Afghan Papers: Whatever We Want Them to Be

There is a lot of noise about the secret U.S. military documents that were released by the WikiLeaks site. There are a huge amount of records and information about the U.S. war in Afghanistan in these documents. Some people have said from briefly reading the papers that they will ruin the American strategy — mainly because of the link between the Pakistani secret service and the Taliban.

Logically, if Pakistan, the main U.S. ally in the war in terror, has links to the Taliban militia, which is the militia that Americans are fighting, something is not right. The issue is that Pakistani involvement was well known, and the documentation only reinforces that certainty.

In reality, these documents add nothing to what the world already knows. They show “secrets” like the brutal killing of civilians and the expansion of U.S. covert operations to assassinate leaders of the insurgency. These documents are far from the “Pentagon Papers,” documents that, in 1971, helped Americans understand the real extent of the Vietnam War. The “Afghan Papers” will at most fuel the already increasingly bad mood among Americans about the current war issue.

Another immediate effect of these documents will be to feed conspiracy theories. After all, if the U.S. ignores Pakistani actions, what then is the American “hidden agenda” in Afghanistan? What other undisclosed situations is the White House hiding from American voters?

As any historian knows, documents are not facts themselves — they are, at best, records of an event, in a limited and often inaccurate way. To have historical importance, documents must be submitted to extensive and careful questioning and linked to the context in which they were produced. This questioning should be honest, without historians anticipating the answers. The one who “tortures” documents for confirmation of what he believes is the “truth” does not want to know the real truth. He only wants to campaign.

Unfortunately, many people will “torture” the “Afghan Papers” to confirm the intrinsic evil of the “American Empire,” with obvious harmful effects for understanding the times we live in.