Author: Andrew Sullivan

My two cents. But this one has a stark simplicity to it:

“Reading on the toilet.”
James Franco, actor

Alexis Madrigal deems the latest document dump "a milestone in the new news ecosystem":

The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution. … Traditional media organizations are increasingly reaching out to different kinds of smaller outfits for help compiling data and conducting investigations. NPR is partnering with several journalism startups to deliver their information out to a larger audience. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University broke a large story on renewable energy in association with ABC's World News Tonight. ProPublica's 32 full-time investigative reporters offer their stories exclusively to a traditional media player.

Andrew Bacevich calls this a new type of "information warfare":

Rather than being defined as actions undertaken by a government to influence the perception of reality, information warfare now includes actions taken by disaffected functionaries within government to discredit the officially approved view of reality. This action is the handiwork of subversives, perhaps soldiers, perhaps civilians. Within our own national security apparatus, a second insurgent campaign may well have begun. Its purpose: bring America’s longest war to an end. Given the realities of the digital age, this second insurgency may well prove at least as difficult to suppress as the one that preoccupies General Petraeus in Kabul.

Pejman does his best to profess "shock" at some writers' view that the Israeli government has been damaging US interests and its own survival by its policies for the past few years, and that the immensely influential pro-Israel lobby bears some responsibility for enabling this. But in trying to find anti-Semitism in any of our writings, he comes up short. In fact, he honorably bears witness to the opposite:

For the record, Stephen Walt was a professor of mine for two classes back when he was at the University of Chicago. Part of the reason I consider it painful to write about what his place in the blogosphere has become is that in the time that I knew him, I never at any time heard him say, or even intimate anything that could be remotely considered anti-Semitic …

I vividly remember how searing John Mearsheimer’s lecture on the Holocaust was, how powerful and unsparing his discussion was concerning the manner in which millions of Jews were massacred. He made sure that we, his students, fully absorbed the horrors attendant to the Holocaust, and in doing so, he did us a massive favor by ensuring that we were fully cognizant of the barbarism associated with the times.

There is no attempt to exonerate me from the Tablet's and The New Republic's baseless smears – but Google will do. What Pejman's point boils down to is that we, as writers, must constantly berate any and all vile anti-Semites who try to exploit or co-opt our arguments, without our knowledge. I guess I thought that went without saying. But my own diligence against anti-Semitism, in all its forms, in my own church in particular, is well-documented and has gone back decades.

I will not be intimidated from examining and criticizing both the actions of the Israeli government and the lobby that does so much to enable it, against what I believe are the long-term interests of the US and the West. Neither, I suspect, will the others now routinely targeted with these lies and smears.

A contrarian view of the pamphleteer.

From the AP:

"During the 77-day proceedings, Duch admitted to overseeing the deaths of up to 16,000 people who passed through the prison's gates. Torture used to extract confessions included pulling out prisoners' toenails, administering electric shocks and waterboarding."

American exceptionalism in the neocon era: the right to do what we forbid others from doing.

The full strip is here.

Dennis Sanders asks:

There really isn’t a strong movement in the United States that is committed to a more moderate version of conservatism. There are a few groups, but there is no strong reformist presence within what makes up the American right in the same way that there is in the United Kingdom. Across the pond, the Tory Reform Group has been around for 35 years representing a more moderate brand of conservatism and they can be credited for helping get the Conservative Party back in power.

But the impulse here in the States among those on the right who are dissatisfied with the state of things, is to simply walk away. Whether its Brink Lindsey now touting a “libertarian centrism” or Tim Lee flirting with the left, the usual result of frustrated folks on the right is not to change things, but to leave and look for greener pastures.

Why is that? Why is there no impulse to change the right?

