Foreign Policy In Focus

Almost as soon as the WikiLeaks story broke on Sunday, officials and commentators were making comparisons between these 91,000 documents and the Pentagon Papers, the 4,000 page classified study on Vietnam leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. The White House and other critics were quick to reject the analogy. Even supporters of WikiLeaks' decision to release the documents are hesitant to put this event in the same league as the Pentagon Papers, which have come to hold such an important place in progressive history.

There are important differences between WikiLeaks’ potential influence on the war in Afghanistan and the Pentagon Papers’ actual influence on the war in Vietnam. But, contrary to the heroic story of the Pentagon Papers, these differences reveal the actual shortcomings of what happened in 1971. For all of their accomplishments, the Pentagon Papers were in key respects, a failure. Understanding the limits as well as the achievements of the Pentagon Papers is an important step in maximizing the potential influence of the WikiLeaks documents. This is one of those cases where the negative lessons of history are as valuable as the positive ones.
 
First, there is the claim that the Pentagon Papers actually revealed high-level secrets about the Vietnam War, while WikiLeaks hasn’t revealed anything that wasn’t already known to the public. In truth, however, aside from the details of what officials knew and when they knew it, there was not much in the Pentagon Papers that surprised ardent critics of the war. In many ways, the documents merely confirmed previous revelations of the war made by incisive and intrepid journalists. By 1971, David Halberstam and Seymour Hersh had already written books and articles that opened a window onto virtually every level of the war—from the National Security Council meetings of the Kennedy administration to the massacres at My Lai. These and other heavy-hitting journalists were concerned not only with the specific details of Vietnam, but also with challenging the Cold War consensus that fueled it.

By 1971, while the anti-war movement had severely weakened that consensus, it had not altogether broken it. In fact, in response to Nixon’s curtailment of the draft and initiation of troop withdrawals from Vietnam, opposition to the war actually subsided in the year that Ellsberg photocopied the classified documents and gave them to the New York Times and Washington Post. Contrary to the image of an America galvanized against the war, the Pentagon Papers were released in a time of relative apathy about Vietnam.
 
In addition to the lull in the antiwar movement, the influence of the Pentagon Papers was paradoxically limited by the scandal that their publication prompted. Almost from the beginning, the story of the war was marginalized by accounts of the government’s injunction against the newspapers. At a press conference on June 21, 1971, just one week after the Pentagon Papers were published, a reporter exclaimed, “We want to emphasize the issue is not the one of the Vietnam War but rather why didn’t management support freedom of the press.”

The landmark judgment on behalf of the newspapers was a major victory for the cause of a free press. However, it did little to further Ellsberg’s original intention—to end the war in Vietnam. Ellsberg himself has lamented this much in The Most Dangerous Man, the recent film in which he tells his story. The central failure of the Pentagon Papers is that they did not end the war in Vietnam, which continued for another four years.

For Nixon, of course, the Pentagon Papers were nothing less than fateful. Despite the fact that the documents covered events in Vietnam only up to 1968, before he took office, Nixon reacted to them as though he had been personally attacked. It was the leak of the Pentagon Papers that prompted the infamous Plumbers Unit whose first task was to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. This would be good practice for the break-in of the Watergate hotel the following year. As Ellsberg notes, the biggest accomplishment of the Pentagon Papers was indirect. By sparking Watergate, it helped bring about an end to Nixon’s reign.

There are at least two ways to interpret the implications of this story for WikiLeaks. One is to conclude that, like the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam, WikiLeaks will not have a major impact on the war in Afghanistan. The American populace remains largely disconnected from the war, which is being fought by a post-Vietnam volunteer army. It is easy to envision how, in the coming days and weeks, the reporting and commentaries will shift the focus away from the war itself to follow the drama of WikiLeaks and the fate of suspected leaker, Bradley Manning.
 
But there are some signs that, in reporting on the WikiLeaks story, the press, at least, is breaking with the legacy of the Pentagon Papers. The lead story in the New York Times on Sunday night focused on the Pakistan intelligence agency and not the leak itself.

Subsequent coverage on the paper’s website has continued to highlight the content of the documents, even as it features stories about Assange and Manning.
 
Those who oppose the war in Afghanistan should keep the momentum going and use this disclosure to continue pressing the points about Pakistan’s cross-purposes, about corruption in the Afghan government and security forces, and about the real extent of civilian casualties. Only in this way can WikiLeaks help end the war, and in so doing, accomplish what Ellsberg could not.

By now, you've heard about Wikileaks's Pentagon Papers-esque document leal. Rather than add a few snowflakes to the media blizzard today, we'll direct you to some of the best coverage. We've been following it at the Guardian, one of three outlets, along with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, on which Wikileaks dumped the documents. It's hard to imagine the latter two improving on the Guardian, which sprang out of the blocks in fine form.

