Secrets about Afghanistan

In 1971, a pacifist named Daniel Ellsberg, who had obtained secret documents about the war in Vietnam, took a year to get The New York Times to publish the information. The articles showed both that the United States was losing the confrontation and that the White House had committed and covered up numerous mistakes. The leak of what were called “The Pentagon Papers” marked a turn in the war and provoked a deep legal debate.

Now, nearly 40 years later, another pacifist, Australian Julian Assange, recently divulged 90,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan that would mark a point of inflection in some aspects of the conflict. This time, however, a year is not necessary to convince anyone to publish them. The reason is that the Internet now exists, and Assange has a website, Wikileaks, which just dropped the bomb. Prudently, however, he offered to share it exclusively with three internationally respected periodicals: The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, and the German weekly Der Speigel.

The importance of the revelation is twofold. On one hand, there is the uncovering of a series of facts that show the collusion between the Pakistani secret services and the Taliban terrorists and certain grave errors committed by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan. On the other hand, there is the formidable capacity of the Internet to spread news in minimal time and over maximal space.

The Internet thus renders a service to transparency while simultaneously accommodating alarmist lies, truthful works and offenses such as crimes against children. Its immediate effects overwhelm the possibility of legal debates, contextualization and clarifications. But, for all that, the traditional press maintains a key role, as demonstrated by the fact that Wikileaks went to the three pillars of journalism mentioned above.

Regarding the content of the documents, the general impression they leave is that the citizens have not been sufficiently informed about the war. The period that is covered by the papers goes from January 2004 to December 2009 — i.e., from the government of George W. Bush to the eve of Barack Obama’s. According to the experts, there are important episodes missing in the publicized archives, and the majority of what they reveal is no longer of any military significance. But it obliges one to think that there have been many more civilian casualties than have been officially recorded, and it raises doubts about the help of Pakistan, an Afghan neighbor that has always been under suspicion.