Leaks Add to Pressure on White House Over Strategy
By ERIC SCHMITT and HELENE COOPER
Published: July 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — The White House sought to reassert control over the public debate on the Afghanistan war on Monday as political reaction to the disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased the pressure on President Obama to defend his war strategy.
On Capitol Hill, leading Democratic lawmakers said the documents, with their fine-grain portrayal of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations have previously portrayed, would intensify congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s policy.
“Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent,” Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.
The Senate this week takes up a critical war-financing bill and is expected to hold a hearing on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.
While Congressional and administration officials said the disclosure of the documents probably would not jeopardize the financing bill or General Mattis’s expected confirmation, it could complicate how the White House tries to achieves its goals in Afghanistan.
The White House appeared to be focusing most of its ire toward Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, the Web site that provided access to some 92,000 secret military reports to The New York Times and two other news organizations, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Guardian in Britain. The documents span the period from January 2004 through December 2009.
White House officials e-mailed select transcripts of an interview Mr. Assange conducted with Der Spiegel, underlining the quote the White House apparently found most offensive. Among them was Mr. Assange’s assertion, “I enjoy crushing bastards.”
Mr. Obama was already facing an uphill battle on the way to a scheduled review of his Afghanistan war strategy in December, and administration officials have been bracing for a political fight as they try to defend the strategy at a time when gains seem limited.
At a news conference in London on Monday, Mr. Assange defended the release of the documents.
“I’d like to see this material taken seriously and investigated, and new policies, if not prosecutions result from it,” he said.
The Times and the two other news organizations agreed not to disclose anything that was likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations, and The Times redacted the names of Afghan informants and other sensitive information from the documents it published. .WikiLeaks said it withheld posting some 15,000 documents for the same reason. Pakistan strongly denied the suggestions in the leaked United States military records that its military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency.
A senior ISI official, speaking on condition of anonymity under standard practice, sharply condemned the reports as “part of the malicious campaign to malign the spy organization” and said the ISI would “continue to eradicate the menace of terrorism with or without the help of the West.”
Expressing dismay over the reports, the official said the Pakistan military and its spy organization had suffered tremendously while leading the forefront of the war against terror.
“Pakistan is the biggest victim of terrorism,” he said. “Why then are we still targeted?” he asked.
Calling the reports raw, uncorroborated and unverified, the official said: “In the field of intelligence, any piece of data has to be corroborated, analyzed and substantiated by multiple sources. Until then it remains raw data, and it can be anything.”
Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for President Asif Ali Zardari, dismissed the reports and said that Pakistan remained “a part of a strategic alliance of the United States in the fight against terrorism.”
He added: “Such allegations have been regurgitated in the past. Also, these represent low-level intelligence reports and do not represent a convincing smoking gun. I do not see any convincing evidence.”
Mr. Babar questioned how Pakistan could possibly have the kind of connections to the Taliban that some of the reports suggest, asking if “those who are alleging that Pakistan is playing a double game are also asserting that President Zardari is presiding over an apparatus that is coordinating attacks on the general headquarters, mosques, shrines, schools and killing Pakistani citizens?”
He continued, “There was a time when many people believed that former President Musharraf was running with the hare and hunting with the hound,” suggesting that any such double-dealing lay with the president’s predecessor and nemesis. “We believe that era is over.”
Pakistani television news channels did not report on the content of the documents but carried brief reports that noted the American government’s condemnation of the leak and perhaps a clip of the news conference by Mr. Assange. One editor of a major news channel, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was pressure not to cover the topic.
Most of Pakistan’s news coverage on Monday focused on a suicide bomb aimed at the house of a provincial minister of information.
The web portal of Dawn, the country’s most prestigious daily, carried an Associated Press report in which an ISI official dismissed the reports..
The Express Tribune, a daily newspaper from Karachi, noted that American officials had held long-standing concerns about ISI links to the Taliban, though its report led with the government’s condemnation of the leak.
Popular Pakistani blogs had nothing on the WikiLeaks trove by Monday afternoon.
Bina Shah, a novelist based in Karachi, wrote on Twitter: “Why is nobody in Pakistan discussing the WikiLeaks story? It’s sensational.”
While Pakistani officials protested, a spokesman for the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said Mr. Karzai was not upset by the documents and did not believe the picture they painted was unfair.
The Karzai government offered no pushback to accounts in the reports that describe how the war effort has been hurt by corruption and the questionable loyalty and competence of the Afghan government, police and army. Instead, they focused on other problems outlined in the documents, including civilian deaths caused by the American and NATO militaries and Pakistani complicity with militants.
On Monday, Mr. Karzai said a NATO strike had killed 52 civilians in a remote village in Helmand Province three days earlier.
Speaking after a news conference in Kabul, Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, was asked whether there was anything in the leaked documents that angered Mr. Karzai or that he thought unfair.
“No, I don’t think so,” Mr. Omar replied.
He described the documents as being mainly “about civilian casualties and efforts to hide civilian casualties, and the role of a certain intelligence agency in Afghanistan,” a reference to the ISI.
“The president’s initial reaction was, ‘Look, this is nothing new,’ ” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Kabul, Afghanistan; Adam B. Ellick and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; and Caroline Crampton from London.
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