Here's the Guardian's home page for itscoverage: Afghanistan: the War Logs

And, to keep from overwhelming you'll, we'll just send you to three blogs for today. First, Siun at FireDogLake: Wikileaks' Release of Secret Afghan War Archives

Next, Steve Hynd at Newshoggers: The War Logs: The Largest Pentagon Leak Ever

Finally, Glenn Greenwald at Salon: The WikiLeaks Afghanistan leak (Big "sic" to Salon for capitalizing the "L" in Wikileaks, not to mention repeating the word "leak" -- just signs of how much everyone is rushing to jump on this story.)

Bear in mind that the man who transferred the documents to Wikileaks, SPC. Bradley manning, was taken into custody by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division in early June. Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter at Wired's Threat Level report:

"When Manning told [infamous hacker and also a Wikileaker Adrian] Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

"Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he's frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he has never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security."

In fact, whatever SPC. Manning's motivations, they may be eclipsed by those of Lamo, whose credibility is considerably more questionable than Manning's will ever be. (Most of that information I received "on background.") Will Manning eventually be seen as the second coming of Daniel Ellsberg?

In the meantime, please include Focal Points among the sites you follow for analysis of the leak that is to leaks as Deepwater Horizon is to oil spills.
 

At Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger comments on an op-ed that a British member of Parliament wrote for Der Spiegel on July 1. But Scotsman Rory Stewart isn't just any MP. He's the man who wrote The Places in Between (Mariner Books, 2006), an astonishing account of trekking across Afghanistan in the wake of the initial post-9/11 U.S. attacks. Incidentally the danger to which he exposed himself was not only to an alternately hospitable and hostile people, but to winter storms while hiking in the mountains.

Stewart gained instant authority, beyond diplomats and military commanders, on the subject of Afghanistan and, while one might not always agree with him, he's always worth reading.

". . . everyone -- politicians, generals, diplomats and journalists -- feels trapped by our grand theories [such as counterinsurgency] and beset by the guilt of having already lost over a thousand NATO lives, spent a hundred billion dollars and made a number of promises to Afghans . . . which we are unlikely to be able to keep. [Thus] it is almost impossible to imagine the US or its allies halting the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the years to come. … And all our policy debates are scholastic dialectics to justify this singular but not entirely comprehensible fact. …

"The only way in which we could move beyond the counter-insurgency theory [is] to understand that however desirable [defeating the Taliban and creating a legitimate state in Afghanistan] might be, they are not things that we -- as foreigners -- can do. ... But to acknowledge these limits and their implications would require not so much an anthropology of Afghanistan, but an anthropology of ourselves."

Jason Sigger writes:

"It would be nice to have some articulate, moderate Democrat voice these words. It would be even nicer to imagine that Obama's National Security Council has recognized these issues. … I am not sure if there's a significant difference between the objectives of neocon 'idealism' and liberal internationalism right now, and I think that's a major flaw in the Democratic party right now."

Applied to neocons today, the term was once more commonly used to describe rebellious youth in the sixties, such as those who protested against Vietnam. As for that "anthropology of ourselves," after that war, the United States, including the national security community, seemed to have done a national soul searching in hopes of inoculating ourselves to future such situations. But the Vietnam vaccine didn't take -- apparently our "work-up" of the body politic was flawed.

"Show me the money, or at least some receipts scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and grocery bags," wrote Joseph Galloway at Common Dreams in February of 2007. He continued:

"This week, we were treated to the spectacle of the former U.S. civilian overlord of Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, squirming in the hot seat as he attempted with little success to explain what he did with 363 TONS of newly printed, shrink-wrapped $100 bills he had flown to Baghdad. [He] said that a lot of the cash was delivered to ministries of the Iraqi government to meet payrolls that were patently fraudulent.

The Department of Defense's special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, said that a 2005 audit he conducted found that in some ministries the payroll was padded with up to 90 percent "ghost employees" -- people who didn't really work there or perhaps didn't really exist. Bremer said that he decided to provide the money to meet those payrolls, even though he knew they were bogus, for fear of starting riots and demonstrations among the Iraqis, real and imagined. …

I can think of no period in American history when we sat idly by while $12 billion just disappeared, poof, without a paper trail; without heads rolling; without someone going to prison.

Remember the sense of vertigo this story induced in you (well, me anyway) when you read it? If you haven't heard about the latest wrinkle, prepare for your head to spin anew. In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Corruption Suspected in Airlift of Billions in Cash From Kabul, Matthew Rosenberg reports:

In Iraq, the brutality displayed by Americans toward Iraqis and Iraqis toward Iraqis was shocking. Many Americans wrote American brutality off to our soldiers put in the impossible position of making hair-trigger decisions about who was an insurgent and who was a civilian. Nor did most of us want any part of responsibility for Iraqi brutality. It may have been an unjustified war, many of us no doubt thought, but at least we gave them their freedom -- and look what they did with it.