I suspect because its institutional structure – with the massive amount of money attached to it – is so wrapped up in a coordinated party line the odds of being able to take it on while remaining a part of it are minimal. Look at the apostates: me, Bartlett, Frum, Johnson. They are all expelled from any institutional support (except for those like me lucky enough to be independent) and then ostracized and demonized. When you look at what has happened to dissenters on the right, I don't think there's a huge mystery as to why the impulse to change from within has died out. It will require a few massive defeats to reform it. Or some bombshell that wakes the base up to their own delusions. I'm not betting on either …

What do we really learn from the Wikileaks monster-doc-dump? I think the actual answer is: not much that we didn't already know. But it's extremely depressing – and rivetingly explicit – confirmation of what anyone with eyes and ears could have told you for years. We already know the following:

The notion that a professional military and especially police force can be constructed and trained by the West to advance the interests of a "national government" in Kabul within any time frame short of a few decades of colonialism is a fantasy.

We are fighting a war as much against the intelligence services of Pakistan as we are the Taliban. They are a seamless part of the same whole, and until Pakistan is transformed (about as likely as Afghanistan), we will be fighting with two hands tied behind our backs.

This is the Taliban's country. Fighting them on their own ground, when they can appear in disguise, can terrify residents by night if not by day, and fight and then melt away into the netherworld of mountains and valleys is all but impossible. And as the occupation fails to secure popular support (and after ten years and a deeply corrupt government in Kabul, who can blame the Afghans?), the counter-insurgency model becomes even less plausible than it was before. 

The enormous cost in lives and money is in no way proportionate to the eradication of around 500 Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, who are effectively being protected by a foreign government, Pakistan, we aid with a $1 billion a year.

The troops deserve to fight in a strategy that can actually work. They deserve not to be risking their lives for bases that have to be abandoned, on hillsides where they cannot see the enemy, in a war where the enemy abides by no civilized rules but where every civilian casualty in response is a propaganda victory for the Taliban. This is a lose-lose proposition.

Would you send your son to fight there, knowing all this. If not, how do we continue to support a strategy in which other people's sons are thrown into the wood-chipper that leads nowhere?

Now we all know why retreat is politically treacherous. The terror threat from that region is real – and made worse by the last few years. Allowing the Taliban to come back and launch attacks with al Qaeda from Afghanistan and Pakistan is real. A president who withdraws and then presides over a terror attack will be vulnerable to cheap political attacks of the Palinite variety.

But a mature polity will understand that just because we cannot prevent any terror attack from that region does not mean we should be occupying it with 100,000 troops in a quixotic attempt at nation-building. We have to return to the Biden option of the least worst counter-terrorism strategy. In order to defeat this terror threat, the American people are going to have to accept that they will endure, for an indefinite period of time, a level of terror that is more than zero. They are also going to have to accept that the occupation itself has become a source of terror, globally. Don't take that from me. Take it from the former head of Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5 in a response to the UK inquiry into the Iraq war:

Britain's support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan radicalized many Muslims and triggered a big rise in terrorism plots that nearly overwhelmed the British security services, the former head of the domestic intelligence agency said on Tuesday. Giving evidence to an official inquiry into the Iraq war, Eliza Manningham-Buller, former MI5 director general, said the U.S.-led invasions had substantially raised the number of plots against Britain. "It undoubtedly increased the threat and by 2004 we were pretty well swamped," she said. "We were very overburdened by intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with.

When one weighs the extra terror risk from remaining in Afghanistan, the absurdity of our chief alleged ally actually backing the enemy, the impossibility of an effective counter-insurgency when the government itself is corrupt and part of the problem, the brutality of the enemy in intimidating the populace in ways no civilized occupying force can counter, the passage of ten years in which any real chance at success was squandered … the logic for withdrawal to the more minimalist strategy originally favored by Obama after the election and championed by Biden thereafter seems overwhelming.

When will the president have the balls to say so?

