Obama and the massive Afghan war leak

© Flickr / The White HouseThe Afghan war is now even less popular than it was during George W. Bush's presidency
The Afghan war is now even less popular than it was during George W. Bush's presidency - Sputnik International
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In politics everything falls right into place sooner or later, and this is exactly what happened this week in the Afghan war, when tens of thousands of classified documents about the war were published. This information explosion will certainly affect President Barack Obama's approval ratings, as the Afghan war is now even less popular than it was during George W. Bush's presidency.

In politics everything falls right into place sooner or later, and this is exactly what happened this week in the Afghan war, when tens of thousands of classified documents about the war were published. This information explosion will certainly affect President Barack Obama's approval ratings, as the Afghan war is now even less popular than it was during George W. Bush's presidency.

On July 27, Obama finally received the $37 billion in additional funding for his new war strategy, which he had been requesting for nearly six months, when the U.S. House of Representatives followed the Senate and approved the new war-funding bill.

That injection, in addition to the $130 billion allocated for the Afghan and Iraqi wars this year, should give the U.S. military what it needs to "break the back" of the Taliban, if not completely defeat them, by the summer of 2011, when the United States plans to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

Two days before Congress approved the bill, thousands of secret U.S. military files about the war in Afghanistan were published by the Guardian, the New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel, which obtained the documents from the Internet organization Wikileaks. The documents include reports by mid-ranking officers, details of civilian killings in botched military operations, and information about the cooperation between the Pakistani intelligence service and the Taliban.

The documents relate to a period from January 2004 to December 2009, during the administration of President George Bush and before President Obama ordered a "surge" in Afghanistan.

Speaking in the Rose Garden Tuesday, Obama said he was concerned about the massive leak of sensitive documents about the Afghan war, but that the papers did not reveal any concerns that were not already part of the debate.

Indeed, the public is more or less aware of the facts contained in the leaked documents (about 91,000 documents, mostly battlefield reports). Nor is it a secret that the occupying forces are not trained to distinguish civilians from Taliban or terrorists, that many civilian deaths go unreported, that the Taliban attacks are becoming more deadly, and that Afghans view their police as criminals and their central and local governments as a malignant force in their lives.

This is how a population generally feels toward an occupying army and a puppet government. There is nothing new here.

As for Pakistan's intelligence service supporting the Taliban, you would have to be deaf and blind not to know about this by now. But it would have been indecent for Washington to go public with these accusations, considering that Pakistan is its main ally in the Afghan war.

The Taliban was created in Pakistan by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was fighting its own Afghan war. The CIA most likely severed its ties with the Taliban, but it was more difficult for Pakistan to part with these former allies, partners and fellow Muslims who have settled in their country.

In other words, the Afghan war leak didn't change the general picture, it just brought it into better focus.

However, the sheer volume of Pentagon documents released, 91,000, is truly shocking, even if some of them were a few words per page. Journalists from the Guardian said they sorted through the documents with experts for three weeks, and ultimately decided not to publish those documents that "might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets." These 15,000 unpublished documents are a ticking time bomb. The Pentagon and the other relevant U.S. agencies are investigating the source of the leak.

Often the most important element of a leak is not the content so much as the timing. There can be no doubt that this leak was timed to coincide with Congress's vote on additional funding for the Afghan war. Still, the spending bill passed the House by a vote of 308-114. All but 12 of the "no" votes came from Obama's Democrats, who hold a 253-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

The Democrats who do not support Obama's strategy are not un-American or even against the war in Afghanistan per se. Rather, they simply cannot understand the objectives of the strategy or the zealous support their country is giving to Hamid Karzai's corrupt government. They do not understand how the United States can leave Afghanistan (troop withdrawal is to start in July 2011) without a functioning government in place. What was the $1 trillion, nine-year war for? Few believe Afghanistan can become a truly democratic country.

No other country before the Untied States was able to implant foreign ideas in Afghanistan in the hope that they would eventually lead the country toward progress. The Soviet Union tried implanting socialism there during the 1979-1989 war, in which tens of thousands of Russians were killed and maimed. Moreover, that war provoked a severe crisis, which many believe heralded the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In 2001, the United States launched its attempt to inoculate Afghanistan with democracy and capitalism, which are no less alien to Afghanistan than socialism.

Britain, which fought and won three wars in Afghanistan in the late 19th century, pulled out when it saw that the country would never become a colony like India.

The most interesting aspect of this development is that U.S. politicians and generals are admitting that the unintentional killing of civilians is a better recruitment tool for the Taliban than anything it can do itself, including threats and promises of money.

So far no one has managed to prevent accidental civilian deaths. A week ago, more than 50 civilians were inadvertently killed by a U.S. missile in Helmand. Had they been killed in a military operation, it could have been classified as war crime. As is, the tragic event was dismissed as a technical mistake that resulted in the death of a few dozen "savages."

RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Fedyashin

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

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