National Interest USA

By JULIAN E. BARNES And JEANNE WHALEN

U.S. defense officials on Thursday responded angrily to WikiLeaks’ plan to post additional Afghan war logs, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggesting that the move could further endanger the lives of Afghans who helped the U.S. war effort.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking to a group in London by video link on Thursday, said his group had gone through 7,000 of the 15,000 documents the group has so far withheld from publishing. WikiLeaks had said it was withholding posting those documents until it had time to review them to block out the names of sources contained in the documents.

“Absolutely,” he replied when asked whether he still plans to publish the remaining documents.

The organization has already released some 76,000 classified documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, leaked by a source the website has refused to identify.

The U.S. says it is investigating army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning as a possible source of the leak.

The documents touch on unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings by North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces and covert operations against Taliban figures, among other things.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said posting more documents would be “the height of irresponsibility.”

“The only responsible course of action for them is to immediately remove all the stolen documents from their website and expunge all classified material from their computers,” he said.

Earlier Thursday, Mr. Gates, responding to a question from a Navy sailor in San Diego, said intelligence sources have confirmed that al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have given direction to comb the documents looking for the names of Afghans who had helped the American war effort.

“I think the consequences are potentially very severe,” Mr. Gates said. “We don’t have specific information of an Afghan being killed yet because of them. But I put the emphasis on ‘yet.’ ”

WikiLeaks’ supporters say the accounts of the conflict should be publicized to reveal potential war crimes and the toll of the war.

Mr. Assange said some of the criticism has been “legitimate,” but repeated his earlier call for the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help him redact the names. “So far there has been no assistance,” he said.

He expressed some ambivalence about the need to protect Afghans who have helped the U.S. military. “We are not obligated to protect other people’s sources,” including sources of “spy organizations or militaries,” unless it is from “unjust retribution,” he said, adding that the Afghan public “should know about” people who have engaged in “genuinely traitorous” acts.

Mr. Assange said he still fears that the U.S. is trying to have him arrested for publishing the classified documents. He was meant to appear in person at the panel discussion about the media at London’s Frontline Club, but dialed in by Skype instead. Asked by an audience member for his current location, he said “no comment.” He appeared to have dyed his trademark white hair brown, and to have cut it in a close crop.

Write to Jeanne Whalen at jeanne.whalen@wsj.com

Tom Fenton – From: The Daily Telegraph. What damage .. Julian Assange, Australian-born editor-in-chief of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Source: AFP

the dust is sort of settling, what was the impact of tens of thousands of classified Afghanistan War documents which were dumped on the internet by WikiLeaks.org?

Was it – as most of the mainstream media immediately pronounced – the biggest intelligence leak since the Pentagon Papers?

It was certainly the most voluminous.

But it only added details to what serious newspaper readers already knew; war is messy, soldiers make mistakes, weapons sometimes hit the wrong targets – in short, that “stuff happens”, as Donald Rumsfeld said of the Iraq War.

In fact, you could find ammunition to make any point you want from the WikiLeaks.

It was all there – the good, the bad and the meaningless of years of combat.

What are we to make of Julian Assange’s bombshell? The WikiLeaks founder seemed to think it was a game changer. But ironically, the only thing it may change is the way the Pentagon manages its security. There may be fewer leaks in the future.

Obama supporters said the leaks showed what a mess the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism strategy left behind in Afghanistan, and pointed out that the current administration is now pursuing a potentially more successful counter-insurgency strategy.

That would have been more convincing if a few days later an administration official had not leaked to the New York Times that in fact the Pentagon now believes counter-terrorism (killing Taliban leaders) is more effective than counter-insurgency (protecting the Afghan population).

In fact the only big news in the WikiLeaks is that someone was able to turn so much secret information over to a whistle-blower website. That was the real shocker.

The Pentagon needs to pull up its socks and improve the security of its computer programs. And maybe it needs to stop classifying so many routine reports secret.

If it had fewer classified documents, it might do a better job keeping them secret.

Another big question raised by the leaks is whether they will change government policy on the Afghan war.

Since they told us very little (other than details) that we did not already know, they are not likely to change public opinion – which anyway in America and Europe is already against the war.

If anything, WikiLeaks is a tribute to how well old-fashioned journalists of the mainstream media have kept the public informed of how the war is going.

Certainly, coverage of the war has become thinner in the past few years but it’s enough to give the public the general picture: The war is not going well.

It does not seem “winnable” in a strictly military sense of the word.

And of course, the Obama administration and a number of high-ranking military officers have also told us that.

The inevitable outcome of the war in Afghanistan is already clear. American and allied troops will be going home soon.

The Taliban will remain.

The Afghan population and neighbouring Pakistan have already drawn the obvious conclusion.

They know who they will have to do business with.

The acronym MENA stands for Mission Element Need Assessment. It’s a document constructed to objectively assess if the self-interests of the United States are compelling enough to warrant the institution of a change to national policy or the initiation, continuation or termination of national action including, but not limited to, acts of war.

