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Afghan War Documents S


Officials say leak won’t alter views


WikiLeaks documents cause little concern over public perception of war


by Glenn Kessler and Karen Tumulty


The Obama administration and its allies in Congress sought Mon- day to turn the leak of more than 91,000 classified documents about operations in Afghanistan into an affirmation of the presi- dent’s decision to shift strategy and boost troop levels in the near- ly nine-year-long war. “This administration spent a


large part of 2007 and 2008 cam- paigning to be this administra- tion and saying that the way that the war had been prosecuted, the resources that hadn’t been devot- ed to it, threatened our national security,” White House press sec- retary Robert Gibbs said. The documents cover the years 2004 to 2009; Obama shifted course in December 2009. The posting of the documents


Sunday night by the group Wiki- Leaks.org could complicate House approval of $37 billion in emergency war funding for Af- ghanistan and Iraq that has cleared the Senate, but it is expec- ted to pass. Republicans, who have generally supported the war effort, were largely silent Monday about the WikiLeaks revelations, perhaps because the bulk of the documents concern the war effort during the George W. Bush ad- ministration. Lawmakers said that the trove


of documents may harden opposi- tion but is unlikely to suddenly al- ter impressions of a war that the administration had previously ac- knowledged is a tough slog amid declining public support. The lat- est Washington Post-ABC News poll found 53 percent of adults say that the war has not been worth its costs, matching last month’s highest-ever mark. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi


(D-Calif.), who is working to pass the bill that would help fund Oba- ma’s 30,000-troop boost for the war effort, said winning approval


is “not an easy thing one way or another.” Although the leaked documents may add to the vol- ume of the debate, she said, they do not address current circum- stances. “A lot of it predates the president’s new policy,” Pelosi said.


Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), No. 3


in House leadership, said the rev- elations do not change his view of the conflict, nor does he expect a change in public sentiment. “Back home in Indiana, people still re- member where the attacks on 9/11 came from,” Pence said. “I don’t believe this release will have a sig- nificant bearing on the sense of my constituents about the just- ness of this war or the imperative of its successful completion.” The diplomatic consequences of such an intelligence breach were harder to judge. In Islam- abad, Pakistani officials reacted angrily to allegations in the docu- ments that Pakistan’s spy agency collaborated with the Taliban, with analysts warning the dis- closure could have damaging con- sequences for Pakistan’s relations with the United States. In Kabul, President Hamid Karzai was “shocked” that “such a huge num- ber of documents were leaked” — but not by the allegations con- tained in them, his spokesman told reporters. State Department spokesman


P.J. Crowley said that the U.S. am- bassadors in Kabul and Islam- abad, Pakistan, as well as Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had warned senior officials there about the pending WikiLeaks disclosure and said it had not been sanc- tioned by the U.S. government. “We wanted to make sure they un- derstood the context under which these documents would be re- leased . . . that this represents a crime and that we are investigat- ing it,” he said. Gibbs, at his daily briefing, ar- gued that the Obama administra- tion had largely identified the problems detailed in the docu- ments and had taken steps to ad- dress them. “We have certainly known about safe havens in Paki- stan. We have been concerned about civilian casualties for quite


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some time,” he said. “And on both of those aspects, we’ve taken steps to make improvements.” As for re- lations with Pakistan, “we under- stand that the status quo is not ac- ceptable and that we have to con- tinue moving this relationship in the right direction.” Gibbs’s case was echoed at the


“Most of these documents are


several years old and may well re- flect situations and conditions and circumstances that have ei- ther been corrected already or are in the process of being corrected,” Crowley said. “Some of the docu- ments talked about a conflict that was underresourced and that was a fundamental element of the strategy review overseen by the president.” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-


Conn.) said the documents “add nothing to the public understand- ing of the war in Afghanistan. The materials — which cover the pe- riod from 2004 to 2009 — reflect the reality, recognized by every- one, that the insurgency was gain- ing momentum during these


White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the leak “poses a very real . . . threat to those that are working hard every day to keep us safe.” chances for success.


years while our coalition was los- ing ground.” “Most of it is old news,” said


State Department and in state- ments issued by leading lawmak- ers.


Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the president’s opponent in the 2008 election. “The emerging picture from this leak adds up to little more than what we knew already — that the war in Afghanistan was deteriorating over the past several years and that we were not winning.” But Sen. John F. Kerry (D-


Mass.), the chairman of the Sen- ate Foreign Relations Committee and normally a reliable defender of the administration’s policies, warned the documents “raise se- rious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Paki- stan and Afghanistan” and “may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more ur- gent.” From a public relations stand- point, the documents could hard- ly have appeared at a worse time for the Obama administration. The previous House vote this month revealed how skeptical Democrats have grown about the war effort. Although it passed


narrowly — 215 to 210 — the ma- jority of Democrats had voted for an amendment that would re- quire Obama to present a plan by April for the “safe, orderly and ex- peditious redeployment of U.S. troops.” That amendment also would have allowed a vote in Con- gress to stop additional war fund- ing if withdrawal does not start by next July, the time administration officials have said they will start reducing forces in Afghanistan. Jim Manley, spokesman for


Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), said: “There’s growing questions being raised on the Hill. All you have to do is look at the votes on the supple- mental” funding bill. The obvious comparison that


many seemed to jump on initially was the Pentagon Papers, which helped galvanize public doubts about the Vietnam War. But un- like the Pentagon Papers, these documents — although they are closer to a real-time assessment and although they land in the su- perheated Internet era — do not reveal any strategy on the part of the government to mislead the public about the mission and its


Gibbs condemned the leak of


the documents, calling their pub- lication “a concerning develop- ment in operational security” that “poses a very real and potential threat to those that are working hard every day to keep us safe.” But he went out of his way to praise the New York Times — one of three news organizations given an initial peek by WikiLeaks — for its responsible handling of the documents once it had received them.


Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon


spokesman said officials are con- ducting a review of the docu- ments “to try to determine the po- tential damage to lives of our service members and our coali- tion partners, whether they re- veal sources and methods and any potential damage to national security.” The probe, he told re- porters Monday, will take “days, if not weeks.”


kesslerg@washpost.com tumultyk@washpost.com


Staff writers Shailagh Murray and Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.


Leak itself gains more attention than the contents afghanistan from A1


low-level officers reporting on events in their sector at a time when the situation in Afghani- stan was deteriorating and the Taliban insurgency was gaining strength. The flurry of hastily written


documents provide a disturbing, disorienting and often incoher- ent history of the U.S. war effort from 2004 through last Decem- ber, when Obama announced his new strategy for the country. There are detailed accounts of Afghan civilian casualties. One report from 2007 chronicles a raid by helicopter-borne U.S. commandos in Paktika province that was aimed at killing an al- Qaeda commander. Instead, U.S. rockets killed seven children. Other reports document ap- parently criminal behavior by Af- ghan government officials, in- cluding the alleged rape of a 16- year-old girl by an Afghan police commander in the fall of 2009. Then there are dozens of docu- ments that revolve around ru- mors passed to U.S. forces by Af- ghan villagers or partners in the field. One such account suggest- ed that Taliban fighters were planning to commandeer a truck carrying U.S. military food, inject the food with poison and smug- gle the goods back onto a U.S. base. The food attack never hap- pened. “Most of these reports are seen by low-level staff and watch offi- cers who collate, analyze and screen them before they make it to more senior staff,” said one senior military official. In the Pentagon, the huge dis- closure of classified information prompted more concern about the leak itself than about the sen- sitivity of the information made public. The release of classified information was briefly men- tioned at the early morning up- date for senior military officers with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but after about 90 seconds of dis- cussion the officers quickly moved on to other matters, a military official said. “For anyone who is looking at the war over time, the reports provide historical background,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Stud- ies. “But the problem is that they are historical. They are impres- sionistic accounts based on one incident at one moment in time.”


RODRIGO ABD/ASSOCIATED PRESS


An Afghan soldier searches a boy during a patrol in the volatile Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar. The U.S. war against extremists in Afghanistan is in its ninth year. One former senior intelligence


official said the disclosure was “the equivalent of when we cap- ture a computer hard drive and get to look at all the historical documents.” The former official added:


“The fact that the information is old doesn’t stop us from finding out how good these guys are, what they knew then, how that compares with what we knew.” Senior White House officials said the classified accounts bol- stered Obama’s decision in De- cember to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush ad- ministration. The United States has made


significant progress in driving down the number of Afghan civil- ian casualties, a problem that ap- pears repeatedly in the leaked re- ports. The U.S. relationship with Pakistan also is slowly improv- ing, U.S. officials said. But U.S. forces still face serious problems in working with the of- ten corrupt and incompetent Af- ghan government. The Afghans’ shortcomings are laid bare in the classified documents and mirror accounts in hundreds of recent newspaper articles. “There hasn’t been a sudden


change in Afghanistan,” said Ste- phen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan, where he advised


senior U.S. commanders. “So far, there has been incremental and useful change. The basic strategic challenges of Afghanistan remain what they have been.”


Obama has not delivered a ma- jor address on the Afghan war since his December speech an- nouncing the new strategy. His statements have usually focused on the oil spill and plans for the faltering economy. To sustain support over the long term for his counterinsur- gency strategy, which isn’t likely to produce sweeping improve- ments in the next year, the presi- dent will probably have to make the case that Afghanistan is worth the cost, a senior adminis- tration official acknowledged.


In the near term, the Obama administration seems intent on casting the voluminous leak as old news and ignoring it. The Pentagon similarly played down the need for safeguards to pre- vent future leaks of classified ma- terial.


“Once someone has a security


clearance, you are supposed to trust them,” said a senior U.S. military intelligence official. Thousands of military personnel and contractors had access to the field updates that constitute the bulk of the leaked documents, the official said. The same dismissive attitude


dominated the national security think tanks in Washington where analysts closely follow the war.


By Monday afternoon, most of these experts had given up on searching through the huge Wiki- Leaks database for new informa- tion.


Some gave up Sunday night. “I’m going to bed, but if I were


to stay up late reading more, here is what I suspect I would dis- cover,” Andrew Exum, an analyst with the Center for a New Amer- ican Security, wrote on Sunday night. “ ‘Afghanistan’ has four syl- lables . . . LeBron is going to the Heat. . . . Liberace was gay.’ ” jaffeg@washpost.com finnp@washpost.com


Staff writer Michael D. Shear and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.


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