Pentagon Papers Lite

On the heels of the Washington Post's investigation into the intelligence community our government has come to depend on, comes another nugget that fell into the laps of The New York Times, The Guardian, and Germany's Der Spiegel. It's being called "The War Logs," or, "The Afghan War Diary," and there's been a big surge in media coverage to interpret this sudden release.

A note on WikiLeaks. MotherJones has a feature story in their August issue called "Click and Dagger," in which it does make mention of the Pentagon Papers, and it's just ironic that the site got its own version of those documents:

It took nearly two years for Daniel Ellsberg to get the Pentagon Papers into the public domain. "As a leak, it's almost an example of what not to do," says [founder Julian] Assange. "By the time he got the info out, it was of little political consequence." The basic model hasn't changed much since then: Most whistleblowers still need a sympathetic reporter or politician to get the word out.

There is a warning in that paragraph for the present situation. The political consequence of this Afghan Diary might be too little too late, because, as The White House was quick to point out, the details of these documents refers to a time period prior to President Obama's decision to both call a three month policy review and send 30,000 additional combat troops. And what's missing? There was no reporter that these documents were leaked to, no face to put it in print. Today The White House elaborated on the leak at the press conference, saying it could do "potential harm" to the war and relations with Pakistan.

The War Logs, and subsequently, the specific documents that number 92,000+ (note that there appears to be an agreement between WikiLeaks and the three publications to not publish their respective stories/investigations at the same time, nor can they have access to all the documents right away) are not an indictment of a failed military operation that has lasted nine years. I think the aim of the anonymous leaker was to get hard information about what has happened so far out into the open. Many publications have deep access to the US military, but rarely do they get physical information that identifies operations that have taken place deep in the mountains of Pakistan, and how difficult maintaining order within the regions of Afghanistan really has been.

Many have already said, either on Twitter or on blogs or in print, that these are most decidedly not the Pentagon Papers of this war. At first glance of some of the substance of the documents, it gives names, places, and other things that appear top secret, but maybe that's in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure Pakistan would not like some of what is in there, and there's always potential to miss something and have some name get out that wasn't supposed to, and endanger someone's life. The Pentagon Papers were about proving to America that its adventure in Vietnam was not worth the cost in blood it had paid. The papers were released at the tail end of combat operations, so there was not much that could be done to reverse the policy. It was a first-hand account of the government's thinking, and gave hard evidence to the long-held suspicion that American officials did not think the Vietnam War could be won. There is a stark difference between learning that you've been lied to by your government, and learning that your government and its military has been up to far more than was originally told. It's like finding out your high school teachers actually had lives outside the school during the summer.

The primary effect of this Afghan War Diary is one of transparency, not shock. We know what the grand plan for Afghanistan is, and we know what the President wants to accomplish. There isn't a whole lot of discrepancy towards the endgame, and the reason we're still there is because the administration implicated in these very documents did not fully understand the hornet's nest they were poking with the biggest of sticks, the US military, but this isn't a indictment of the overall strategy. The Obama administration might be concerned about how the public interprets this event, but I say bring it on. Too many don't believe in absolutes, and Afghanistan is an absolute, and it took an anonymous leak of things we already know to get it back into the conversation. I'm hopeful to see how journalists go forward with this information.