Obama's 'War of Necessity' Worse than Bush's 'War of Choice'
"The
truth about the WikiLeaks release, as one highly-placed source confided, is
that 'we don’t know how to respond.' That also applies to Pakistan's double
game - an ally infiltrated by the enemy, which the U.S. can't do without. The 'war
of necessity,' as Obama has described it, is becoming worse than the 'war of
choice' in Iraq."
Founder, spokesperson and editor in chief of WikiLeaks Julian Assange: His group's release of 90,000 classified documents pertaining to Afghanistan has turned the media world and world at large upside down.
On Tuesday of last week, 68 foreign
ministers met in the Afghan capital Kabul. They were gathered there for the
10th conference of countries that in some way contributed to the war, which
broke out in late 2001 between the United States and its NATO partners against
the Taliban and those in al-Qaeda it was protecting - and who were responsible
for the September 11th attacks. In contrast to the speech of President Hamid
Karzai, who spoke of the country's radiant future “as if the war didn’t exist,”
according to one diplomat, the mood was somber.
Pessimism about the way the conflict
is going and the capacity of Pakistan to single-handedly take on the
fundamentalist insurgency has been noted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
She observes, “Citizens of many nations represented here, including my own, wonder
whether there is any chance of success here, and if so, whether we all have the
commitment to achieve it.” Just five days later, the people she spoke to would
find out that the situation in the country is far worse than the governments engaged
in the war had admitted to the press.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
In an operation without
precedent, at least 91,731 classified military and intelligence agency documents
about Afghanistan were copied from the computers in which they were stored and leaked
to the site Wikileaks. Created by
Australian Julian Assange in 2007, based in Sweden and well-known in the United
States, its specialty is to divulge secret documents sent in by readers of
presumed public interest. This time, it shared the material it received with The
New York Times, The Guardian of London, and the German magazine Der
Spiegel.
The results came to light on
Sunday, after weeks of analyzing the documents that were produced between 2004
and 2009, and a joint decision to excise the names of informants and other data
capable of putting lives at risk or damaging anti-terrorist operations. Therefore,
about 15,000 documents were not released. Even so, the White House called the
leak a “threat to national security.” What came out was more than enough to confirm
the military, political, strategic and moral failure of the Afghan enterprise during
the Bush era - which doesn’t seem to have changed under Barack Obama.
In reality, the files that
were released don't contain any bombshell revelations - the kind that could take
down governments. And reduced to its skin and bones, they don’t reveal anything
new. But the formidable mass of detail exposed about the day-to-day reality of
the war, and its astonishing richness, undoubtedly confirms everyone's worst
suspicions: the war hasn't weakened, but rather strengthened, the Taliban. And
all the while, as Pakistan has received $1 billion per year to help battle the
insurgents, its fearsome military secret service, the ISI, has trained them to confront
the U.S.; efforts at winning the hearts of Afghans are a fiasco.
Beyond this, the death of
unarmed civilians, intentionally or through the indifference of soldiers, and
the cover-up of these incidents, far exceeds anything we knew before. American
forces have established a squadron [Task
Force 373] for locating, interrogating and assassinating Afghan terrorist suspects
put on arbitrarily-prepared lists, and of course, without judicial supervision.
At least 195 people were killed under conditions that qualify as war
crimes. Up to now, Washington hasn’t denied anything that was published. And
Karzai, the Afghan president, has made it known that the documents adequately reflect
what is happening in the country.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
The immediate effect of the
leak will be to intensify pressure for troop withdrawals. It isn't inconceivable
that a President Obama could push up a review of the military effort in
Afghanistan which is now scheduled for December. (Last December, he announced
his counter-insurgency strategy and the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to
the country). The truth, as one highly-placed source confided, is that “we
don’t know how to respond.” That also applies to Pakistan's double game - an
ally infiltrated by the enemy, which the U.S. can't do without. The “war of
necessity,” as Obama has described it, is becoming worse than the “war of
choice” in Iraq.
