Wikileaks: What We’re Accomplishing

The Times had a piece in Sunday’s paper on the strange truth that our expenditure since 9/11 of a trillion dollars on two wars has barely scraped our consciousness. Fifty-eight Americans have died in Afghanistan so far this month;

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Among the ninety-one thousand or so documents from the Afghan war released by WikiLeaks Sunday is an incident report dated November 22, 2009, submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus. It describes how a convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.” What could be scarier than that?

Maybe what the soldiers found out next: these weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two- or three-thousand-dollar bribe per truck; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of (and has denied) earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.”

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One document, which has already been widely quoted, is the report of the provincial reconstruction team for Paktia: [...] ”The people of Afghanistan keep loosing [sic] their trust in the government because of the high amount of corrupted government officials. The general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worst than the Taliban.”

  New Yorker

In terms of what we're "accomplishing" there, compare this recently released study documenting that our killing of civilians is what causes Afghans to take up arms against the U.S. with this morning's report that a NATO airstrike in Southern Afghanistan last week killed 45 innocent civilians, many of them women and children.

  Glenn Greenwald

In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.

  Jay Rosen

And we can expect it to be addressed with internet restrictions in the near future. I’m surprised it hasn’t been already.