Everything You Want to Know

Get ready for more books and movies about war. The materials that were released today for free access on the website WikiLeaks will certainly inspire many works. For those 90,000 pages, secret military reports tell the whole story of the war in Afghanistan — this time, not written by historians and writers but by soldiers and their commanders.

The release of the documents was done with the cooperation of three publications, to which WikiLeaks had granted access in advance: The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. While the site published the original unedited documents, the three newspapers prepared scores of articles and analysis of the material as their teams had evaluated for almost a month the reliability of the information and had developed the theme. The website did not announce where it obtained such amazingly detailed information, but The New York Times confirmed that, according to sources from President Barack Obama’s administration, the information is probably authentic.

The documentation covering the period of 2004-2009 includes operational reports, prepared by field commanders and the intelligence forces on various operations, contacts, events and the overall situation in Afghanistan. Lots of the information is not surprising: there are hundreds of reports containing information about innocent victims and investigations swept under the carpet. The reports talk about U.S. forces and NATO’s suspicions about close links between Pakistani intelligence service and the Taliban, as well as about direct assistance from Islamabad. The documents draw a picture of a growing Taliban movement (which already has land-air missiles, something that was not known until recently) and the weakening efforts of international forces and Hamid Karzai’s government to establish strong bonds with local leaders and to gain the trust of the locals.

All of this is not new. Lots of it has already been told, suspected, investigated or shouted about on the pages of newspapers, reports of international organizations and on the streets of Kabul. Yet it is shocking to see it put together in such a crude, startling way. In one of the reports, investigated by The Guardian, some confused American soldiers, who were attacked by terrorists, started to fire at random citizens on the streets of Jalalabad, leaving a trail of dead and wounded innocent Afghans. The case was left without consequences, and even without a detailed report, until the growing discontent among the locals urged the army to create a several thousand page investigative report that had no further impact. No less brutal are descriptions of some operations conducted by the elite American Task Force 373 against senior Taliban members, where many innocent people were often killed.

Representatives of the White House called the release of tens of thousands secret military documents “irresponsible” since it threatens the lives of soldiers and Afghans. The Pentagon announced that it will take weeks to assess the exact damage caused by the release of so much information. Although the materials concern the period before the president arrived in office, the documents will have a negative impact on Barack Obama’s strategy for handling the war in Afghanistan. Both Pakistanis and Afghans will react sharply to some of the things written in the military reports. The German government, as Der Spiegel says, will have to face difficult questions — Task Force 373 facilities operate at the German bases Camp Marmal and Mazar e Sharif, in Northern Afghanistan, where the Germans are in charge, but are not supposed to give any information or reports to either NATO or the German government. The American public would see once again how malign war could be.

Overall, those who will benefit most from these volumes of documents are WikiLeaks, historians and the film industry. WikiLeaks will because this is the most extensive disclosure of secret documents in U.S. military history and it will help them take their place as a legitimate source of important information. Historians have access to documents — which would normally only become available after decades have passed — to study modern war. The film industry will benefit because war, as shown by these documents — no matter how “modern” — is still a nasty, dirty, bloody and complicated undertaking that seems hopeless and sad in the real world and exciting only on the big screen.