Over the last few days, few people have not heard of the explosive exposure by Wikileaks of what it calls the "unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan War". More than 90,000 classified military intelligence documents were given to the media on the condition by the "leaker" that they not be released before Sunday, July 25.
It remains a mystery as to why that date was stipulated, but one can guess that it was timed to make the most impact on the deliberation of the US House of Representatives on the passage of a US$60 billion war funding bill, which took place on Tuesday, July 27. The bill was passed in a 308-114 vote, with strong Republican support. So if the leaker's (or leakers') intention was to put a stop to the bill, he (or she or they) failed. Members of Congress knew full well that they would be committing political suicide if they went home on a six-week summer vacation and left soldiers in the field without funding. The Senate had already passed the spending bill the week before, and it now goes to President Obama for his signature.
The timing of the disclosure, the period covered in the leaked documents from 2004 to 2009 (before Obama's Afghan policies went into effect), and the raw nature (as opposed to coherent internal narrative) of these classified documents, have caused some political conspiracy theorists to think that the leak was made by, or with the approval of the administration itself, to highlight the need for more funding for the war, which some have dubbed the "Obama War"." However, a former senior White House official said unequivocally that that line of thinking was out of the question. "There is zero possibility that the government would knowingly have leaked these materials as a matter of policy. Wouldn't work. The leak strategy itself would leak."
Turning to the question of what the leaked Afghan reports do and don't tell us, the views in the last few days, after the oopsy-daisy reaction died down, have been "not much".
There are people who are comparing them to the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War that were leaked in 1971 by one of their contributors - Daniel Ellsberg of Rand Corporation - to the New York Times. The paper ran its excerpts in a series of articles that started a snowballing media effect. Street protests, political controversy, indictments, lawsuits and eventually the collapse of Johnson's Vietnam War effort ensued. Ellsberg came out to admit his action and surrendered himself to the authorities. He was sentenced to a 115-year jail term and now resides in Mexico.
But the two leaks are world's apart, if not in the intent, but in the nature and quality of the material itself.
The Pentagon Papers (officially entitled "US-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defence") were a top-secret study commissioned by the Pentagon on the US's political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. They were well-researched, well thought-out and coherent documents. The papers revealed damaging information which had never been disclosed to the public before, such as President Kennedy's role in sanctioning the overthrow of Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and the expanded US bombing of Cambodia and Laos. They also revealed that the Johnson administration's main objective in Vietnam was not exactly to keep South Vietnam from the communist domination, but to avoid a humiliating US defeat.
The Wikileaks documents are gargantuan in volume compared to the Pentagon Papers, reflecting the advancement of technology. But due to their size, few have read them rather than talked about them. After being called "explosive" and "monumental", they are now described as "a footnote" and "a haphazard cache of documents without any context".
No one was surprised by reports that Pakistani Intelligence, funded by the US, has been aiding Taleban insurgencies. The stories have been reported to the public and known by the US military and intelligence services for years.
On the report of civilian deaths, several human rights organisations had already been compiling data on such incidents, and released periodic reports. Such concerns prompted the former commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to put in place last year controversial stringent new measures intended to reduce such casualties.
The third piece of significant information, about US commandos trained to "take out" insurgent leaders, has also been well covered by newspapers and magazines, and was welcome news in some military and civilian quarters.
Unlike the Pentagon Papers, the Wikileaks documents are raw data collected in the field, by low level intelligence officers. They are like a daily diary rather than an analysis. Most importantly, the materials do not provide a comprehensive picture of the complexity of the conflict that goes beyond the borders of this fractured country, and do not include one critical factor - the violent trade in drugs.
But the leak of documents of this extent cannot be casually dismissed; US and Nato war strategies, procedures and equipment details may have been compromised, not to mention the lives of informants and soldiers in the field.
That truth is the first victim of war is never an understatement; neither is the danger of leaks. But the story of the British "Operation Mincemeat" during World War II should serve as a reminder of the danger of the fog of war.
A body, supposedly of a British soldier, washed ashore in Spain early one morning in 1943. On his person were attached documents marked "Top Secret" with the British "coded" plan that led the Germans to believe that the Allies were planning invade Greece and Sardinia, when in fact their target was Sicily. The Germans took the bait, as described in a cryptic message to Churchill: "Mincemeat Swallowed Whole." The Germans prepared their counter-strategy accordingly and suffered major loses.
As Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), assumed coiner of the expression "fog of war", said succinctly: "The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty." And our own political ambiguities in the ongoing discord are no exception.