Evidence of a Failed Mission

[unhappycamper]

Evidence of a Failed Mission
by Phyllis Bennis
Published on Tuesday, August 3, 2010 by OtherWords

WikiLeaks' Afghan War Diary, a trove of 91,370 previously secret documents, is an important first history of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Of course, mistakes will be found--but these are reports of military leaders to others in the military. This is where they tell the truth. It's significant that the Obama administration has not tried to claim the reports are inaccurate. Instead, they're claiming that disclosing the reports somehow endangers U.S. troops, while at the same time disparaging the documents as having no new information.

Afghans and Pakistanis clearly know far better than we do what the U.S./NATO forces are actually doing in their countries--so it's not the reports, it's the actions they document that put U.S. and allied troops at risk.

What the leaks will do is stoke even greater global anger around the world, as evidence comes to those who didn't know firsthand what the U.S./NATO occupation means for Afghans and Pakistanis. That will certainly mean rising anger toward U.S. policy and Americans as a whole. But more importantly, it will spur enormous antiwar activity in places like Europe, Canada, Australia, and Turkey. And that means greater pressure on those governments now providing troops for the war in Afghanistan--and on the Obama administration to end the war.

There's no evidence yet of a new smoking gun among the documents. But taken as a whole, the documents provide a collective arsenal of evidence of a brutal war that never did have a chance to succeed--and evidence of two administrations of a government determined to mislead its own people and the rest of the world.

The documents indicate significant shifts in the nature of how the war is being fought, with documentation of escalating Special Forces operations and drone attacks. The Pentagon's "nation-building" efforts are failing in places like Marja, last spring's poster-city of a U.S.-backed government-in-a-box. The handpicked mayor-in-a-box, who spent most of the last 15 years living in Germany, is so unpopular that he has to be ferried into town on military helicopters for occasional meetings and then quickly whisked away.