Barrett Garese

Wikileaks and the War

newyorker:

Amy Davidson on Wikileaks and the War:

“…a leak informing us that our tax dollars may be being used as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day…

Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war.

One should pause there. 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.

But after more than eight years at war, how carefully are we even looking at Afghanistan? The Times had a piece in Sunday’s paper on the strange truth that our expenditure since 9/11 of a trillion dollars on two wars has barely scraped our consciousness. Fifty-eight Americans have died in Afghanistan so far this month; one of them—Edwin Wood, of Oklahoma—was eighteen years old. Maybe the WikiLeaks documents will make those numbers less abstract…”

The official narrative of war will always differ from the specific facts on the ground. It will always be carefully shaded, it will always contain contradictions and falsehoods and statements that are less than true. Of course the administration will say that it has faith in the Karzai government, and of course we know that it does not.

You cannot fight a war without offering misinformation, misdirection and deception to the enemy. And the technology has not yet been invented to share the “truth” with the American people while offering misinformation, misdirection and deception to the enemy. If you want to win a war sometimes you have to lie.

Mike presents some very good points above that I think everyone should keep in mind as this story continues to be debated, examined, and more revelations come to light. We are seeing what amount to pockets of information without context or condition and while that can be a good thing, it can also be a deceptively bad thing. I would doubt any of us are analysts, so we’re coming at this without an ounce of expertise or skill in seeing these puzzle pieces and putting together the rest of the image.

I will offer one comment to build upon what he says above though: there is a very distinct difference between offering misinformation, misdirection, and deception to throw off the enemy or protect our troops, and offering misinformation, misdirection, and deception to throw off the American people. One is misdirection with a purpose; as Mike said, it’s a necessary evil for a greater good (a concept that I do believe in, but generally only as a last resort.) The other is a cynical and criminal cover-up. War is hell; a complicated hell, but hell nonetheless. We owe it to those in the line of fire to not jump to conclusions (or accusations) just because we’ve gotten a peek behind that curtain.

Source: newyorker