Afghan Secrets Leaked

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US braces for blowback over Afghan war disclosures

By KIMBERLY DOZIER - AP - Tuesday July 27, 2010

Intelligence officials, past and present, are raising concerns that the WikiLeaks.org revelations could endanger U.S. counterterror networks in the Afghan region, and damage information sharing with U.S. allies.

People in Afghanistan or Pakistan who have worked with American intelligence agents or the military against the Taliban or al-Qaida may be at risk following the disclosure of thousands of once-secret U.S. military documents, former and current officials said.

Meanwhile, U.S. allies are asking whether they can trust America to keep secrets. And the Obama administration is scrambling to repair any political damage to the war effort back home.

The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war's opponents in Congress that one of the nation's longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated. Congress has so far backed the war, and an early test of that continued support will come Tuesday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., holds a hearing on the Afghan war.

Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Tuesday the military doesn't know who was behind the leaks, although it has launched "a very robust investigation."

Morrell complained that too much was being made of the documents, of which even the most recent is at least six months old.

Speaking about questions the material raises about the reliability of Pakistan in the war on terror, he said statements about a dubious partnership are "clearly out of step with where this relationship is now, and has been heading for some time."

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday he worries that the leaks won't stop "until we see someone in an orange jump suit."

Still, the leaks are not expected to affect passage of a $60 billion war funding bill. Despite strong opposition among liberals who see Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, House Democrats must either approve the bill before leaving at the end of this week for a six-week vacation, or commit political suicide by leaving troops in the lurch in war zones overseas.

As that political battle plays out, U.S. analysts are in a speed-reading battle against their adversaries.

They are trying to limit the damage to the military's human intelligence network that has been built up over a decade inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such figures range from Afghan village elders who have worked behind the scenes with U.S. troops to militants who have become double-agents.

Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military may need weeks to review all the records to determine "the potential damage to the lives of our service members and coalition partners."

WikiLeaks insists it has behaved responsibly, even withholding some 15,000 records that are believed to include names of specific Afghans or Pakistanis who helped U.S. troops on the ground.

But former CIA director Michael Hayden denounced the leak Monday as incredibly damaging to the U.S. — and a gift to its enemies.

"If I had gotten this trove on the Taliban or al-Qaida, I would have called it priceless," he said. "I would love to know what al-Qaida or the Taliban was thinking about a specific subject in 2007, for instance, because I could say they got that right and they got that wrong."

Hayden predicted the Taliban would take anything that described a U.S. strike and the intelligence behind it "and figure out who was in the room when that particular operation, say in 2008, was planned, and in whose home." Then the militants would probably punish the traitor who'd worked with the Americans, he said.

"It's possible that someone could get killed in the next few days," said former senior intelligence officer Robert Riegle. He recalled what happened when the U.S. arrested the Soviet double agent, Robert Hanssen: "When people found out what we knew, people died."

Another casualty may be the U.S. attempts to forge cooperation with Pakistan's secretive intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Multiple American cables complain about ISI complicity with the Taliban. And they also tell the Pakistanis "how much we know about them," said Riegle, who now runs Mission Concepts Inc., a private intelligence firm.

"You're not going to see any cooperation," he said. "People are going to freeze."

The raw data released Sunday may also prove useful in a wider way to America's "frenemies" — the intelligence services of countries like China and Russia, who have the resources to process and make sense of such vast vaults of data, said Ellen McCarthy, former intelligence officer and president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

Former CIA chief Hayden added: "If I'm head of the Russian intelligence, I'm getting my best English speakers and saying: 'Read every document, and I want you to tell me, how good are these guys? What are their approaches, their strengths, their weaknesses and their blind spots?'"

Former CIA official Paul Pillar described what he called the coming chill in the U.S. intelligence community, which had been pushed into sharing information across agencies in the aftermath of the intelligence failures that led to 9/11.

"The pendulum will now swing back," he said. Pillar, who now teaches at Georgetown University, said the community would shift from "need to know" back to "need to protect.",0099

Morrell was interviewed on CBS's "The Early Show" and Bond appeared on NBC's "Today" show.

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Huge leak of secret files sows new Afghan war doubts

Jo Biddle - AFP - Tuesday July 27, 2010

The leak of 90,000 secret military files has emboldened critics of the war in Afghanistan, who raised fresh questions Tuesday about the viability of the increasingly unpopular US-led campaign.

The New York Times said in an editorial Tuesday the documents made public by the website WikiLeaks "confirm a picture of Pakistani double-dealing that has been building for years."

The Times said President Barack Obama will have to deal firmly with Islamabad in response to the most controversial files, which indicate that key ally Pakistan allows its spies to meet directly with the Taliban.

"If Mr Obama cannot persuade Islamabad to cut its ties to, and then aggressively fight, the extremists in Pakistan, there is no hope of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan," wrote the daily.

Americans are increasingly weary of this costly war," wrote the Times, one of three media organizations, along with German magazine Der Spiegel and Britain's Guardian, to have received the documents weeks ago from WikiLeaks.

Some members of Congress questioned Obama's Afghanistan strategy, as well as an as-yet unpassed 37-billion dollar funding bill for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, following the leaks.

Democratic Senator Russell Feingold said the disclosures "make it clear that there is no military solution in Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, Democratic Representative Jane Harman, who chairs a Homeland Security intelligence subcommittee, said the documents "reinforce the view that the war in Afghanistan is not going well."

The 92,000 documents released Sunday, dating from 2004 to 2009, triggered an outcry from nations fighting in Afghanistan as the Pentagon scrambled to uncover the source of the security breach and whether it would endanger lives.

US experts were working to see if the huge cache "could jeopardize force protection or operational security, or even worse still, the national security of this country," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told Fox News.

In addition to the Pakistan allegations, the leaked files maintain that the deaths of innocent civilians have been covered up, and that Iran is funding Taliban militants eight years after the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the radical Islamic regime from power.

The bombshell revelations triggered outrage, with a top NATO general calling for increased vigilance against such leaks as the White House slammed them as "irresponsible."

The coalition needed to be aware that some "documents are pushed out into the open via leaks, but that obliges us even more to work with the greatest care," said General Egon Ramms, who is in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs warned that the leaks had put the names of service personnel and military operations in the public domain, but played down the likely strategic and political impact.

"In terms of broad revelations, there aren't any that we see in these documents," Gibbs said, pointing out that most of the period covered by the leaks was during the previous Bush administration.

Britain, which has some 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, said Monday it regretted the leak while Pakistan has said the reports were "skewed" and not based on the reality on the ground.

In Berlin, a defense ministry spokesman said releasing the documents "could affect the national security of NATO allies and the whole NATO mission."

But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defended the decision to publish the leaked files, saying they showed "thousands" of war crimes may have been committed in Afghanistan.

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Hit list draws fire in wake of leaked US documents

AP - When it comes to war, killing the enemy is an accepted fact. But there are charges that some American commando operations in Afghanistan may have amounted to war crimes.

The thousands of pages of classified U.S. documents released Sunday by whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org include nearly 200 incidents involving an elite military unit tasked with hunting down and killing enemy combatants.

But military officials and experts are denouncing suggestions that U.S. troops are engaged in war crimes in Afghanistan. They say enemy hit lists may be ugly and uncomfortable, but they are an enduring and sometimes unavoidable staple of war.

Amnesty International's Tom Parker says it's hard to tell "where assassination ends and war starts."


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