A MENA supports what eventually becomes a combination of Presidential Orders, National Security Decision Directives and Congressional Acts and Mandates that instruct the country’s apparatus to act accordingly. At this point in time with respect to Afghanistan, that process assumes that sufficient national interest exists to warrant that the United States needs to (a) conduct active military operations in the theater and (b) engage in a program of reshaping the Afghan nation and culture. This conclusion was arrived at nearly a decade ago by the Bush Administration and is currently embraced by the Obama Administration. The questions about Afghanistan boil down to (a) whether or not the conclusion is still valid and (b) what direction the dialectic is headed, so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no trouble with pursuing our enemies to the ends of the earth and killing them. I remember writing cautiously about Afghanistan about a decade ago when Osama Bin Laden fled there and the process of winnowing down the Al-Qaeda network’s influence began in earnest. I worried we might be doing some of it the wrong way. We had picked up where we had left off in the 1980’s when the Soviet Union was the occupier fighting by proxy using local mercenary armies sprinkled with US advisors and leveraged by US aerial might. It felt too much like the toe dipping that got us into trouble in Vietnam. I also thought that in our myopia we were discounting too much the lessons learned by the Russian military in these very same mountains. I still contend that politically we could have — and strategically, we should have — gone in there and done the bulk of the job ourselves. Afghanistan should have been a lopsided battle between two foreign forces making as little collateral impact on the local populace as possible. It was not to be.

As Afghanistan unfolded I worried that actively continuing to fund and encourage the militarization of the Afghan regime — and by consequence its domestic and foreign opposition — and attempting to introduce cultural “American-style Westernization” into the country would have dire future consequences. This was not the Mesopotamia where the world’s first great libraries were founded, where the Tigris River created the basis of national organization, and secularization — granted at the hands of a brutal dictator — had been established. No one has ever succeeded at permanently altering the cultural tribalism of Afghanistan. No one has because tribal organization is a natural equilibrium dictated by the terrain. An axiom of global stability applies, “Mother Earth does not care what the monkeys scurrying about on her surface think.”

I actually like Afghanistan as a battleground. It’s probably one of the world’s best “kill boxes” for concentrating a threat and engaging it in isolation. The fact that Al-Qaeda was stupid enough to retreat there is what I like to think of as a “Blessing of Allah” giving the infidels the perfect laboratory to practice the Art of War.

Sadly, so far I think we’ve missed scoring our touchdown.

The threat to the U.S. National Interest which was once so clear you could use a push pin to mark where it was has become diffuse. The rules of engagement have become Byzantine. Strategic military advantage has steadily degenerated to it’s inevitable stalemated equilibrium. And most dire of all, what we are seeing is the primary target learning to escape the ideal set-piece capture box and move eastward into the populated sanctuary of Pakistan where the potential regional destabilization of a sub-continent threatens to undermine future global stability.

The United States of America will follow that threat because we have to. Al-Qaeda remains a clear and present danger not just to our country but many others. I have no doubt that a multi-national mission to maintain contact and effect continued attrition remains necessary. Quite honestly, it remains in the world’s interest to contain that threat in Afghanistan’s remoteness and continue to extract as much attrition as possible. How well we can do this dictates when what must come next will happen.

The day when Afghanistan’s battlegrounds will go fallow is coming. If and when the threat migrates, its value to the United States and the world will surely diminish below the effort required to be there. Then the Afghans will be left to pick through the detritus of our visit.

They are a resilient people and they’ve do so many times in the history of mankind. I’m not so worried about the power and politics of that country. I’m confident that no matter what we do, it will remain largely the same. They have within them an abundance of leadership, not always the kind we approve of, but then again, whose domestic political backyard doesn’t look like that. It takes up to three lifetimes — almost two centuries — to slowly demobilize a nation of tribal armies. The Afghans have never had that much peace in their history. It’s what they live with and truthfully, they’re better at it than most people on this planet.

What I do worry about are the consequences of the feeble Westernization we have imposed on these people. We’ve installed a more efficient political apparatus in the hope that it will mean the blossoming of democracy and plurality. But history is full of instances where that infrastructure only served as a conduit for warlords with ambition to rise more rapidly to dictatorship. We’ve enabled — make that encouraged — individuals to dream beyond the limits of their mountains. Some have taken our admonition to heart. When at last our occupation ends, I fear for them most of all. Their suffering will likely be brutal. We will owe those who supported us just as we owe so many others before them that believed in our promises of what were ultimately to be unsustainable dreams. It doesn’t have to turn out that way, but it will unless we make it important enough not to.

This is what rests on the shoulders of President Barack Obama. It is for him and his Cabinet to find peace with honor in Afghanistan. To set into motion how we will honor those who stood by us in the challenges they will face after we’ve gone. And to prepare and align our diplomatic and military forces for the next stage in the pursuit of those who seek to harm us. That’s my mission element need assessment.

JONATHAN PEARLMAN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT

THE Defence Force says Australian soldiers have been using gunsights engraved with biblical citations and it will move quickly to address any ‘’sensitivities”.

A spokesman said the military had been unaware that the sights – made in the United States by Trijicon, which was founded by a devout Christian and says its ”morals” are based on ”biblical standards” – carried references to Bible verses. The citations appear in raised lettering at the end of the sight stock number.

”The Department of Defence was unaware of the significance of the manufacturer’s serial number … [and] is very conscious of the sensitivities associated with this issue,” the spokesman said.

Last night a spokeswoman said Australia had 1051 of the sights, though it was not known how many were in Afghanistan.

”The sights were procured because they provide mature technology which is highly reliable, in wide use by our allies, and best meet Defence requirements,” the spokesman said.

”Soldiers are confident in the utility of the sight and the positive and proven effect which it is having on operations.”

This week US media revealed that Trijicon had sold up to 800,000 of the sights to the US military. The defence forces of the US, New Zealand, Australia and Britain have all said they had not known about the citations.

Yesterday the NZ Defence Force said citations in Afghanistan would be removed and Trijicon would be asked to stop including them. Markings included ”JN8:12” – a reference to John 8:12 – and ”2COR4:6”, a reference to part of the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians.

In a statement on its website, Trijicon said it had put citations on sights for more than 30 years.

”As long as we have men and women in danger, we will … do everything we can to provide … state-of-the-art technology and the never-ending support and prayers of a grateful nation.”

with Associated Press