The shock waves from WikiLeaks’ mammoth release of classified material continue to spread. One of the stories we’ve posted today, an editorial from Brazil’s Estadao, highlights that after the release of 97,000 classified U.S. military documents showing how badly the Afghanistan War is going, in the words of one senior diplomat, the NATO allies ‘don’t know how to respond.’
The editorial from Estadao says in part:
What came out was more than enough to confirm the military, political, strategic and moral failure of the Afghan enterprise during the Bush era – which doesn’t seem to have changed under Barack Obama.
The formidable mass of detail exposed about the day-to-day reality of the war, its astonishing richness, undoubtedly confirms everyone’s worst suspicions: the war hasn’t weakened, but rather strengthened, the Taliban. And all the while, as Pakistan has received $1 billion per year to help battle the insurgents, its fearsome military secret service, the ISI, has trained them to confront the U.S.; efforts at winning the hearts of Afghans are a fiasco.
Beyond this, the death of unarmed civilians, intentionally or through the indifference of soldiers, and the cover-up of these incidents, far exceeds anything we knew before. American forces have established a squadron [Task Force 373] for locating, interrogating and assassinating Afghan terrorist suspects put on arbitrarily-prepared lists, and of course, without judicial supervision. At least 195 people were killed under conditions that qualify as war crimes.
The truth, as one highly-placed source confided, is that “we don’t know how to respond.” That also applies to Pakistan’s double game – an ally infiltrated by the enemy, which the U.S. can’t do without. The “war of necessity,” as Obama has described it, is becoming worse than the “war of choice” in Iraq.
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