Amy Davidson:

What does it mean to tell the truth about a war? Is it a lie, technically speaking, for the Administration to say that it has faith in Hamid Karzai’s government and regards him as a legitimate leader—or is it just absurd? Is it a lie to say that we have a plan for Afghanistan that makes any sense at all? If you put it that way, each of the WikiLeaks documents—from an account of an armed showdown between the Afghan police and the Afghan Army, to a few lines about a local interdiction official taking seventy-five-dollar bribes, to a sad exchange about an aid scam involving orphans—is a pixel in a picture that does, indeed, contradict official accounts of the war, and rather drastically so.

Ambinder:

WikiLeaks has given journalists and researchers a road map to begin tracking Afghan detainees and the activities of special forces units.

There are about 100 detailed references to something called  "OCF" detainee transfers to the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility. OCF stands for "Other Coalition Forces." Other Coalition Forces is the approved euphemism for special forces units, usually belonging to the Joint Special Operations Command. Researchers can now begin to track the dates when people disappeared and when they were transferred. By the time of the strategy turn, there were more than 750 people in custody in Bagram, out of more than 4,500 detainees that were there at one point. Where did the rest go? When where they released?

Fallows:

The Obama Administration policy I most disagree with was his decision late last year to double-down in Afghanistan. Although I am not an expert of Afghanistan, I opposed this choice it because everything I have learned about the world makes me doubt its central logic. That logic is: if we bear down for a limited time, in a limited way, that will make enough difference that we can then begin to leave — rather than simply preparing to leave now. At first glance, these documents cast severe doubt on the idea that staying for another 18 months — who knows perhaps another 18 years — would truly "make the difference" in transforming Afghanistan.

Londonstani over at Andrew Exum's place:

There does seem to be a growing trend internationally away from control and direction by organisations and governments towards impetus for action coming from groups of individuals who are somehow harnessing technology. Organisations like Wikileaks leave grand old names like Reuters, BBC and the New York Times rewriting news they didn't break. (That said, the NYT is one of a few organisations investing heavily in original reporting, which shows in their output.) At the same time, a leaked video of a girl getting beaten by the Taliban in Swat  presented the Pakistani government with the political cover it needed to launch a campaign against the Pakistani Taliban last year.

Jay Rosen:

If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.

James Joyner:

I don’t know that any serious damage has been done here.  Have sources and methods been compromised? Have Coalition soldiers or Afghan civilians who have put their lives in our hands been put in additional danger?  I have no way of knowing.

But, while I’ve long argued that we overclassify and need to revamp our system so that more information is available to the public, sooner, I don’t think the solution to the problem is for low level operators to violate their sacred trust.

Gabe Schoenfeld:

WikiLeaks has evidently held back some 15,000 even more sensitive documents and is subjecting them to its own “harm minimization” procedures–whatever that is–before it releases them. Clearly, however, a Pandora’s box has already been opened. And we shall no doubt soon see the consequences. 

Yglesias:

Information should be classified when making it publicly available would put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk. And maybe there’s something in this giant trove of documents that meets that standard. But surely Jones isn’t going to seriously maintain that every document in here meets that standard. This report on an orphanage with no orphans, for example, is clearly benign. 

Greenwald:

Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world.  Just as was true for the video of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret.  But that's what our National Security State does reflexively:  it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing.  WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall, enabling modest glimpses into what The Washington Post spent last week describing as Top Secret America.  The war on WikiLeaks — which was already in full swing, including, strangely, from some who claim a commitment to transparency — will only intensify now.  Anyone who believes that the Government abuses its secrecy powers in order to keep the citizenry in the dark and manipulate public opinion — and who, at this point, doesn't believe that? – should be squarely on the side of the greater transparency which Wikileaks and its sources, sometimes single-handedly, are providing.

Joe Klein:

The Wikileaks intelligence dump–more than 90,000 secret intelligence documents detailing the frustrations of the war in Afghanistan–has elements of both the Tet Offensive and the Pentagon Papers. But it seems more like Tet to me: the overall impact of this event is likely to make clear to a public, which has not been paying much attention, how futile the situation in Afghanistan is–and how utterly duplicitous our Pakistani "ally" has been.