strayed into its path -- the fact that special forces are systematically eliminating high-profile insurgents is old news.

In March, for example, unidentified Pentagon sources told the Los Angeles Times that the number of covert ops in Afghanistan had been doubled and that "a significant portion of the leadership has fled over the border, been captured or removed from the equation."

The Economist magazine suggests that "in military terms, the one copper-bottomed, never-known-before revelation" contained in the papers is that insurgents have acquired heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, which in 2007 blasted a U.S. helicopter from the sky. At the time, it was reported that a well-aimed rocket-propelled grenade had downed the Apache. SAMs were first used in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the CIA gave the mujahedin Stinger missiles, which destroyed dozens of Soviet choppers. However, it doesn't appear as though the set of SAMs currently in the hands of the Taliban have been deployed to such a devastating effect.