At least this time, while they can't expect a Presidential Medal of Freedom to be forthcoming as it was for Bremer (generosity above and beyond the call of duty?), "U.S. and Afghan officials," the WSJ article continues, "say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and the murkiness of their origins."

Okay, Americans are notorious for tuning out the violence committed by our government and military in our names. But why didn't Americans react more strongly to the visceral image of cold hard cash -- shorn of the discretion of checks or wire transfers -- stacked on pallets sent to a corrupt government? If one of those pallets were stacked with just singles, it would be enough to provide any one of us with income for life.

More to the point, do Focal Points readers think this new story from Afghanistan, on the heels of McChrystal's faux pas, as well as his fatalism about our mission there, could gain traction and convince Americans once and for all that there's nothing to be gained from our presence in Afghanistan? Kindly respond in the comments section.

Two nominees walk into the capital for their confirmation hearings on Tuesday morning. One is a war hero. The other, a lawyer. They meet under the great rotunda to give each other a little pep talk before what promises to be a long day. “I’m sick and tired of hearing about my lack of judicial experience,” the lawyer confesses. “No, problem,” says the war hero. “I have enough experience for the both of us. Take some of mine,” and he sprinkles a little of his experience dust over the top of her head. “Damn it,” says the lawyer, “Now I have a record.”
 
This conversation is, of course, imaginary. But it does illuminate a real difference between the issue of experience in the hearings to confirm Elena Kagan as Supreme Court justice and David Petraeus as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
 
Kagan has never served as a judge. For this reason, Republican critics have argued that she simply isn’t qualified for the job. But Kagan’s hearings would likely be more heated if she had judicial experience. The very same critics would pore over her record to support their claim that she is just another liberal activist cloaked in a judge’s robe. Thus, experience can be a double-edged sword.  
 
But this isn’t the case for the war hero. The widespread support for Petraeus as McChrystal’s replacement has revolved in large part around the general’s experience in Iraq. Echoing the news reports, in his opening remarks at the confirmation hearings, Senator Carl Levin underscored Petraeus’ “highly experienced leadership.” Other members of the committee followed suit. While several of them asked challenging questions about the current strategy in Afghanistan, nobody critiqued Petraeus’ experience in Iraq.
 
Experience is not a double-edged sword for Petraeus because of the bi-partisan consensus that the war in Iraq was ultimately a success, if not a victory. This consensus has emerged out of the surge narrative that has become so dominant in discussions of the Iraq War. According to this narrative, when Petraeus took over the war in 2007, he led a strategic revolution in Anbar province, where the Sunni insurgency was strongest. As a result of the counterinsurgency strategy implemented by Petraeus, the insurgency was persuaded to turn against Al Qaeda and throw its lot in with the U.S. The Anbar Awakening, as it is called, was a pivotal turning point in the war, after which the insurgency increasingly lost traction and momentum. Even Obama, who had been a sharp critic of the war in Iraq, has called the surge a success.
 
Ever since the surge narrative took root, there has been little public debate about the situation in Iraq. Thus, it is no surprise that, instead of an ongoing conflict, Iraq figured into the hearings as an historical event. It mattered only insofar as its success could be applied to Afghanistan. Along these lines, a few senators asked whether there might have been more popular support for the U.S. in Anbar province than in Marja, Afghanistan. But none of them asked whether the success in Anbar has led to long-term stability or effective governance in Iraq. If they had probed into the more recent history of Anbar, they would find a province wracked by political infighting that constantly threatens to self-destruct. The Awakening Party, whose members led the turnaround in 2007, has been accused of intimidation and corruption, and was unable to command the popular vote in last February’s election. Meanwhile, multinational companies are scrambling to get a piece of Anbar’s future oil and gas production, leaving it unclear whether and how the local population will actually benefit. While violence is down, it is far from certain that the Clear-Hold-Build strategy has had lasting success in the region.
 
When the Judiciary Committee asks a Supreme Court nominee to answer for their judicial decisions, it is less an interrogation of individual qualifications than a provocation for debating deeply engrained differences over the principles and values of our political system. Along the same lines, many progressives hoped that the change in command would prompt a discussion not of Petraeus’ qualifications, but rather, of the guiding principles and values of the war in Afghanistan. So far, the more complicated legacy of the surge in Iraq has been left out of that debate. The erasure of the long-term effects of counterinsurgency in Iraq does not bode well for Afghanistan, where corruption, lack of popular support for the government, and sooner or later, a battle over the country’s newly-discovered natural resources, similarly plagues the war effort. As T.S. Eliot wrote in the wake of the Great War, “We had the experience, but missed the meaning.”