Recently, the WikiLeaks
Web site published approximately 76,000 of over 91,000 leaked documents of
intelligence reports about Afghanistan. WikiLeaks delayed the release of some
15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a “harm minimization process”
demanded by its source. Parts of these documents have been widely published by
major daily newspapers, such as the New York Times.
 Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan |
The
information in the documents confirms what anti-imperialist and anti-war forces
have known for years. Nearly nine years since the invasion, the
occupation continues to be an unjust colonial adventure, murdering countless
Afghans on a daily basis and sinking the people of Afghanistan further into
untold misery. Furthermore, the occupiers are getting no closer to gaining
control of Afghanistan; they are not winning.
The
WikiLeaks documents contain details on how the United States is increasingly using
Reaper drones to assassinate individuals by remote control from a base in Nevada. The Pentagon has set up a secret unit of
Special Forces that searches for people on a list of 2,000 individuals,
identified as resistance leaders, marked for “kill or capture” without
trial. The secret commando unit is called Task Force 373, made up of Army and
Navy Special Operatives, which operates precisely as a death squad.
The Pentagon is
conscious of the lack of support for the endless occupation of Afghanistan at
home. As one senior adviser to Gen. McChrystal told a Rolling Stone reporter in
a series of revelations that led to McChrystal’s firing: “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to
this war, it would become even less popular.” The documents reveal the extent
to which the White House and the Pentagon are engaged in a deliberate attempt
at controlling the information that comes out of Afghanistan. For instance, the
Pentagon covered up evidence of resistance forces having acquired
surface-to-air missiles; and it has withheld information on the sizeable
increase in roadside bombing attacks by the resistance.
The leaks reveal that
the U.S. military is paying local media outlets
to run stories friendly to the occupiers’ objectives. Army psychological operations units and provincial
reconstruction teams have put Afghan media under contract to air U.S.-produced
content. In 2008, a provincial reconstruction team gave two radio stations in Ghazni
“12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming.” Another radio station
was paid “$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air
time for the month of October.” There are instances of U.S. military personnel referring to Afghan reporters
as “our journalists” and giving them instructions on how to cover stories.
These psychological operations are similar to the case in 2005, when it was
revealed that the Lincoln Group, a Pentagon contractor, was paying Iraqi
newspapers to publicize stories written by the US military.
Exactly how all these
documents were leaked is unknown. Currently, the Pentagon is going after Pvt.
Bradley Manning for allegedly having leaked the documents, as well as WikiLeaks
for having published them. The ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End
Racism), of which the Party for Socialism and Liberation is a member, has
mobilized demonstrations for defending Manning and WikiLeaks from prosecution.
Whoever had a hand in leaking these documents has performed a service by
exposing war crimes. There is no honor in safeguarding the secrets of a
murderous occupation.
Significance of leak
But the fact that a leak
of such enormous magnitude occurred is in itself significant. The mere
transmission of 91,000 documents is a monumental task, leave alone gaining
access to them. Private Bradley Manning is currently being held incomunicado at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia where he awaits trial on charges that he is responsible for the leak. Manning, 22, is also accused of leaking the video in April of U.S. soldiers carrying out a deadly helicopter strike against Iraqi civilians in 2007. If Manning was singularly responsible, he should be applauded for his bravery, not imprisoned with the ridiculous charge that he has put soldiers’ lives at risk. The Pentagon and White House war-makers are really to blame.
While we cannot know yet the details of the leak, they may also signal a growing rift within the
U.S. ruling class. When imperialism is
victorious in its wars of conquest, there is considerable unity among the ranks
of its officials and ideologues. But when imperialist wars are being lost,
there are cracks in the ruling class, with different factions pointing the
finger of blame at one another, each with their own ideas on how to solve the
crisis. This is frequently when documents are leaked, business media outlets begin
publicizing critical views that were previously censored, officials are fired,
and new and often risky strategies are designed and implemented frantically.
Some have speculated that a faction of the ruling class, desiring a
tougher approach to Pakistan, will take advantage of the leaked
documents to make their case. Others may even want to bring an end to
the occupation of Afghanistan, not out of sympathy for Afghan people but
based
on the realistic assessment that the occupiers cannot win the war.
Whatever the case, the impact of the documents could be quite powerful.
As pro-war New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman commented on the source of the leak:
“Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet
for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather
than later.”
The leaking of the
documents; the less Pentagon-friendly corporate media coverage of the
occupation; the firing of McChrystal; and the replacement of McChrystal’s Community Defense Initiative with Petraeus’ Local Defense
Initiative, with the true intent of starting a civil war—all point to the same
basic fact. The United States is losing its war over control of Afghanistan and
the ruling class is scrambling to find a way out of its quandary.
For
revolutionaries and progressives, the question of Afghanistan should not be
complicated. The U.S. working class has nothing to gain from this criminal
occupation. Regardless of what one’s outlook of a post-occupation Afghanistan
might be, the Afghan people have the right to self-determination. The United
States and its allies have no right to continue occupying Afghanistan. Their
only responsibility is to withdraw their forces immediately and
unconditionally, and to pay reparations to Afghanistan for the years of
occupation and decades of intervention before that, all of which are directly
responsible for the state that Afghanistan is in today. U.S. out of
Afghanistan!
