Of the IRA and the Afghan War

[unhappycamper]

John R. MacArthur
President and Publisher, Harper's Magazine
Posted: August 19, 2010 05:11 PM

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- I know it was supposed to recall the drama of Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg, but when WikiLeaks jolted Washington last month with its "revelations" about the Afghan debacle, I was disappointed.

This isn't to minimize the courage of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and the leaker, or leakers, who gave him the documents. I was pleased to see The New York Times, so badly tarnished by its biased reporting in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, help amplify the news. It took guts. I hope that more Ellsberg types will surface in the patriotic mission of providing their fellow Americans with more facts than they usually get from the politicians and the press.

But there was something unrevealing about the actual information that came out. Did we not recognize the incompetence of Hamid Karzai's Potemkin army? Didn't we know that many innocent civilians have been killed by unthinking American bombs and terrified American soldiers? Are we really surprised that the Pakistanis are playing a double, or even triple game with Karzai and the Taliban? Does it amaze us that the guerrillas have weapons more sophisticated than land mines and rifles?

Something else troubled me about the ritual exposure of "secret" documents -- and the government's ritual denunciation of the leakers -- that brought to mind not Saigon and its infamous bubble of denial but Northern Ireland, which I visited in early March 1983. There, in the midst of a low-intensity civil war, I learned a more powerful lesson than any "secret" document could teach about the causes of violence in Afghanistan.

~snip~

Next time you hear Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or Christiane Amanpour try to justify the reckless stupidity of the Afghan war by invoking human rights or international law, try to imagine how the local citizens might feel if British soldiers were patrolling the streets of Boston, Washington or Austin -- to enforce, let's say, a ruling by the International Criminal Court against U.S. soldiers for atrocities committed in Iraq against women and children. It's no secret that many Americans would reach for a gun. You won't find that sort of information in the WikiLeaks documents, and it isn't classified.