I'm catching up on the Wikileak story.
A six-year archive of classified military documents about the war in
Afghanistan was published at the nonprofit website, Wikileaks. (I can't provide a link, because this system seems to have crashed.) There's debate about whether this information is ground-breaking, whether it endangers national security, and whether there is sufficient evidence of American war crimes.
The Washington Post describes the methods and motives of this website. And here's another profile by the New York Times. The White House says that this leak endangers national security. Is there evidence of war crimes?
Charli Carpenter says there are no surprises in these leaks. Andrew Sullivan has a pile of links from the blogosphere. Sullivan also says that there may be no surprises, but the news is extremely depressing just the same.
(more later.)
Apt. 11d 
There’s a really good chapter in Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes that is basically an extended riff on what it means to know something or to know someone in Washington. The immediate cause is what GHWB knew or didn’t know about selling weapons to Iran to help funnel money against Congress’ wishes to the Contras. But it’s also more widely applicable.
If this story, or set of stories, gains traction, then it will change what is known about Afghanistan. At first blush, it seems mostly to be things that are reasonably well known among people who know these sorts of things. That’s Carpenter’s take.
But knowing some of the specifics (as one of her commenters notes, naming names among who in Pakistan is helping some Taliban factions) and increasing the circle of people who know these sorts of things can both have political effects. So it will be interesting to see how long this stays news.
The Guardian publication may be more significant (or not, given that the Tory-ish govt is not likely to care), as it indicates more questions in Europe about just wtf is the point after nearly 10 years.
Which I think is a perfectly valid point. In 2001, we wanted the national Taliban government gone, a place that wouldn’t be a massive training zone for people trying to blow us up, and OBL’s head on a pike. We got two out of three, and might well have gotten all three except GWB wanted to pound Iraq.
Ten years down the road, I think it’s fair to ask if the end-state of Afghanistan is so important that it’s the single best use of all the resources committed there. On the other hand, these documents are most likely to interest people who are already asking that question.
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